Category: nuclear war

Submarine Stakes – North Korea 71 Australia 6

Nuclear-powered-submarine
Nuclear powered attack submarine PCU Virginia returning after its maiden voyage in 2004 US Navy photo by General Dynamics Electric Boat Public Affairs CC Wikipedia

Call me late to the party, but this submarine commentary has been on the back burner for a couple of weeks. As long-term readers would know, I often eschew the 24/7 news cycle, in favour of (ahem) in-depth reports.

The headline might look like an outrageous flogging in a rugby match, but it is actually the fact of the matter. North Korea, with a population close to ours (25 million), has 71 submarines. Australia has just six. North Korea’s subs are diesel-electric only, although it does have nuclear weapons and in fact tested a missile just last week! But no nuclear subs as far as we know.

Most of North Korea’s ageing submarine fleet is comprised of relatively small coastal patrol subs or mini subs. An infographic prepared by Al Jazeera shows that the top 10 countries own a total of 343 subs, with North Korea, the US, China and Russia accounting for 247.

Six countries (the US, UK, Russia, China, France and India), have nuclear-powered submarines. The US dominates the nuclear submarine stakes with 68, ahead of Russia (29) and China (12).

That’s the global picture behind Australia’s newly-inked alliance with the US and UK (AUKUS), which led to Australia scrapping a contract with France to build 12 conventionally-fuelled attack submarines. What sharpened the topic was a timely opinion piece in the Brisbane Times by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

He claims the hyperbole about the new defence alliance has been ‘dialled up to 11’.

I don’t usually pay much attention when a former PM critiques the government of the day. But in Turnbull’s favour, he put the French submarine deal together during his tenure, so he probably knows more about it than most. Despite a tendency to refer to ‘my government’, a trait he holds in common with Kevin Rudd, Turnbull puts the issue into perspective. For a start, he makes it clear that every country that has nuclear submarines has a nuclear industry. He also points out that while Australia is scrapping one contract, it has not replaced it with another; just “discussions’’ over the next 18 months.

“There is no design, no costing, no contract,” Mr Turnbull wrote. “The only certainty is that we won’t have new submarines for 20 years and their cost will be a lot more than the Attack class submarine, the first of which was to be in the water by 2032”.

Veteran investigative journalist Brian Toohey has big problems with the timeline for delivery of the nuclear subs.

“What role will Australia’s nuclear-powered attack submarines play if a war with China breaks out in the next 20 years? The answer is none. The first of these subs will only become operational after 2040 and the last around 2060, if all goes well.

“Worse, they will reportedly cost well over $100 billion, the latest estimate for the cost of the 12 French-Australian conventionally powered submarines that the Morrison government has scuppered.”

Prior to World War 1, there was considerable dissent in Canberra as to whether we should have a submarine fleet at all. In the end we comissioned two subs in 1914 as a response to the enemy’s use of submersibles during WW1. The Royal Australian Navy Submarine Service did not operate subs during WWII but provided bases for allied navies in Fremantle and Brisbane. We also had Oberon class subs from the 1950s to 1970s, mainly used for surveillance. https://www.asc.com.au/submarines/australias-submarine-history/

Our current fleet of six Collins class submarines was built between the 1990s and 2003, subject to massive cost blowouts and delays.

The tactical advantage of the nuclear-powered sub is that it can stay underwater for months at a time without surfacing.

If you have seen movies like the Crimson Tide, The Hunt for Red October, Das Boot or Abyss, you might imagine how submariners feel, cooped up in a metal tube 24/7. There are insights aplenty in the latest BBC melodrama, Vigil. The six-part mini series is made by the team that created Line of Duty. Much is made of the psychological impact of prolonged underwater isolation, the lack of privacy and temptations to stray from a strict regime of regulations.

Australia’s AUKUS announcement is likely to rekindle the flame that burns in the hearts of those who oppose nuclear power and nuclear weapons. This will probably happen regardless of Scott Morrison’s assurances that “Australia has no plans to acquire nuclear weapons”. 

The ageing vanguard of the anti-nuclear movement (my vintage), grew up through the Cuban missile crisis, the ensuing Cold War and nuclear power station meltdowns. We had plenty of reasons to oppose Australia’s nuclear ambitions. It was (and still is) widely assumed Australia would at some point embrace nuclear energy, given that we have a plentiful supply of the raw material (uranium).

There was opposition to nuclear power, but the broader movement was aimed at stopping governments from developing (and testing) nuclear weapons. While France is getting all huffy about its scuppered submarine deal, let’s not forget the nuclear tests it carried out in French Polynesia (Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls) between 1966 and 1996. Don’t go there.

You may recall 300,000 anti-nuclear protesters cramming into London’s Hyde Park in 1983. A year later, New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange caused an international ruckus when introducing a ban on nuclear-powered vessels within NZ’s territorial waters.

When journalists asked NZ PM Jacinda Ardern about AUKUS, she said she had not been informed – “Nor would I expect to be.”

Anti-nuclear protesters are also fearful of the dangers of radioactivity leaking from damaged power stations (as happened on Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukishima (2011). Check out these 28 accidents (that we know about).

Scarier still is this list of 38 sinkings, collisions, fires and other submarine accidents since the year 2000. Nine nuclear submarine sinkings or scuttlings have a list of their own.

Submarines have come a long way since the world’s first military submersible, The Turtle, which operated during the American Revolution in 1775. Captained by Sergeant Ezra Lee, the pear-shaped submersible failed in an attempt to attach a small mine to the hull of the gun ship, HMS Eagle, in New York harbour. The craft was powered by hand cranked propellers.

Submarines have proven to be the most lethal machines in warfare. The German U-boat fleet lost 178 boats in WWI but sunk 5,000 naval and merchant ships. Likewise in WWII, the U-boat fleet sunk some 3,300 ships, most by firing torpedoes at them.

However, submarines have many uses apart from their peace-time role as a military deterrent. My favourite is the transparent sphere used by David Attenborough’s team to bring us brilliant underwater imagery. Other uses include deep water exploration, research, filming, tourism and private recreational activities. The closest I’ve come is a glass-bottom boat on a Barrier Reef excursion. Ed)

If you have a spare $25 million or so you could ask Seattle-based shipbuilder US Submarines to show you its mid-size luxury submarine yacht model. The Seattle 1000, with a range of 3,000 nautical miles, has five staterooms, five bathrooms, two kitchens, a gym and a wine cellar spread across three levels.

Boys and their toys, eh! My post-war childhood contains a happy memory of bath time, playing with a toy submarine which came free in a cereal packet. The toy sub was powered by household baking powder and one could while away hours in tepid water watching it submerge and surface.

Perhaps you had one too.

 

 

 

Some questions about ‘The Boy from Poowong”

hiroshima-poowong-journalism
Image: Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Wikimedia.org, public domain

Bob’s taking a week off as we are booked to perform at a folk festival this weekend. More about that next week. It seemed the right time to give this contribution a run. Norm originally presented this as a talk to a U3A group in Brisbane. We thought it merited wider exposure as the subject is a journalist who reported vital news from the frontline yet was suspected of being a spy. This should remind us that the McCarthy era was alive and well in Australian in the 1950s.

By guest writer NORM BONIFACE

Who was the Australian journalist who married a German Jewess in London in 1938, had one child but was divorced after 10 years? He married again and had three more children who were refused Australian citizenship by Prime Minister Robert Menzies.

He was known for being the first western journalist to report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, and for his reporting from “the other side” during the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

He began his journalism at the start of WW2, during which he reported from China, Burma and Japan and covered the war in the Pacific. After the war, he reported on the trials in Hungary, and later the Korean War, the Vietnam War and on Cambodia under Pol Pot.

The Australian national security department (Commonwealth Security Service, which became Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) in 1949), opened a file on his whole family in the 1940s. Australian security was concerned by his father’s interest in helping Jewish refugees in Melbourne, and his views on the Soviet Union and republican China. A document on his own file dated February 1944 noted:

“This man is a native of Poowong (a small dairy farming town in South Gippsland, Victoria) and his past life has been such that his activities are worth watching closely. He is an expert linguist and has travelled extensively. A comparatively young man who married a German Jewess with a grown family, he seldom misses an opportunity to speak  and act against the interests of Britain and Australia.”

Other documents on his file show ASIO was concerned by his “scathing criticism of American imperialism”.*

* Described in Wikipedia these days as: “American imperialism consists of policies aimed at extending the political, economic and

cultural influence of the United States over areas beyond its boundaries. Depending on the commentator, it may include military conquest, gunboat diplomacy, unequal treaties, subsidization of preferred factions, economic penetration through private companies followed by intervention when those interests are threatened, or regime change.”

He is in the Melbourne Press Club’s Hall of Fame, principally because he was the first correspondent to file from Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb and described the effects of radiation sickness and death for the first time. His reports from Hiroshima were heavily censored in the United States, but they helped set the mood for a global era of nuclear deterrence.

The Australian government sent ASIO agents to Japan and Korea to collect evidence, but in early 1954, conceded it could not prosecute him.

In 1955 while overseas, he lost his passport (reported stolen). The Australian government refused to issue a replacement. Though born in Melbourne, Victoria he was refused re-entry to Australia and as a consequence became stateless. Successive Conservative Australian governments between 1949 and

1970 tried to construct a case to prosecute him, but were unable to do so. Cuba came to the rescue and provided him with a passport to permit international travel.

Around 1967, ABC journalist Tony Ferguson filmed an interview with him in Phnom Penh. It is reported that Ferguson said that the general manager of the ABC, Talbot Duckmanton, ordered its destruction.

The Australian government still refused him re-entry for his father’s (in 1969) and later his brother’s (in 1970) funerals. In 1970, attorney-general Tom Hughes admitted to prime minister John Gorton, that the government had no evidence against him. Hughes said that a prosecution for treason under the Crimes Act “cannot be mounted unless the war is a proclaimed war and there is a proclaimed enemy”, and the Australian government had not declared war in Korea or in Vietnam. (NB: Could a similar argument apply in Iraq and Afghanistan in relation to Julian Assange?)

It was not until the Whitlam government came to power in 1972 that he was permitted to return home. A documentary film including interviews with this journalist, entitled “Public Enemy Number One” by David Bradbury, was released in 1981. At the time the ABC refused to show the film. The film expressed the journalist’s views and was criticised in Australia for the coverage of “the other side” in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and posed the questions: “Can a democracy tolerate opinions it considers subversive to its national interest? How far can freedom of the press be extended in wartime?”

From a legal standpoint his lawyers argued that both of these wars were “undeclared”. In fact the former (civil war) remains an open conflict even today (2021).

“He will be remembered by many during the Cold War years as one of the more remarkable ‘agents of influence’ of the times, but by his Australian and other admirers as a folk hero.” – Dennis Warner, war correspondent and historian.

In 2011 Vietnam celebrated his 100th birthday with an exhibition of his work in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi.

It is in no doubt that he was a controversial figure during the Cold War years. Some hated him and some loved him. Some said he was a spy in the pay of the Soviet KGB, a secret agent for the

Communist Chinese, North Koreans or North Vietnamese, or a clandestine communist “fellow traveller”. Others said he was an “agent of influence” for one or all of the above.

Or was he just a journalist who had strong views, who saw injustice and hardship, and criticised those he believed responsible for it?

Writing in The Australian in 2008, journalist Greg Lockhart described the previous governments’ actions as “a remarkable breach of the human rights of an Australian citizen” in which it “simply exiled him for 17 years” without any legal reason.

He died in Bulgaria in 1983 at age 72 years.

Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983).

The near misses that spawned 207 nuclear war songs

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Hydrogen bomb explosion – image by www.pixabay.com

Ok, it’s a rough tally and not all of the songs about nuclear war on the Wikipedia list below were written in the 1980s. But many of them surfaced after the nuclear missile conflict near-miss of 1983. Millennials and even Gen Yrs may have been agog at the two nuclear missile false alarms broadcast in Hawaii and Japan recently, but there are precedents.

In October 1962, Russian naval officer Vasil Arkhipov intervened in the imminent launch of a nuclear torpedo, thus preventing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 from escalating. At the time, US and Russian naval fleets were posturing in waters off Cuba, where Russia was building missile silos.

Arkhipov, a naval officer aboard a B-50 Soviet submarine, somehow knew something his captain did not; that the depth charges being dropped by the US destroyer Beale were practice rounds, designed to deter. As other US destroyers joined in the “mock” attack Captain Valentin Savitsky, assuming World War III had broken out, ordered that the sub’s 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo be prepared for firing. This required the permission of three on-board senior officers, but Arkhipov refused. Had the torpedo been fired (at the aircraft carrier USS Randolph), this would inevitably have triggered US retaliation.

Last year the BBC interviewed retired Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov, another brave Russian who averted nuclear war in 1983.

“In the early hours of September 26, 1983, the Soviet Union’s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the US. Computer readouts suggested several missiles had been launched,” the BBC report began. “The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

“But duty officer Stanislav Petrov – whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches – decided not to report them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm.”

In doing so, Petrov defied his instructions (to pass the information up the chain of command). But he was right.

Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, now living the quiet life in a small Russian village, used his common sense and decided (risking a posting to Siberia), to bypass his superiors. Bravo, Stan.

“I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it,” he told the BBC’s Russian Service, 30 years after that overnight shift.

At least half of the (anti) nuclear war songs in this Wikipedia list were released in 1983 or over the following six years, with another big flurry in 1989. Call it the Chernobyl Factor if you must.

This is by no means a comprehensive list (my 1981 song ‘The Almost Armageddon Waltz’, for example, is not included). The earliest nuclear war protest songs surfaced in the 1950s – Tom Lehrer’s ‘We’ll all go together when we go” and the Kingston Trio’s ‘Merry Minuet.’

Of the earlier material, no-one IMHO will ever top Randy Newman’s ‘Political Science’ (1972) with its wry reference to Down Under (“…we’ll save Australia, don’t want to hurt no kangaroo, we’ll build an all-American amusement park there, they’ve got surfing too…”

(Randy at the piano)

Given the average time nominated between the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and the strike (about 40 minutes), you could look up a dozen of these songs on YouTube and spend your last hour on earth with your favourite tipple/best girl or boy listening to these ‘told you so’ warnings from the likes of Peter Tosh, Barry McGuire, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Bruce Cockburn, Pink Floyd/Roger Waters, Tears for Fears and Sepultura, to name but a few.

You’d think Australian bands would not rate much of a mention on this list – we are after all 5,500 kms away from the nearest nuclear missile threat. Nevertheless, Redgum, Midnight Oil (3), INXS, Men at Work, Icehouse and the Urban Guerillas get a mention. There is also this obscure dance tune, ‘Dream home in New Zealand’, by the British ska band, The English Beat.

You won’t understand a word but you can just put it on repeat and groove the minutes away (ee-yo-yo, ee-yo-yo).

Then there’s Weird Al Yankovic’s merry Yuletide ditty, ‘Christmas at ground Zero’, with its weirdly prophetic line “The radio just let us know that this is not a test.”

I have no idea how this little ripper was overlooked for our Christmas playlist, but there’s always next year, isn’t there?

It’s good to have satirists like Randy Newman and Weird Al to keep us focused on the importance of being dryly fatalistic about the portent of a nuclear winter.

The questions should be: if humble songwriters can be so wise, why are world leaders so dumb? Why are the systems they put in place to avoid accidental nuclear war so downright flawed?

Lately a few stories have come to light that suggest North Korea has the missile capacity to strike Darwin, some 5,500kms away from Pyongyang. I don’t recall North Korea’s leader making direct threats about Australia or our relationship with the US military. But given the presence of a US Marine Corps in Darwin, I’d say we are on the list.

There is understandable global angst about the world’s lack of control over nuclear weapons and the rogue states which have them. The phrase “accidental nuclear war” is now very much in the lexicon.

The Future of Life Institute maintains a timeline of close calls on its website. This is scary stuff.

As commentators have pointed out, since last week’s Hawaiian misstep and this week’s gaffe by Japanese early warning systems, either incident could have sent the respective antagonists in this psycho-drama scurrying to press their big buttons.

People who research nuclear near-misses are careful to point out that they only know about the (de-classified) incidents involving the US. Data on near-misses and accidents in nuclear states like India, Pakistan and North Korea are not so readily available.

These two incidents of operator-error will no doubt result in a slew of reviews and overhauls of early warning systems. They may also give rise to another crop of anti-nuclear war songs.

If you care to delve into the list of (anti) nuclear war songs, be warned, the quality is uneven and heavy metal bands (Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Black Sabbath) are over- represented. But there are also some thoughtful ballads (Kate Bush, Fred Small and this one, by The Postal Service (‘We will become silhouettes’).

People of the Left claim that wars of any type are started (and sustained) to keep the military-industrial complex ticking over.

I was so intrigued by the title of this 1982 Dead Kennedys song I checked it out – could have been written yesterday!

‘Kinky Sex Makes the World Go ‘Round’ has little to do with sex, or music for that matter. Instead we have a 508-word monologue accompanied by punk rhythms presented as a telephone conversation between the US Secretary of War (‘the companies want a war’), and a breathless (female) UK Prime Minister (‘oh, that sounds marvellous.’)

“We knew you’d agree – the companies will be pleased.”

Dead Kennedys

Next week, maybe.

Flashback (September 2017), June 2015