China has demanded that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) immediately obstruct the AUKUS submarine deal, that it has warned will contradict the UN nuclear watchdog’s own rules.
China has been persistent in calling out the AUKUS security pact, which will result in Australia obtaining eight nuclear submarines from the US and the UK.
China has demanded, in a letter addressed to the IAEA, that the latter intervenes to block the pact from going ahead, and that the agency will be in breach of its own rules if it lets the project continue.
This came after IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said he was satisfied with the trilateral pact, in a report released on Monday, 12 September 2022.
“I welcome the AUKUS parties’ engagement with the Agency to date and expect this to continue in order that they deliver on their stated commitment to ensuring that the highest non-proliferation and safeguards standards are met,” he said.
In response, the Chinese government strongly excoriated the report terming it as “patently absurd”, and held Grossi guilty of acting as a “political tool” of Australia, the UK and the US.
“The relevant report selectively quotes agency’s documents, lacks proper legal basis, and at the same time overstepped its responsibility and competence to make misleading conclusions,” it said.
The letter said the agency could not “overrule” member states including China and declared any endorsement of the deal would be in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
“The three countries have deliberately confused legitimate military activities within a country’s sovereignty with acts of nuclear proliferation,” the Chinese government said.
“It is … not an issue which can be settled bilaterally between the three countries and the agency to the exclusion of other member states of the agency.”
Earlier, in July 2022, the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association and China Institute of Nuclear Industry Strategy held a highly orchestrated media conference to launch a scathing report about AUKUS.
Titled: A Dangerous Conspiracy: The Nuclear Proliferation Risk of the Nuclear-powered Submarines Collaboration in the Context of AUKUS, the propaganda document argued Australia had ‘obsessively’ sought nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s and would be poised to do so again.
‘Given the fact that Australia already has a body of nuclear weapons-related knowledge accumulated historically and that it will get into its hands nuclear-capable delivery systems, once the country takes the desperate step to develop nuclear weapons again, the lead time to a nuclear breakthrough will be too short for the international community to respond effectively,’ the report said.
AUKUS was formed in September 2021, as a new three-way strategic defence alliance between Australia, the UK and the US, initially to build a class of nuclear-propelled submarines, but also to work together in the Indo-Pacific region, where the rise of China is seen as an increasing threat, and develop wider technologies. The deal marks the first time the US has shared nuclear propulsion technology with an ally apart from the UK.
Nuclear-propelled submarines in this context have longer range, are quicker and are harder to detect. But the UK national security adviser, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, made it clear, at the onset, that AUKUS is about more than a class of submarine, describing the pact as “perhaps the most significant capability collaboration in the world anywhere in the past six decades”.
The deal includes not only eight nuclear submarines, but also cruise, hypersonic, and precision-strike missile technology, which is very pertinent in times when China aggressively claims 90 percent of the South China Sea as its waterway, and is increasingly implying that it may invade Taiwan.
The deal set Australia on track to become only the seventh country in the world to operate nuclear-powered submarines. The others include the US, the UK, Russia, China, France, and India.
Quick in response to the formation of AUKUS, in September 2021, China came out with a measured reaction calling AUKUS “extremely irresponsible.” A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that the pact “seriously undermines regional peace and intensifies the arms race.” But Chinese state-owned media took the baton to completely denigrate Australia and the US.
Accusing the US of “hysterically polarizing its alliance system,” the Global Times, an international English-language media outlet owned by the Chinese Communist Party, said on its editorial page that “Washington is losing its mind by trying to rally its allies against China.”
The paper went on to say that Australia “is still a running dog of the US,” and is a participant in the “US-led strategic siege of China.”
“If Australia dares to provoke China more blatantly because of that, or even find fault militarily, China will certainly punish it with no mercy,” the paper warned.
If Australia becomes “militarily assertive,” the paper inveighed, “Australian troops are also most likely to be the first batch of Western soldiers to waste their lives in the South China Sea.”
The threats were not reserved for Australia alone, the media outlet had much to say about the US corralling Quad members as well. “The US intends to turn the Quad and AUKUS into ‘sinister gangs’ containing China,” it said. It went on to “warn solemnly Japan, India and Australia not to follow the US too far in confronting China. Once they step on the red line of China’s core interests, China will not care about their relations with the US, and China will not hesitate to punish them.”
Then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had clarified that Australia would not seek to establish nuclear weapons or a civil nuclear capacity after the AUKUS agreement was announced in September last year (2021).
The Australian government has always maintained that its nuclear submarine partnership with the US and UK would “set the highest possible non-proliferation standards for naval nuclear propulsion”
Australia is an avowedly non-nuclear state. However, Beijing fears Australia’s nuclear submarine fleet may be a clandestine attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
Beijing is insisting the trilateral pact is an “obvious cover-up effort by the three countries (Australia, the US and the UK) to conceal the true nature of their co-operation, which is nothing but an act of nuclear proliferation”.
The aim of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and achieve complete disarmament.
If China claims AUKUS is surreptitious, and is raising a kerfuffle about it, must it not be held culpable for its own burgeoning nuclear arsenal and military build-up? China has an estimated 155 nuclear warheads ready to be deployed on six different types of land-based missiles, approximately 50 of which can reach the continental United States. China’s nuclear arsenal appears to be expanding substantially for the first time in years. Over the past few decades, China had maintained only about twenty silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). But recent evidence from independent US experts shows that the country is likely constructing more than 200 new missile silos.
China has the largest navy in the world. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) navy now has 355 ships and submarines, 145 of which are major surface combatants. The PLA plans to have a total of 460 ships by 2030. The PLA now operates six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, six nuclear-powered attack submarines, and 45 diesel-powered attack submarines. By 2030, it plans on garnering 65-70 subs. The US navy presently has 68 submarines.
The PLAAF (air force) has developed the H-6N bomber, a long-range nuclear-capable aircraft, which also can be air-to-air refuelled. The PLAAF has a total of 2,800 aircraft, of which 2,250 are combat aircraft.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated that Chinese defence-related expenditure actually reached USD240 billion in 2019 — nearly 40 percent higher than the official budget (USD183.5 billion). In 2022, the Chinese government announced a defence budget of USD229.5 billion, the highest year-on-year increase (of 7.1%) ever.
China’s trajectory, militarily, is causing immense anxiety among its neighbours. Its belligerence in territoriality in its environs is destabilising to the region. Its claims on the East and South China seas do not only pose a serious diplomatic and military challenge to the US, but to all nations operating in the region.
China has been incessantly intimidating democratic Taiwan, threatening to take it forcibly, if necessary; and customarily waylaying Taipei’s diplomatic agenda globally, increasingly isolating the latter with its diplomatic, military and economic might.
Over the past few years, China has repeatedly oppressed freedom of expression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong under the guise of “anti-separatism”, “anti-extremism” and “counter-terrorism”. In Xinjiang, since 2017, an estimated one million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim peoples were arbitrarily detained without trial and subjected to political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation in “transformation-through-education” centres.
The fact is, China is conducting itself (exceptionably) on its own terms, with utter disregard for international convention, as its response to the 20 July 2016 International Court of Arbitration (at The Hague)’s ruling on the South China Sea and its arrant contempt for the recent UN ruling on Xinjiang have exhibited.
Much to US chagrin, the world is no longer unipolar, even as it resolutely tries to contain China with alliances like AUKUS and Quad. China, in a humungous way, and Russia have sought to dilute American hegemony on the global stage. Standing off against the AUKUS and Quad is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) whose principle active members are China, Russia and Pakistan.
What is critical to the imperatives of the day is that the Australian nuclear submarines are a long way in the coming (perhaps, two decades). Till then, China has the option of doing many impetuous things. For instance, building its military and nuclear arsenal to outrival the US and its allies, enhance its economic, diplomatic and military reach in Asia and Africa, build more military installations on artificial islands in the South China Sea, and secure more military bases in the developing world….
montes-musings.blog 
Too good Monte
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