Illustration by Peter Lewis
Nuclear bait and switch
AUKUS was a first clue. A whole pile of blather, cooked up between the US military establishment and Australia's former disastrous Morrison Coalition government, that essentially boils down to Australia agreeing to subsidise, at great cost, the deployment and operation in the Asia-Pacific region of what will effectively be US-controlled nuclear submarines. To me this looked like the radioactive thin edge of an atomic wedge. Straight away my mind went back to 2005, when former Labor PM Bob Hawke (another great friend of the US military establishment) gave a speech suggesting that Australia should accept large…