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The Australian co-founder of a Nobel Prize-winning advocacy group says it is time for Labor to honour its promise, while in opposition, to ratify the UN’s nuclear weapons ban treaty. By Kristina Kukolja.

Time for Australia to sign non-nuclear treaty

Co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Tilman Ruff.

Credit: Laurent le Crabe

Australia has long been at the forefront of global efforts towards the containment of nuclear threats. Now, in the wake of the American military strikes on Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency says the global nonproliferation system is on the brink of collapse. Australian campaigners are calling on the government to step up its advocacy for nuclear disarmament.

“It’s an alarmingly dangerous time – the nonproliferation regime is under severe threat,” says Dr Tilman Ruff, who is co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Nobel Prize-winning advocacy group founded in Australia.

He calls the United States attack on Iran a “frightening escalation” that dealt a “body blow to the peaceful nonproliferation regime … which was already in a parlous state”.

Ruff says Australia must urgently show it is serious about nuclear disarmament by signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Now in its second term, the Labor government has yet to act on a commitment it made while in opposition to sign and ratify the treaty. Ruff is concerned the US is putting pressure on the Albanese government not to sign. He says ICAN has been told that ratification of the treaty hasn’t been raised in cabinet, and it must be. “The issue needs prime ministerial leadership,” Ruff says.

“The reasons for the delay are American pressure and the displeasure that the US would indicate when Australia does this.”

He says support for the “illegal and unwarranted” US military action in Iran has damaged Australia’s global reputation, and ratifying the treaty would help to repair its credibility.

“Australia joining the TPNW would be of global significance, especially if it became the first nuclear weapons supporting and assisting ally of a nuclear-armed state to do so. It would be the most effective way we could support peace and nuclear disarmament, prevent nuclear war and reinforce the rule of law.”

Australia has maintained a strong bipartisan nuclear nonproliferation stance for decades. The Whitlam Labor government established the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) more than 50 years ago. It was a Coalition foreign affairs minister, Alexander Downer, who took the test ban treaty to the United Nations General Assembly in 1996, and Australia now has the third-biggest network of stations monitoring for signs of nuclear testing in the world.

Amid the IAEA warnings, ASNO director-general Geoff Shaw says its nonproliferation efforts are being intensified in the Asia–Pacific.

“The nonproliferation regime is under unprecedented strain,” Dr Shaw tells The Saturday Paper, noting that the international geopolitical situation has been deteriorating for the past 18 months.

Iran’s continued uranium enrichment and failure to comply with its IAEA nuclear safeguard obligations are among the “profound geo-strategic challenges” identified in ASNO’s latest annual report.

Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and says it no longer feels protected by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

After the US bombed three key Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend, Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations-backed nuclear watchdog, told an emergency session of the UN Security Council that the US attacks had led to a “sharp degradation in nuclear safety and security”. Grossi argued that without diplomacy, the global nuclear nonproliferation regime “could crumble and fall”.

Geoff Shaw’s office, which falls under the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, notified The Saturday Paper that it was unable to provide promised updated remarks from him following the US attacks.

Global concerns about an acceleration of nuclear proliferation are mounting less than a year before the New START treaty – signed by the US and Russia in 2010 as an agreement to limit their nuclear arsenals – is due to expire. (Russia suspended its participation in 2023 but did not withdraw.) Earlier this month, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in its annual report that the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – countries confirmed or believed to have nuclear weapons – are modernising their arsenals. The institute warned of a “dangerous new nuclear arms race … at a time when arms-control regimes are severely weakened”.

“We are closer to nuclear war than we have been for a long time,” says veteran Australian anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott.

Beyond Iran, ASNO’s Geoff Shaw says he is also worried about North Korea’s continued testing of ballistic missiles, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its “deeply concerning” de-ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 2023. The prospects of it coming into force anytime soon, says Shaw, are “pretty grim” – it still needs to be ratified by nine major countries, including the US, North Korea, China, India and Israel.

“Achieving ratification by the remaining ‘Annex-2’ countries is a difficult task,” concedes Robert Floyd, the Australian head of the UN’s Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) in Vienna. “But it is not impossible.”

Dr Floyd says nuclear testing “by any state would be deeply worrying and destabilising, as a return to testing by one state could easily mean a return to testing by many”.

The prospect of nuclear conflict and the resumption of weapons testing “is definitely on our mind”, says David Hardman, who oversees an Australian government network of facilities charged with detecting possible nuclear detonations across a vast swathe of the southern hemisphere.

Based in the north-east Melbourne suburb of Yallambie, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) hosts the main radionuclide facility for testing airborne nuclear particles and radioactive noble gases, and it oversees 20 other monitoring stations and laboratories across the mainland and territories including Antarctica, and in Fiji and Kiribati. Australia is among a few countries to host all four types of technology used for monitoring the atmosphere, underground and underwater.

“Radionuclide sites are the smoking gun – they are the ones that will say, yes, that was a nuclear explosion,” says Hardman.

The International Monitoring System (IMS) operated under the CTBT is critical to deterrence efforts, he says, “ensuring that nobody can get away with nuclear testing”.

An Australian seismic station helped confirm past North Korean nuclear tests. IMS equipment also has civilian and scientific applications, such as monitoring the movement of whales and other marine life, and environmental changes.

After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, ARPANSA says data from Japan was used to help develop emergency response advice for civilians. The Australian government used modelling based on the data to “advise Australian search and rescue teams on the ground in Japan and to understand the potential risk to Australia”.

Hardman says data collected through IMS monitoring could also be used by the proposed AUKUS nuclear submarine program, which has required Australia’s two main nuclear regulatory agencies to take on additional responsibilities.

This touches on a controversial point for Asia–Pacific neighbours. The Australian government is funding more activities to “strengthen” nuclear safeguards across the region, including the establishment of a national data centre under the CTBT in Malaysia, a similar proposal for the Pacific Islands, and a new memorandum of understanding with Indonesia, with an “enhanced focus on nuclear security” and “fostering” nonproliferation collaboration.

Geoff Shaw says Australia’s objective is to reassure neighbours that “Australia meets its treaty obligations and is committed to doing so” and to build “confidence that we are there to help them in their treaty obligations”.

However, Australia’s decision to join AUKUS has raised questions in the Pacific about its ability to meet its own obligations, as a signatory to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga.

“Pacific peoples feel a great sense of betrayal from what Australia did,” says Fiji-based Epeli Lesuma, a demilitarisation campaigner with the Pacific Network on Globalisation.

“Australia uses a term in Fiji called the ‘Vuvale’ partnership, which means ‘family’. ‘Vuvale’ and ‘Pacific family’ are thrown around by people in Canberra, but the sentiment behind it is hollow – particularly when you think about what Australia did with AUKUS.”

Lesuma says AUKUS is a danger to the Pacific because it will potentially bring nuclear-powered submarines into the region and has pushed island nations into the geopolitical competition between the US, China and Australia.

“The Australian government chose to betray all of us by exposing us to greater nuclear risk and nuclear violence, submarines cutting through the Pacific Ocean – creating a bigger target on our backs.”

“There is no trust,” agrees Samoan-born Maualaivao Maima Koro, a Pacific security expert at the University of Adelaide. She says Pacific nations are looking to Australia for leadership on nuclear issues, in a region that – decades on – is still living with the health and environmental harms of nuclear testing by France, Britain and the US.

“Pacific leaders have the view that Australia will step up because it is the country that can. It is the country with the means, alliances and exposure to do so,” says Koro.

“The idea of Australia’s responsibility to the Pacific Islands Forum is that you can advocate for the interest of the region – but it’s not happening. Pacific Island states want Australia to commit to the Rarotonga treaty and uphold it.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Nuclear fallout".

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