The case against AUKUS

Published in The Saturday Paper, 25 July 2026

“The ultimate crazy irony is that …Australia is spending an eye-watering amount to build a capability to defend us from a military threat which in fact is most likely to arise simply because we have that capability – and are using it to fight alongside the US in a conflict in which it is not in our interest to engage.”

As this week’s ALP National Conference will confirm, the Albanese Government remains strongly politically wedded to the AUKUS nuclear-propelled submarine project. But the project was misconceived from the outset and, five years later, remains even more obviously not in our national interest to pursue. For three main reasons: there are huge doubts about its deliverability, its cost to Australia manifestly outweighs its benefits, and its implementation would profoundly limit our independent sovereign agency.

Other concerns have been raised about the project, most importantly its potential contribution to nuclear weapons proliferation, the environmental impact of nuclear waste disposal, and the likely difficulties that will be experienced recruiting and sustaining a much-expanded submariner force. While real, these problems are all likely to prove reasonably manageable: through, respectively, the negotiation of IAEA safeguards protocols, creative underground engineering solutions for the relatively small amounts of waste involved, and sufficiently attractive financial incentives for personnel.

Deliverability. As to the real showstoppers, the first is that there has been from the beginning zero certainty of the timely delivery of the eight promised AUKUS boats, and every piece of evidence now available on the public record reinforces scepticism as to whether any of them will be delivered on time, or indeed at all.

The first tranche, of three existing Virginia-class boats, is to be supplied by the US from 2032, but that has always been premised on the assumption that the Pentagon had its own inventory requirements, and meeting the Australian requirement would require an increase in the annual build rate from 1.2 submarines to 2.3. Despite our contribution already of some $3 billion to enhance the US shipyard capacity, with more to come, that hasn’t happened. We will only get even the second-hand boats now on offer on the assumption by the US that they will remain for all practical purposes just an extension of its own fleet, which starkly raises the sovereign agency issue I come back to below.

An even bigger question mark hangs over the deliverability of the second tranche of the AUKUS submarine project: the five new-design SSN-AUKUS attack submarines to be jointly built by the UK and Australia (the hulls to be built in Adelaide, and married to reactors built in Barrow-in-Furness) with the first Australian boat entering into service in the early 2040s. It requires heroic levels of optimism to believe that any of this will happen.

Every report coming out of the UK indicates that its defence-industrial base is presently under extraordinary stress, with submarine building schedules tightening and costs increasing, and with every prospect of further deterioration, notwithstanding Australia’s commitment to spending $4.5 billion over 10 years to help boost production rates. And at the Australian end, I need only quote my very South Australian successor as foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who has described building nuclear-powered submarines in Adelaide as a ‘fairytale’, a ‘mirage’ which is ‘just not going to happen’.

Cost-benefit. It is unquestionable that nuclear-propelled submarines are much more capable than conventionally powered boats when it comes to speed and endurance, although it is a very large assumption that their undetectability advantage will remain immune from technological challenge in the decades ahead. Both the Virginias and new SSN-AUKUS class boats would be able to deploy significantly further afield, for much longer, with more capacity to move quickly away from risk situations than any conventional alternative, and with their size enabling them to deploy significantly more attack firepower.

But is their incredible expense – currently estimated $368 billion over thirty years – justified? How useful will this capability actually be for Australia’s defence, given that –even with a full fleet of eight new boats in service – normal operating constraints mean that only two, or at most three of them, will be deployable across our vast maritime environment at any one time? Just how much intelligence gathering, or archipelagic chokepoint protection, or sea-lane protection, or ‘deterrence at a distance’, will that number of boats make possible?

The only credible answer to the question of what these boats are for, is that they play the role which the US manifestly wants them to play, and for which they are best equipped: primarily as supplementary assets, effectively embedded into US military command, for the task of finding, tracking, and possibly attacking Chinese submarines seen as a nuclear threat to the US mainland, as they move into and around Pacific waters. Australian ministers have never explicitly conceded as much, but the conclusion is inescapable that from the outset the whole enterprise has been viewed through an alliance reinforcement lens, with this role for the boats being the understood quid pro quo.

It was perception of the US’s own strategic advantage, not ours, that drove Washington’s agreement to the deal. What is particularly valued by the US is Australia’s willingness – both as an explicit part of the AUKUS deal and as additional measures designed to continue to endear ourselves to the Washington military establishment – to make important new basing facilities available to its military, in addition to Pine Gap. There is the B52 bomber base at Tindal in the Northern Territory, and the Marine Corps Rotational Force base in Darwin, but above all the Stirling submarine base south of Perth, especially useful in support of potential US operations to interdict Chinese energy supplies entering the Malacca Strait chokepoint.

It is certainly not inconceivable that a major war will erupt between the US and China over Taiwan, even though US President Donald Trump has recently shown much less enthusiasm for rushing to its defence, or even maintaining ambiguity about that intention, than his predecessors. The big risk here is that Australia will join on the US side, under irresistible pressure from Washington and out of a misplaced sense of optimism that will thereby be buying further lifetime insurance protection from our great and powerful ally. Misplaced, because whatever the psychological comfort it might have offered us in days gone by, the ANZUS alliance has never legally bound the US to defend us, even in the event of existential attack.

Trump’s approach to alliances generally has been particularly egregious, regarding all of us more as encumbrances than assets. But under whoever is president in future, should we be drawn into war, our expectations should extend no further than Washington shaking a deterrent fist, and threatening and delivering retaliation, if its own assets on Australian soil are threatened or attacked. The notion that extended nuclear deterrence justifies our prostration – that the US really would be prepared to sacrifice San Francisco for Sydney, let alone Miami for Melbourne —is, and always has been, a ludicrous delusion.

If sanity does not prevail, and war over Taiwan does erupt, this is not a fight it would make any sense for Australia to join. While obviously we should and would deplore any attack on a flourishing democracy, the reality is that Taiwan has always been a special case, not enjoying the same kind of universally recognised sovereignty as Kuwait or Ukraine. Our involvement in a war in its defence would make almost zero military difference, but come at vast cost to us, above all economically with the overnight severance of all links with our major trading partner that it would obviously entail.

So, the ultimate crazy irony is that, with AUKUS and its associated commitments, Australia is spending an eye-watering amount to build a capability to defend us from a military threat which in fact is most likely to arise simply because we have that capability – and are using it to fight alongside the US in a conflict in which it is not in our interest to engage, without any guarantee of support in return should we ever need it.

Sovereign agency. Australian governments will always insist that they maintain full control as to how the AUKUS assets are used, and that will always remain the case on paper. But the reality is otherwise, and will rapidly become apparent if and when serious tensions arise. It simply defies credibility to think that Washington will ever go ahead with its sale of Virginias to us, or allow the further access to highly sensitive nuclear technology involved in the SSN-AUKUS follow-on project, in the absence of an understanding that we will deploy those boats to join the US in any fight in which it chooses to engage anywhere in our region, particularly over Taiwan.

Are we all meant to ignore Biden senior Asia adviser Kurt Campbell’s reported observation in 2021 that ‘we have them locked in now for the next 40 years’? Or Elbridge Colby’s, just before he was appointed Pentagon under-secretary of defense for policy, that delivery of any Virginias to Australia would be highly imprudent without ‘an iron-clad guarantee that they can be deployed at the will of the United States’? I have had personal ministerial experience of being a junior allied partner of the US in a hot conflict situation – the first Gulf War in 1991—and my recollections are not pretty.

Those who deny, or ignore, the loss of Australian sovereign independence that is necessarily involved in our commitment to the AUKUS project are simply defying reality. And those who accept the reality of our loss of sovereign agency but actually applaud it as a as a price worth paying for our protection – as Michael Pezzullo, for one, has done in cheering what he describes as a “‘pooling of sovereignty’ in the face of a belligerent China” – seem to have lost not only any sense of national pride, but of Australia’s national interest.

What next? For all its profound failure to serve our national interests, the unhappy reality is that termination of the AUKUS Pillar I agreement will probably now have to await the US and/or the UK finding themselves unable or unwilling to meet their respective obligations under it, each of them having clear opt-out rights under the agreement. With Australia remaining such a compliant cash cow in the meantime, that is not likely to happen until at least 2032, and maybe years later.

At the very least the Albanese Government – recognizing, as it must, the reality and gravity of the risk that the AUKUS submarine fleet will simply not be delivered on time, in the necessary numbers, or at all – should now devote major resources to developing a fallback plan premised on the possibility of that failure. That could involve a larger and much earlier deployed fleet of conventionally powered submarines. But it may be that a better defence option in these circumstances would be simply to recognise that the latest revolution in military technology is real, and that our huge continent and maritime surrounds will be less well protected by a handful of crewed submarines, than by relying wholly on a combination of self-managed air, missile, underwater, and cyber detection and destruction capabilities, with a major reliance on autonomous delivery systems.

My regretful conclusion is that Australia’s no-holds-barred bipartisan embrace of AUKUS Pillar I is more likely than not to prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions our country has made, not only putting at profound risk our sovereign independence, but generating more risk than reward for the very national security it promises to protect. I cannot imagine this decision being made by any of the Hawke-Keating Governments of which I was part for 13 years. Times have changed.

Gareth Evans testified last month at the AUKUS Public Inquiry

Gareth Evans was a Cabinet Minister throughout the Hawke-Keating governments, including as Foreign Minister from 1988-96.

This article was first published in The Saturday Paper on 25 July 2026