A Nuclear North Korea: Implications for Australia's Arms Control Diplomacy

North Korea’s entry into the nuclear club in October 2006 has presented Australian policy-makers with an acute dilemma. Having spent the better part of two decades proclaiming that it was at the forefront of international efforts to restrict nuclear weapons proliferation and to promote the concept of multilateral arms control, Australia now finds itself caught between the hound and the hydrant. Entrenched orthodoxies within the arms control establishment in Australia have failed to anticipate the rapid changes in international security politics which are driving much of the recent proliferation behaviour. At a time when counter-proliferation policy in the United States (US) is shifting the international goalposts even further, Australian bureaucrats and policy-makers have remained staunchly defensive of established notions and methods of arms control and disarmament. This paper surveys two broad issues raised by the North Korean nuclear test: the policy foundations of Australia’s traditional approach to arms control and disarmament; and the growing gap between Australia’s arms control policy and contemporary counter-proliferation activity. The paper concludes with an assessment of the direction of Australian policy since the reemergence of nuclear issues on the domestic political agenda. It suggests that in order to rescue arms control diplomacy from potential irrelevance, Australian policy makers should re-examine the strategic principles upon which the original arms control school was built in the 1960s by Hedley Bull and others