As announced by the White House on Monday, Australia will modernize its military fleet with nuclear-powered war submarines acquired from the United States. This move strengthens an alliance that the United Kingdom also joins, aimed at containing China’s growing expansionism in Asian waters. Australia had previously agreed to acquire similar submarines from France, but the US maneuvered to place its own submarines instead, suggesting that alliances to contain China currently prevail over European partnerships.
The meeting on Monday in San Diego, on the Pacific coast, between President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak formalized this new trilateral security alliance that covers areas such as cybersecurity, space technology, artificial intelligence, and submarine development. The alliance is known in Washington as Aukus, an acronym formed by the first letters in the names of the three countries: Australia (A), the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US).
Australia will thus equip itself with three US submarines from the Virginia class, which will be expanded to five. The first three, with the permission of the US legislature, will be manufactured in the US and delivered in the 2030s. Of the other two, one will be made in the UK and the other in Australia, with a delivery date of around 2040. The submarines are named SSN-Aukus.
As Ned Price, spokesperson for US diplomacy, stated when the Aukus agreement was announced in September 2021, it was agreed to provide Australia with “a model of nuclear-powered submarine with conventional weapons to deliver that capability to Australia at the earliest possible date and, critically, in a way that meets the highest possible standards of nuclear non-proliferation.” The secretly negotiated agreement led to the Australian government canceling a $66 billion (€61 billion) contract for a fleet of conventionally powered French submarines, causing a strong and unusual diplomatic clash between Washington and Paris.
China, for its part, has responded that the Aukus agreement violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international agreement signed in 1968 with the aim of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom are the nuclear-weapon states that have ratified the treaty. The others, including Australia, have pledged not to acquire nuclear weapons. The Australian authorities have rebutted criticism, arguing that they are working to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, not nuclear weapons.
The three allied countries said in a statement provided by the White House that “Australia will not intend and will not attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.”