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LECTURE BY THE HON. P.J. KEATING, VISITING PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY, 
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES - SYDNEY, 25 NOVEMBER 1998

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ELIMINATING NUCLEAR WEAPONS: A SURVIVAL GUIDE 
FOR THEÂ Â  TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

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In earlier lectures 
here over the past two years I have spoken mostly about Australia and 
its place in the world. Tonight I want to discuss a darker and more 
dangerous subject, one that threatens to cast a long shadow over the 
twenty first century.

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I am talking about the 
continuing inability of the international community, and more particularly 
the great powers, to take the steps necessary to eliminate nuclear weapons 
from the world.

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In some ways, I suppose, 
I am an unexpected campaigner for nuclear disarmament. I am a realist 
about international affairs and I don’t have great faith in the inherent 
good will of the nation state. I have never seen much point in the politics 
of symbolism. During the Cold War I thought ideas of unilateral disarmament 
were naive and dangerous.

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And yet this issue of 
nuclear weapons worries me more than any other when I think about the 
sort of world young Australians will inherit.

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Over the past decade 
the world has undergone deep changes. The Cold War, which defined our 
international system for fifty years has ended and the information revolution 
is transforming our lives and societies. But in many ways our institutions, 
and our ways of thinking, have not adjusted. As a result, we find ourselves 
on the verge of the twenty first century dangerously close to repeating 
the mistakes of this one.

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One reason for this 
is the human tendency to avert our eyes from problems; to hope that 
if we do not look directly at them, they will disappear.

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In the aftermath of 
the Cold War, this was what we did. No image in the twentieth century 
has seared our collective consciousness like that of the mushroom cloud. 
And in our minds that image of the Bomb defined the Cold War. So although 
nuclear weapons had originally been conceived for a different conflict, 
we assumed that because the Cold War was over, the weapons that defined 
it had miraculously disappeared as well.

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For most Australians, 
the realisation that this was not so came with the announcement by President 
Chirac, on 13 June 1995, that France would conduct a series of eight 
underground nuclear weapons tests at Mururoa atoll in French Polynesia.

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In making this decision 
the newly-elected President was following China in breaking an international 
moratorium on testing that had been in place since January 1993.

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The resumption had been 
foreshadowed during the French election campaign, so it was not unexpected. 
But the outcry in Australia was immediate and strong.

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In response to the tests, 
the Australian government took a series of measures including recalling 
the Ambassador to France, curtailing defence contacts, and coordinating 
protest action in the United Nations and other international bodies, 
including the South Pacific Forum, which Australia was chairing that 
year.

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This did not much diminish 
the public clamour. The government was being urged to break diplomatic 
relations with France, cut off all trade, and dispatch Australian warships 
to stop the tests. Sections of the media, especially commercial radio, 
were running a campaign that became more anti-French than anti-nuclear. 
It seemed at times as if the smoke of the Battle of Agincourt had only 
just cleared. At several points I had to underline publicly that our 
opposition was to the nuclear tests, not to the people of France.

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The selfishness and 
cynicism of the Chirac decision appalled me and I was deeply concerned 
by the provocation it provided to some of the threshold nuclear states. 
But I was not interested in the sort of theatrical and ultimately pointless 
gestures that were being urged upon us. Trade sanctions would have harmed 
Australia more than France. I was certainly not prepared to permit Australia’s 
military forces to be used for symbolic reasons. Short of going to war 
with France, which was absurd, the only option for the warships would 
have been to steam around in circles while the French exploded their 
bombs. This would have underlined not Australia’s strength but our 
impotence.

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The more I thought about the French tests, the more I came to feel 
that the understandable public outrage was in a sense directed at a 
symptom rather than a cause of the problem.

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The French had reminded everyone of what we all wanted to forget, 
the uniqu e, sickening sense of insecurity which comes from knowing 
that weapons exist in the arsenals of governments which have the capacity 
to destroy humankind. The problem, in other words, was the continued 
existence of nuclear weapons in the world.

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As I reflected on this, 
I thought we had an unprecedented and possible unrepeatable opportunity 
to begin to move to a new strategic environment which offered not just 
a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, but their elimination. 
The Gulf War had shown that new, accurate, conventional weapons could 
accomplish the military purposes for which nuclear weapons had once 
been intended, but without such appalling, indiscriminate consequences. 
The Cold War had ended, all the declared nuclear powers were at least 
on speaking terms, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons had for 
the time being been reasonably contained. There was no prospect, however, 
that this situation would continue into the indefinite future.

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The goal of a nuclear 
weapons-free world was not new. It had been a long-term aim of Labor 
Party policy and a goal that had been articulated forcefully by others.

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But as long as the Cold 
War raged, the ambition was unachievable. Now, however, we had an opportunity 
to develop a concrete program to achieve a nuclear weapons-free world.

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The successful negotiation 
of the chemical weapons convention in which Australia had played an 
important diplomatic role, had shown that it   was  possible to put the genie back in the bottle; that a whole 
class of weapons of mass destruction could be abolished. And Article 
VI of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, which had only recently 
been indefinitely extended, committed the nuclear weapons states to 
‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating 
to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear 
disarmament.’

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But of course the task of ridding the world of nuclear weapons was 
not something Australia could accomplish unilaterally. We had none of 
our own to eliminate and we were committed not  to get them. We 
were well respected internationally for our arms control expertise. 
But we were now entering a domain where the deepest national security 
interests of the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France were 
involved.

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Every country was directly 
affected by the nuclear threat, but nothing could happen without the 
five nuclear powers.

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We decided, therefore, 
that the most useful thing we could do was to try to shape the international 
debate. Anti-nuclear groups had written many reports about the problems 
of nuclear weapons but, until that time, no government had ever put 
its name behind a report committed to their elimination. I wanted to 
put the authority of a sovereign government behind the push to rid the 
world of nuclear weapons.

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So in October 1995 we 
announced the formation of a commission comprising a group of eminent 
scientists, disarmament experts, military strategists and statesmen 
and asked them to develop ‘concrete and realistic steps for achieving 
a nuclear weapons-free world.’

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The emphasis was to 
be on ‘concrete and realistic.’ I saw no point in another rhetorical 
statement that nuclear weapons were evil and should be abolished. Any 
report which was to have a chance of convincing the hard-headed defence 
establishments of North America and Europe to change their positions 
had to be grounded in a deep understanding of what elimination meant, 
both technically and strategically.

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These are matters of 
the greatest complexity and profundity. They are not easily resolved. 
The problems include verification - that is, how you can be sure everyone 
abides by an agreement; dealing with break-outs - situations in which 
one country tries to snatch strategic advantage by breaking the agreement; 
and the broader implications of such a major change in the global security 
environment for issues such as the deterrence of chemical and biological 
weapons and of conventional war.

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We were very lucky to get together an outstanding group of commissioners. 
Gareth Evans’s international reputation and energy were critical to 
our success in this, as in so much else. The members included Joseph 
Rotblat, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize f or his work with 
the Pugwash Foundation, General Lee Butler, who had been responsible 
until 1994 for all United States strategic nuclear forces, Field Marshal 
Lord Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff, Robert McNamara, 
the former US Secretary of Defence and President of the World Bank, 
and a number of internationally-regarded disarmament experts. The distinguished 
Australian strategic thinker, Professor Robert O’Neill was a member, 
as was Richard Butler, then the Australian Ambassador to the United 
Nations, now the U.N.’s Chief Weapons Inspector. I believed the group 
should also include someone with direct political experience, so I invited 
Michel Rocard, the former French Prime Minister to participate.

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These were not people 
who had come down in the last shower. They had very different backgrounds 
and brought different assumptions about nuclear weapons to their work. 
Some were long-time peace activists; some had had nuclear weapons directly 
in their control. If this diverse and distinguished group could agree 
on the road ahead, we hoped they would be able to persuade others.

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We provided resources 
to permit the group to commission more detailed papers from expert advisers 
on specific dimensions of the move to a nuclear weapons-free world. 
This brought a range of international scholars into the project. Their 
work has provided a rich resource lode for further debate about this 
issue.

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The commission reported 
to the coalition government in August 1996.

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The recommendations 
were based on the fundamental assumption that ‘the proposition that 
large numbers of nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never 
used - accidentally or by decision - defies credibility. The only 
complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and the assurance 
that they will never be produced again.’

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The report recommended 
a number of immediate steps to reduce the dangers of nuclear war as 
well as longer-term moves towards the larger goal of the elimination 
of nuclear weapons.

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The immediate steps 
proposed included taking nuclear forces off alert; removing warheads 
from delivery vehicles; ending the deployment of non-strategic nuclear 
weapons; ending nuclear testing; initiating another round of negotiations 
between the US and Russia to reduce their arsenals; and a joint agreement 
by nuclear weapons states not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

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The commissioners also 
recommended a series of reinforcing steps to build on these foundations. 
These included measures to prevent further horizontal proliferation, 
not only by countries but by terrorist groups, the development of verification 
arrangements for a nuclear weapons-free world, and the cessation of 
the production of fissile materials for nuclear explosive purposes.

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As we hoped, the recommendations 
were realistic and practical. The commissioners did not ask for unilateral 
disarmament or suggest any measure that might threaten security during 
the process. However, they did make the fundamentally important point 
that, in the end, the decisions that need to be taken are not technical 
decisions but political ones.

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It was a good start. 
But many excellent reports lie languishing on shelves in Ministries 
around the world. The next step was the diplomatic one of trying to 
persuade others to embrace the ideas and adopt the policies.

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One of my regrets about 
losing the 1996 election - and I have several - is the opportunity 
I lost to pursue the report’s recommendations as Prime Minister. I 
would have taken the report to the United Nations General Assembly to 
launch it myself. It would have been high on my agenda for discussions 
with President Clinton and the leaders of the other nuclear states.

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But beyond receiving 
the report in August and lodging it at the United Nations, the present 
Australian government did not endorse its recommendations or try to 
sell them more widely. The Canberra Commission was associated with the 
government I led, and it had been labelled a ‘stunt’ by the current 
foreign minister in the political atmosphere of the time. So the political 
momentum - at least on Australia’s part - was allowed to lapse.

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I believe this is a great pity, and not just for Australia. But other 
governments, I am glad to say, have taken up the cause.

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In June this year the Foreign Ministers of Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, 
Mexico, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Africa and Sweden, forme d 
a new international coalition - called the New Agenda Coalition - 
to push for the elimination of nuclear weapons. They explicitly drew 
inspiration from the Canberra Commission.

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In August, in another 
parallel with the Canberra Commission, Japan convened the Tokyo Forum, 
a meeting of eighteen prominent diplomatic and strategic experts from 
sixteen countries to discuss the impact of nuclear testing and issues 
of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

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Three years after we 
convened the Canberra Commission report, what is the international environment 
for such initiatives? I want to turn now to the current situation and 
the prospects for the future.

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On the positive side, 
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was finally adopted in 1996 and some 
progress has been made in opening the way for negotiations on a treaty 
to limit the production of fissile material for weapons.

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But almost all other news on the nuclear front has been bad. Twenty 
thousand nuclear warheads still have the capacity to destroy the world 
ma ny times. Two of the states on the nuclear threshold, India 
and Pakistan have now stepped over it. Another regime with a known nuclear 
program, North Korea, tested a medium range ballistic missile in August. 
Meanwhile, Russia’s capacity to control and store its existing nuclear 
arsenal is atrophying. And the strategic arms negotiations between the 
major nuclear powers are not going anywhere. Russia has still not ratified 
START 11. Russia, China and the United States have still not ratified 
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Across the board, in other words, 
the impetus for change has stalled.

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After years of developing 
its nuclear capability yet never declaring itself a nuclear power, the 
new Indian government openly tested weapons on 11 and 13 May this year. 
India can undoubtedly deploy reliable fission weapons on a wide range 
of delivery systems including ballistic missiles. It probably has 60 
to 80 weapons.

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Pakistan, India’s 
long-standing rival, responded with its own tests on May 28 and 30. 
Pakistan’s nuclear arms are not as sophisticated or numerous as India's, 
but it has technical capacities which at some time in some form it may 
be tempted to share with Middle Eastern neighbours.

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Then in August we saw 
the successful test by North Korea of a three-stage missile capable 
of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads over 5,500 kilometres. 
The test suggested North Korea has also made progress on a longer-range 
missile that would enable it to strike targets throughout Asia.

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The 1994 Framework Agreement, 
under which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange 
for heavy fuel oil, help in building two light-water nuclear reactors 
and an eventual end to the economic embargo, is now under pressure again. 
North Korea has reportedly continued to work on missile launch facilities, 
and just this week we have seen Pyongyang deny the United States access 
to an underground facility that Americans believe to be a nuclear facility.

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After the Indian nuclear 
tests, President Clinton said forcefully and accurately that ‘to think 
that you have to manifest your greatness by behaviour that recalls the 
worst events of the twentieth century on the edge of the twenty-first, 
when everybody else is trying to leave the nuclear age behind, is just 
wrong.’

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But the problem, of 
course, is that no one else does seem to be trying to leave the nuclear 
age behind, or not at least with any noticeable degree of urgency. And 
this, the non-nuclear powers note, is despite the fact that in order 
to secure the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 
Treaty in 1995, the five declared nuclear weapons states recommitted 
themselves to pursue measures of complete and general nuclear disarmament.

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The essential issue 
here is that you can’t have   non -proliferation without   de -proliferation.

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It is not just states that we need to worry about as a source of new 
nuclear threats, but terrorists and other groups as well.

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Nuclear weapons are not hard to make. You can get instructions for 
a workable device off the internet. Graham Allison, Director  
of the Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s 
Kennedy School of Government, put it this way:

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if a state or a terrorist 
group ‘obtained as little as 30 pounds of highly enriched uranium, 
or less than half that weight in plutonium, they could produce a nuclear 
device in a matter of a month or two with design information that is 
publicly available, equipment that is readily available in the commercial 
market, and modest levels of technical competence represented in graduates 
of any respectable engineering program.’

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The only difficulty 
is access to fissile material. That is why we need to address much more 
comprehensively the problems of ‘nuclear overhang’ - essentially 
the security of stored nuclear weapons and excess fissile material in 
Russia. This is a second area that has become more dangerous since the 
Canberra Commission report.

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At more than 90 sites 
across Russia, 715 tons of nuclear material are stored. This is enough 
to fuel 40,000 weapons.Â   
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Guarding this deadly treasure are military officers and soldiers whose 
morale is low and who have sometimes not been paid for months. In 1996 
the then Director of Central Intelligence, John Deutch, told the U.S. 
Congress that of the tons of weapons-useable nuclear material distributed 
to various centres around Russia over the past 40 years, none had what 
would be regarded in the United States as sufficient accountability.Â   
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Last July, thousands of scientists at the nuclear city of Arzamas-16 
went on strike after months without pay. The Russian Ministry of Atomic 
Energy MINATOM has told its personnel that they can no longer rely on 
government funds to support them and that they need to market their 
goods and services. Â   
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The dangers are real. In November 1993, a Russian naval officer walked 
out of a shipyard in Murmansk with about 10 pounds of highly enriched 
uranium and went looking for a buyer while it was stored in his garage. 
In August 1994, almost a pound of weapons-useable plutonium was seized 
by German police in Munich. It is not just in Russia: the reported theft 
of approximately 130 barrels of enriched uranium waste from storage 
in South Africa was reported in the press in August 1994.Â   
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Through the Soviet Threat Reduction program of 1991 - named the Nunn-Lugar 
program after the senators who co-sponsored the bill - the United 
States provides about $400 million a year to help secure poorly guarded 
Russian nuclear facilities and to help destroy weapons earmarked for 
destruction under current arms control negotiations. But this accounts 
for only one-sixth of one percent of the US defence budget. The Nunn-Lugar 
program is a solid investment, producing lasting security dividends. 
It could easily be doubled or tripled. And if the build-down is to continue, 
it will have to be.Â   
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Some people willingly concede the dangers that nuclear material could 
be diverted to rogue states or terrorists. But that just proves we need 
nuclear weapons, they say: in order to protect ourselves against these 
very prospects.Â   
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But the argument is circular. It is the argument that we   need  nuclear weapons because we   have  nuclear weapons. It is not an argument we think persuasive 
when applied to biological or chemical weapons.Â   
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In an outstanding article in a new collection of essays called   The Force of Reason  
to be published shortly in honour of Joseph Rotblat, a leading member 
of the Canberra Commission, Professor John Holdren of Harvard University 
says that such criminal threats ‘could well be the dominant nuclear 
threat in the next century.’ He argues that the threat is not only 
‘greatly aggravated by the continued existence of national nuclear 
arsenals, but nuclear deterrence is likely to be useless against it 
(because terrorists and other criminals may not be locatable, or if 
locatable, could not responsibly be attacked with nuclear weapons).’Â   
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The state of the Russian nuclear arsenal has other dangerous consequences. 
Thousands of Russian nuclear systems are on hair trigger alert, ready 
to launch at the United States in fifteen minutes. The deteriorating 
condition of Russian early warning systems and the erosion of military 
command and control heightens the danger of an accidental or unauthorised 
launch. It increases the incentive for the Russians to adopt a ‘use 
them or lose them’ strategy for their strategic arsenal. We reportedly 
came very close to such a situation in 1995 when a Norwegian research 
rocket was mistaken for a United States missile attack and the whole 
Russian system went on alert.Â   
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The economic collapse and the decline in conventional military capabilities 
tempts Russia to place extra weight on its nuclear forces to compensate. 
This is the reason Moscow has abandoned its long-standing declaratory 
policy of ‘No First Use’ of nuclear weapons.Â   
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Meanwhile, the strategic nuclear negotiations are stalled. The burst 
of activity from the conclusion of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty 
of 1987, through START 1 in 1991, which halved long-range missiles, 
to START 11 in January 1993, which imposed a further fifty percent cut 
in strategic nuclear forces, has run into the sand. And Russian hardliners 
are pointing to the expansion of NATO to the borders of the old Soviet 
Union as a reason for Russia to maintain its nuclear capabilities. The 
Russian Parliament has refused to ratify the START 11 treaty, which 
it believes advantages the United States. Russia cannot afford to modernise 
and replace ageing and decaying nuclear forces and it is slipping inexorably 
further behind United States numbers and capabilities. It simply cannot 
afford its vast nuclear arsenal and is seeking much larger cuts.Â   
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In the United States political pressure is growing for a National Missile 
Defence System to respond to a perceived evolving ballistic missile 
threat. This would certainly mean abrogating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic 
Missile treaty and would cause the Russians to walk away from START 
1 and 11, fearing that the United States could quickly upgrade a missile 
defence system into a shield behind which it could launch a first strike.

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In this depressing landscape - a period in arms control negotiations 
that some have called ‘the great frustration’ - the agenda for action 
set out in the Canberra Commission report remains highly relevant.

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First we need to urge the steps recommended by  the Canberra 
Commission to de-alert the nuclear arsenals - to lengthen the fuse by 
extending real launch preparation time. This means removing vital parts 
of the systems. An agreement between the Russians and the Americans 
in 1994 to de-target missiles was essentially meaningless. Original 
targets can be fed back into the computer in seconds. But de-alerting 
- in other words, standing the missiles down - will require an effective 
and intrusive inspection system.

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Second, we need to press 
speedily ahead with negotiation of the fission material cut-off treaty 
which will halt the production of fissile material (that is, weapons-grade 
plutonium and uranium) for nuclear weapons. This treaty will begin negotiations 
next January in the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, but the 
scale and scope of the negotiations are still not agreed.

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The fissile cut-off 
treaty will be a companion to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Banning 
tests constrains technological improvements. The Fission treaty will 
constrain the production of the material that goes in them.

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Third, we need to urge 
Russia and the United States to move as quickly as possible to leap-frog 
START 11 with a new and radical START 111 which rectifies the emerging 
numerical inequality in favour of the United States and gets nuclear 
numbers down so low that the other nuclear weapons states are brought 
into the negotiations.

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For my part, however, 
I do not think such measures will be enough.

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I don’t believe that 
any objective short of zero will be able to generate the political consensus 
necessary to stop an eventual break out. Even if only a handful of weapons 
are held by Washington and Moscow and Beijing, even if they are held 
in ‘strategic escrow’ under some form of international supervision 
as General Stansfield Turner and others have suggested, I find it impossible 
to imagine why a future South American government, or some future African 
leader, convinced that Africa has been abused and marginalised, will 
not understand the disproportionate strategic advantages that accrue 
to states with even crude nuclear weapons and will not ask: Why not 
us?

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And there is no defensible 
answer to that question. That is why I believe only a full commitment 
to, and an active program to secure, the elimination of nuclear weapons 
will ever be sufficient to secure our safety.

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Even so, the goal of 
elimination can’t be accomplished by the arms control route alone.

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It is also- even essentially - a debate about global power and influence 
and I believe it will only be resolved in  that context. We have 
come to see nuclear weapons as the ultimate global status symbol. Membership 
of the United Nations Security Council remains co-terminous with the 
possession of nuclear weapons. And United Nations reform, so high on 
everyone’s agenda when the Cold War ended, has faltered.

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The senior adviser to 
the Indian Prime Minister on security issues defended India’s decision 
to declare itself a nuclear state by writing that his country was ‘...assigned 
a particular place in the world order and not treated as a subject responding 
to our own interests.’ That frustration lies at the heart of India’s 
decision to test. I’m not arguing that countries should be rewarded 
for flouting international norms. But I do not think we can create an 
adequate architecture for the world without finding a place in it for 
the democratic government that speaks for the one billion people of 
India.

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More broadly, a larger 
and more sustainable role has to be found for China, India and Japan. 
And with the EU’s expansion, and the creation of the Euro, Europe 
urgently needs to address the fundamentals of its own structure to see 
how it can act more effectively beyond its own continent.

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The link between nuclear 
weapons and the broad strategic environment is particularly important 
to Australia and its region.

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In North Asia, more than any other part of the world - more, even, 
than the Middle East - a combination of historical animosities, unresolved 
relationships, territorial disputes and technologically sophisticated 
economies makes it distressingly plausible  to envisage conditions 
emerging which might induce Japan or Korea or Taiwan to seek nuclear 
weapons. The further introduction of nuclear weapons into the North 
Asian strategic equation would be catastrophic.

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A very senior Chinese 
leader once told me - decisively and with great passion - that China 
would never permit Japan to possess nuclear weapons. It would act to 
preempt such a situation arising.

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This raises again the 
urgent need for a more structured defence and security framework in 
the Asia Pacific, one which can provide transparency and reassurance 
at a time of growing uncertainty. The ASEAN Regional Forum has been 
a good first step, but it can’t carry us through pressures ahead. 
I had hoped the APEC Leaders Meeting might be able to develop as an 
umbrella on top of a regional security forum, but that hope is dimming 
as APEC membership expands and its energy diminishes. This is an issue 
of the highest priority for the region, and a program to eliminate nuclear 
weapons globally must also comprehend the more general problem of regional 
security.

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People might well say 
this is an argument about which Australians can do little. Our capacity 
to influence the world is limited.

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But Australia has shown 
it can play an active part in the global debate. We have an internationally-regarded 
body of officials working on arms control issues. They form a national 
- in fact, an international - asset whose expertise should be preserved.

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We can raise our voice. 
Both major Australian political parties are committed to the alliance 
relationship with the United States. This allows us at least the privilege 
of having our arguments heard. We should be using our voice as powerfully 
and persuasively as we can, and not just with the Administration but 
with Congress as well.

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I believe the government 
should seriously consider suggestions that have been made to reconvene 
the Canberra Commission, probably with a different membership, to re-examine 
in current circumstances its practical and realistic program for moving 
to a world without nuclear weapons. As a firm ally of the United States, 
with a high reputation in international arms control negotiations, Australia 
has a better chance than any other country to refocus international 
debate on the final goal of abolishing nuclear weapons. The government 
would have my enthusiastic support for such an initiative.

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But this is not just 
a matter for governments. Increasingly, the international agenda can 
be shaped from outside. We have seen this with the success of the international 
campaign against landmines.

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We face a long struggle 
to get rid of nuclear weapons and we might not succeed. But you can 
be absolutely sure that if the pressure is not kept on governments, 
if the issues and alternatives are not debated, if the voice of public 
opinion is not raised, then the line of least resistance will be taken.

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And that line will always 
be to let things slide - to hope that in the next hundred years some 
new, more ruthless or more able Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-II won’t 
emerge, that somehow the skills of Russian nuclear scientists now on 
the market will not be made available to some terrorist group, and that 
we will get through it all unscathed.

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I want to end this lecture 
by quoting not a politician or an anti-nuclear activist but a man from 
the heart of the nuclear establishment. General Lee Butler was the former 
head of United States Strategic Nuclear Command, and a key member of 
the Canberra Commission panel.

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Accepting the prestigious 
Henry L. Stimson award for distinguished public service last year, General 
Butler said he was dismayed that ‘even among more serious commentators, 
the lessons of fifty years at the nuclear brink can be so grievously 
misread, that the assertions and assumptions underpinning an era of 
desperate threats and risks prevail unchallenged, that a handful of 
nations cling to the impossible notion that the power of nuclear weapons 
is so immense their use can be threatened with impunity, yet their proliferation 
contained. Albert Einstein recognised this hazardous but very human 
tendency many years ago, when he warned that ‘the power of the atom 
has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift 
toward unparalleled catastrophe.”’

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I hope that is wrong. But drifting is the right word to describe what 
all of us - nuclear and non-nuclear powers alike - have been doing 
over the past few years.

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And those who think there are no risks, who believe we are sure to 
glide safely past the roc ks and shoals because we have done so 
before, should at least reflect on the history of the last issue I spoke 
of in this auditorium - the Asian economic crisis. The economic, social 
and political uncertainty we are seeing around us seemed unimaginable 
in 1997, to even the most informed and sober observers. Just so, ten 
years earlier, would the disappearance of the Soviet Union have seemed 
unimaginable.

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And however unlikely 
nuclear catastrophe may seem to us now, here in Sydney on this peaceful 
November evening, if our judgements are wrong, the consequences will 
be terrible and ineradicable.

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Our challenge - as always, 
in everything - is one of imagination.

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