This week we learnt that the rogue state of North Korea has the ability to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile with the range to reach northern Australia. And we know they are working to miniaturise nuclear warheads to put on top. Question: If the North Korean regime were to fire a nuclear weapon at Australia, what would stop it? Answer: Nothing.
This will come as a surprise to many Australians who trust their government to protect them and trust that the $34.6 billion in the annual defence budget will cover it. But Kim Jong-un's new capability did come a lot sooner than expected. A year ago, the US government said its best guess, based on CIA assessments, was that the North Koreans were about four years away from an intercontinental ballistic missile. This week we watched it streak across the sky on TV, three years early.
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China needs to do more: Bishop
Foreign minister Julie Bishop has ramped up the pressure on China to do more to reign in North Korea after it launched a long range missile.
The opposition spokesman on defence, Richard Marles said, reasonably enough: "We are very keen to understand from the government how an anti-ballistic missile capability is being provided, because if they have that capability we need to have that defence." He tells me he'll be seeking a briefing from the government.
Here's what he'll learn. Australia has no defence against such a weapon, senior defence officials say. "Frankly, there's never been any consideration given to it," said one.
A former defence official, now head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings said: "I know that that hasn't happened. I used to run that part of the Defence Department shop. It's been a singularly undeveloped area of government thinking."
The reason is an artifact of politics, he says. Ronald Reagan's plan for a so-called Star Wars system, derided as an expensive exercise in science fiction, gave missile defence a bad name in Australia, especially on the left of politics, and it lingered.
And North Korea just wasn't a threat. Australia has enjoyed the protection of its geography. The distance from Pyongyang to Darwin is 5800 kilometres. North Korea has just broken through that defence.
"There's been no serious thinking about ballistic missile defence, ever, and there will be now," Jennings said. "It'll be a scramble to catch up."
![Illustration: John Shakespeare](http://web.archive.org./web/20170708235959im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/v/e/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx6np2.png/1499428871831.jpg)
Certainly, the changed facts have changed the mind of Kevin Rudd. The Rudd government's Defence White Paper of 2009 explicitly opposed missile defence for Australia. Why? Because "such a system would be at odds with the maintenance of global nuclear deterrence", although the white paper did say the government would review this annually. This was a sop to the Labor left and exactly the kind of Reagan-era relic that Jennings described. According to an American expert on security strategy in the Asia-Pacific, Mike Green of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Rudd's 2009 white paper was "foot stamping by the left".
But on Friday, the former prime minister, now head of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, said: "Given North Korean developments, Australia would be well advised to begin analysing ballistic missile defence needs, available technologies and possible deployment feasibility for northern Australia."
But not so in the Turnbull government. Nothing has changed, certainly not yet, at least. It's not being considered, ministers and officials said. Wouldn't this be a good time to start thinking about it? As Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop put it this week, North Korea is a threat "directly to Australia". So shouldn't Australia be considering setting up a missile defence?
"Absolutely, the answer is yes," Green said. "The debate over missile defence in Japan is over, they're all-in. South Korea is getting there quickly", with part of a US system already deployed and the next part slowed by a political stoush over environmental effects.
"If all the other partners in the US alliance system in Asia are deploying missile defence, it just seems something Australia has to look at," said Green, who was the senior Asia policy official in George W. Bush's White House.
But are we getting ahead of ourselves? First, the UN Security Council has been meeting to consider the North Korean crisis. Second, Donald Trump said he's considering "severe things" for Pyongyang, that North Korea is "a threat, and we will confront it very strongly".
Third, Malcolm Turnbull tells us that China needs to apply its uniquely powerful pressure on North Korea to stop its rogue behaviour. Fourth, China and Russia jointly have proposed a formula for negotiations between North Korea and the US. Surely one or all of these factors will contain the crisis? If you believe that, I have a friend in Nigeria who wants to give you $1 billion.
North Korea's Kim dynasty has been relentless and unstoppable on its quest for nuclear-armed ICBMs for a quarter-century. Five times this year, the UN Security Council has held crisis meetings after North Korean missile tests. Sanctions have been ratcheted up, resolutions passed, warning issued. Nothing works. One American president after another has threatened North Korea, some have tried negotiating. Nothing works. And Trump's severe measures? As Green said: "If the threat is that the US will unilaterally take out the North Korean nukes, it's hollow, because we don't know where most of their nukes are."
And a US pre-emptive strike is assessed as likely to provoke a cataclysmic North Korean response and spill into full-scale war. The top US military officer, General Joe Dunford, has made the point in recent weeks that conflict on the Korean peninsula would be on a scale the world hasn't seen since the last Korean War, and that killed over 1 million people.
The idea that China will press North Korea hard enough to deter it is unrealistic. The Chinese Communist Party is deeply committed to North Korea as a buffer state and an ally and will not allow it to be brought to its knees to protect the US and US allies.
The proposal for negotiations, likewise, is a fantasy. The regime said this week that it's not interested in negotiating until it has recognition as a full nuclear power. The US likewise refuses to enter into any negotiations unconditionally.
A growing number of US experts believe the most likely outcome will be that the world will tolerate the intolerable and the Kim dynasty will end up as the world's newest nuclear power.
"I recall the debate in 1964 when 'that madman Mao' was getting nukes," said former US diplomat Bob Manning of the Atlantic Council. "Unacceptable. Intolerable. Must not happen. We have lived with China's nukes for 50 years." The same pattern has occurred before, most recently with Pakistan.
So countries within North Korean range need to start thinking about missile defence. But is Australia even a possible target? The Pyongyang government says so. In April, it said that if Australia "remains a shock brigade of the US master, this will be a suicidal act of coming within the range of the nuclear strike of the strategic force of the DPRK".
"Australia is not the top of their target list," Green said. That honour is reserved for the US, of course. But the ANZUS Treaty was forged at the height of the Korean War. "North Korea views the entire US alliance system including the US and all its allies as a threat and target."
And Jennings recalls his undergraduate studies at the University of Tasmania in the early 1980s where "we used to play with the idea of a Soviet nuclear strike on Hobart as a way the Soviets could send a signal to the Americans â 'look how serious we are' â but without it being serious enough that anyone needs to retaliate."
The idea of Darwin or Cairns or Townsville, perhaps, as an intercontinental demonstration site for North Korean nukes? "That idea does exist in theory," Jennings said.
Marles will find out, when he gets his briefing, that the Defence Department doesn't have an answer for him at the moment.
Officials will explain to him that the system the South Koreans are deploying, the THAAD system, will only protect a specific area, such as a city. And that it's unlikely to be effective against an ICBM. "The further an ICBM flies, the faster it goes," a defence official said. "When it gets to over 5500 kilometres, to Australia, it's going as fast as Mach 22" or 22 times the speed of sound.
Japan's Aegis system will defend against shorter-range missiles but have limited value for Australia, the department will tell Marles. And while the US has its own continental system, the GMD, to intercept incoming ICBMs, that system needs a vastly expensive infrastructure and is pretty hit-and-miss in any case.
What defence might not want to volunteer is that the most effective missile defence system is a layered one, using two or more different systems. It is certainly not cheap.
Jennings reflects the defence department consensus when he says that, for Australia, the risk is too small and the cost too great. A THAAD system, for instance, like the one to protect Seoul, would have to be set for each city at risk, at a cost of hundreds of million for each. "If you set one up for Darwin, what about Catherine, or what about the air force base at Tindall, or what about Gove?"
This may be a rational response for a defence planner but, when the voters and taxpayers of northern Australia start to ask why they have no protection against North Korean missiles, the government might need to find a better answer.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.