Is Australia up to the Aukus challenge?

One hundred miles or so south of Sydney, lies tranquil Jervis Bay. On its shores, largely reclaimed by the bush, are the abandoned foundations of a large nuclear power station. When it was built in the late 1960s, it was intended to be the first of a network supplying nuclear-generated electricity to the eastern Australian grid. More than fifty years on, this is all that remains of Australia’s only attempt to establish a civil nuclear industry, every attempt since then to revive the possibility stymied by anti-nuclear activists and politicians lacking the courage to challenge them.

Those doomed foundations symbolise the challenge to Australia to fulfil its central part of the Aukus alliance between her, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In San Diego in the US later today, Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese will join Rishi Sunak and US president Joe Biden to announce the central feature of the Aukus pact: the shape of the multi-decade joint plan to build, man and deploy Australia’s own squadron of nuclear-powered submarines.