Australia and the ANZUS Crisis

Joseph Pearson
Length: 12,379 words

Department of History
Faculty of Arts
The University of Melbourne
May, 2004

Acknowledgements

This thesis owes much to the input of Dr David Goodman and Dr Glenn Moore, both of whom supervised its development. Many thanks to my parents for their generous support, and Dr Wayne Geerling for his helpful advice. And thanks especially to Kelly Gillespie, who put up with me.

Introduction

A tempest across the Pacific

In the first week of February 1985, the agreement binding Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America in alliance began to unravel. New Zealand turned away a US Navy destroyer, the USS Buchanan, and Australia withdrew an offer to assist American testing of the MX Peacemaker missile. Both nations were responding to rising public consciousness of global risks generated by the nuclear arms race. The United States was at this time engaged in a 'strategic modernisation program', rebuilding its military and nuclear arsenal in order to win 'peace through strength', in the words of President Reagan. His administration viewed the displays of nuclear sensitivity by the two junior allies as a 'kick in the teeth' for the US strategic direction.1 While Australia was shortly exonerated for its capitulation on MX, New Zealand remained defiant in the face of growing US ire. The ANZUS treaty between the three nations came under increasing scrutiny-within a month, Prime Minister Bob Hawke informed the Australian public that 'virtually nothing of it remains operative.'2 A year later, the US Secretaries of State and Defense declared that while New Zealand remained a friend, it was no longer an ally of the United States.

There is little dispute that ANZUS is peculiarly Australia's treaty: this nation, the middle power in the trinity, regards itself as the true author and the chief beneficiary of the alliance. The dispute was generated and perpetuated between the two other parties to the treaty, but in an important sense the crisis was Australia's. While New Zealand and the United States dourly exchanged conflicting visions and principles, Australia wrestled with dark fears and an unnerving sense of impotence. Without distorting the central roles of the United States and New Zealand in the narrative, this thesis deliberately examines the ANZUS crisis by this parochial light. It investigates the Australian response to the drama that unfolded within the alliance that is still regarded as 'the cornerstone of Australian security policy.'3 In that window of time when the US relationship had uncertain prospects, when politicians and commentators were scurrying to pronounce 'the death of ANZUS', when if there was to be any future security agreement with the United States it would be likely be renegotiated with increased burdens and reduced value, what did the Australian public perceive as the best direction for the nation?

The tempest across the Pacific eventually blew itself out, as American concerns that New Zealand would spark a global trend faded. Much has been written about the ANZUS crisis, but almost all of it precedes the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the moment the Cold War reached its anti-climactic endgame, the spate of books and articles by political commentators on the alliance rupture suddenly subsided: their predictions outpaced by the march of events, their opinions and alternatives seemingly obsolescent.4 In the decade that followed, the drama's protagonists shuffled off the political stage and published reflections that offer new insights into the forces that fuelled the crisis.5 To date, the ANZUS crisis has only been explored in the domain of political science; this constitutes a first attempt to inspect the crisis through an historical prism.

This thesis searches for the Australian response across three areas, and is therefore divided into three chapters. The first examines the domestic political context and Australia's diplomatic activity within a wider history of the ANZUS crisis. It charts briefly the origin and development of the nuclear disarmament movement in Australia and its political influence. Almost all literature on the ANZUS rift treats the MX controversy as a separate event; this narrative weaves it chronologically into the broader New Zealand-US dispute. In doing so, it provides a renewed historical relevance to the MX controversy in Australia, as an influential and instructive episode in the ANZUS crisis.

The social origins of the crisis are explored in greater detail in the second and third chapters. The second chapter looks at the influence of public opinion on the origin and trajectory of the crisis. In New Zealand, public sentiment was the impetus for the anti-nuclear stance adopted by the government, and the reason behind its refusal to yield to US diplomatic pressure. It therefore offers a useful comparative context for Australian attitudes to ANZUS and nuclear issues. Australian opinion regarding the American alliance is examined over a period from World War II to the uneasy resolution of the crisis, and across three categories: public awareness of the treaty, public comprehension of the treaty, and public support for the treaty. Substantial complexities in Australian perceptions of the security relationship emerge from this analysis.

The public debate surrounding nuclear disarmament and ANZUS is the subject of the third chapter. It is postulated that in Australia, the nuclear disarmament debate and the argument about the American alliance remained two distinct discourses. Since modern perceptions of risk elevated nuclear issues in Australia, the disarmament debate is analysed through the lens of Ulrich Beck's 'risk society' theory. The nuclear debate operated largely at an interpersonal level, but the ANZUS debate was located almost entirely within the Australian media. An aim of this chapter is to excavate the underlying foundations of the debate, to develop a picture of Australian political and intellectual approaches to the American alliance in its moment of crisis.

Events not twenty years old sit uneasily at the overlap of history, memory and current context. The end of the Cold War, however, intrudes on this overlap: the world has changed dramatically in the years since, and the contours of risk in Western nations have shifted. The threat of a global nuclear exchange no longer has the immediacy it did in the 1980s; instead, new fears have beset Australians, different in scale and manageability, with which has come a renewed scrutiny of the American alliance. Throughout, this thesis endeavours to portray the emotions and dilemmas of a period when the American alliance both exacerbated Australian nuclear anxieties and undergirded the nation's security policy.

Chapter 1 Australia and the ANZUS crisis

Nuclear madness

Patrick White stood before his bathroom mirror, a sheaf of papers in hand, imagining an audience of scientists. To the mirror he said:

I pray that we may convey to them the darkness of night which will fall upon the earth, the death of life in the oceans, the death of crops, trees and herds, and the immediate or painful lingering death which will come to most of us...

That our fate is not entirely in their hands is due to the fact that people of the world are stirring, finding a voice.6

A few years earlier, Dr Helen Caldicott had interrupted an apocalyptic narrative to wonder:

Is it not remarkable how we manage to live our lives in apparent normality, while, at every moment, human civilisation and the existence of all forms of life on the planet are threatened with sudden annihilation?

'It is imperative,' she argued, 'that a mass movement of concerned citizens around the globe take up this cause.'7

Caldicott's book, Nuclear Madness: What you can do!, became an international bestseller in 1978. Of all White's speeches, his nervous address to the 1983 Symposium on Nuclear Disarmament had the largest impact.8 Both Australians were darkly prefiguring a modern Armageddon, wrought by full-scale nuclear war. Both offered the same escape route. Their refrain, an unlikely pairing of bleak foreboding and shared hope, echoed around the world in the early years of the 1980s. Citizens of Western nations began voicing their fears of nuclear catastrophe en masse, petitioning their leaders to 'Ban the Bomb'. A broad global 'peace movement' emerged almost spontaneously, welling up from grassroots activism.9 Acknowledging their nation's comparative decline in international power since the 1940s, Americans began to feel that their nuclear arsenal was no longer protective but endangering. In 1980 Randall Forsberg issued her 'Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race', a short manifesto that generated a citizens' campaign demanding a 'bilateral nuclear freeze'.10 The American freeze movement petitioned representatives to pursue the unconditional cessation of nuclear arms development by all nuclear powers. By February 1983, the campaign had encouraged over four hundred city councils and nine state legislatures to adopt freeze resolutions.11 Across the Atlantic, NATO plans in 1982 to array intermediate-range nuclear forces in Western Europe generated massive anti-nuclear rallies.12 In Britain, protestors called for the closure of the US Air Force base at Greenham Common, where nuclear weapons were stationed.13 In Glasgow and elsewhere, activists staged 'die-ins' to evoke the horror of a nuclear calamity; all over the world anti-nuclear rallies were punctuated with grotesque and morbid imagery.14 Yet the participants were energised by the unshakable faith that grassroots pressure could prevail over international realpolitik.

Worldwide nuclear anxiety was heightened by new scientific theories about the effects of a significant nuclear exchange. A nuclear war, these theories contended, would so badly damage the global environment that for any survivors, 'life would be impossible'.15 The sun would be blocked out by soot, smoke and dust for months, casting an unbroken pall over the planet. Surface water would freeze and crops would fail in this 'nuclear winter'.16 The inconclusive disarmament diplomacy between the nuclear powers generated frustration, and focussed public attention on the capabilities and effects of modern weapons technology. As the talks dragged on, new superpower tensions developed over the potential for certain armaments to be used in 'first-strike' attacks-a strategy to overcome 'mutually assured destruction' by targeting the adversary's arsenal before it could respond, leaving the target power decimated and the aggressor theoretically barely scarred. Hawkish official proclamations that it was possible to 'prevail' in a nuclear war further increased public agitation.17

Australia and New Zealand-countries that might once have been considered sanctuaries in the event of a Northern Hemisphere nuclear exchange-were profoundly affected by the revelations of the global reach of a nuclear catastrophe. Both nations, but particularly New Zealand, felt uncomfortably proximate to the sites of nuclear testing by the United States and later France in the South Pacific. Concerns that fallout from the testing could carry on sea winds to populated areas became a public issue.18 Vociferous protests and maritime union bans met US naval vessels docking in both countries.19 In Australia, the anti-nuclear movement had two further targets: uranium mining and export, and the US bases on Australian territory. Australian campaigners regarded it as unconscionable that a nation committed to nuclear arms reduction might, through the export of its raw materials, be partly responsible for their steady proliferation.20 The US bases in Australia were viewed as part of a strategic framework for a first-strike attack on the USSR, and Australian activists particularly emphasised the bases' high target priority if the Soviets acted to pre-empt such an attack.21

The Australian peace movement developed a broad base of public support and involvement. Participation in the Palm Sunday peace rallies grew dramatically, from around 100,000 marchers nationally in 1982 to 400,000 by 1985.22 For the 1984 Federal election, the loosely allied anti-nuclear groups coalesced behind the Nuclear Disarmament Party: the first political party in the world 'to fight a national election with a solely anti-nuclear platform.'23 Its charter listed three objectives: the closure of foreign bases in Australia; the prohibition of nuclear weapons on Australian territory, waters and airspace; and the termination of all uranium mining and export.24 The party won a Senate seat and narrowly failed to win two others.

Of the major parties, the growth of anti-nuclear sentiment was of most significance to the ALP. The subject of uranium mining and export was the catalyst for an acrimonious party conference in 1982, and remained a point of friction within the party after it won government the following year.25 Nuclear ship visits became the site of a particularly significant rift. The Cain Labor Government declared Victoria a 'nuclear free zone' in 1982, with an implicit ban on nuclear ship visits.26 That development encouraged the Federal leader of the ALP, Bill Hayden, to initiate a party policy banning nuclear vessels from all Australian ports.27 Within days members of the party had publicly qualified the policy to the extent of repudiating it, after determining that some seats might be lost at the next election.28 A fortnight later, the US Deputy Secretary of State sternly chastised Hayden for his attempt to prohibit nuclear ship visits.29 Hayden's resentment over this exchange lingered into government. Graham Richardson subsequently assessed the relationship between Hayden and the US State Department: 'They had Bill on the run from '82. They had Bill softened up-in the meantime he's been rolled by Hawke-he was ripe for the picking. He was a good punching bag, so they hoed into him.'30

In part due to the damage this episode inflicted on Hayden's leadership, Bob Hawke took over as Opposition Leader in February 1983. He became Prime Minister a month later. Hawke had little sympathy for anti-nuclear interests where they collided with the American alliance.31 He was strongly pro-American, and his foreign policy pronouncements were often surprisingly conservative. On his first visit to Washington DC as Prime Minister, he stated 'you can only deal with the Soviet Union from a position initially of strength'-an assertion with echoes of President Reagan's motto: 'peace through strength'.32 He dismissed propositions of Australian non-alignment, which remained a pervasive ideal among his party's Left faction, declaring that 'We are neutral neither in thought nor action.'33

Hayden also made a trip to the United States capital shortly after the election, in the capacity of Foreign Affairs minister. As the two Australians most directly responsible for the management of the American alliance, Hawke and Hayden established an uneasy working dynamic. Hayden acquiesced to his leader's firm support for the alliance, and devoted himself to refining the American relationship. He attended the 1983 ANZUS Council in Washington with the objective of getting 'a clearer focus to ANZUS, where it's invoked, the range and cover in general terms.'34 Earlier Australian governments had regarded the vagueness of the treaty's terms as a virtue-compensating for the lack of a formal guarantee by, theoretically, implying one. In Hayden's opinion, this led to a culture of servility, as Australian governments brought unrelated activities under the ambit of ANZUS, in the hope that it would obligate the US to reciprocate fully in moments of peril.35 Hayden sought to exchange this 'maximalist' interpretation of ANZUS, with its guaranteed costs and uncertain benefits, for a 'minimalist' version that gave the treaty a regional focus and asked no more of it than the obvious meanings of its terms.36 He regarded this a necessary response to the US reorientation in alliance management, precipitated by 'the 1969 Guam statement by President Nixon, which seemed to declare that countries of the region would be expected to look after their own security problems short of those conflicts involving nuclear weapons.'37 Hayden largely obtained this clarification at the ANZUS Council; the principles of the Guam Doctrine were reaffirmed, and it was acknowledged that the allies could choose from 'a range of responses' in the event of an attack on one of them.38

Crisis upon crisis39

The New Zealanders, whose representatives had vehemently protested any redefinition of the alliance at the 1983 ANZUS Council, were soon to make Hayden's initiative seem trivial. David Lange's Labour Party emerged victorious from the 1984 New Zealand general election, after nine years in Opposition. The party had entered the election with a pledge to 'make New Zealand and its waters nuclear free', including the prohibition of any nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed craft entering New Zealand.40

The policy generated grave concerns with the United States administration for two reasons. First, it was the firm policy of the US government to 'neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons or components on board any ship, station or aircraft'. To do so would, theoretically, alter its target priority in the strategies of adversaries.41 Secondly, and far more significantly in the context of rising global nuclear sensitivities, the United States administration was concerned that New Zealand's 'nuclear allergy' would prove contagious.42 Key US allies, including Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia, were regarded as potentially susceptible to this contagion.43 Thus, in the opinion of the Reagan administration, New Zealand would have to be quarantined if its symptoms persisted. For the time being, however, the administration chose to remain patient in the hopes of a policy reversal from the new Government. In Wellington a few days after Lange's victory, US Secretary of State George Shultz announced that the US would not request port access for Navy warships for six to twelve months-'a comfortable amount of time' for the government to modify its anti-nuclear pledge and avoid an international dispute.44

At a private meeting in New York two months later, Lange told Shultz that the delay in sending ships would not bring about a change of policy, and that the 'issue should be put to the test'. Shultz agreed. Lange also promised he would attempt to convince his party not to 'make the exclusion of nuclear-powered vessels a pillar of our foreign policy.'45 This undertaking filtered down through the State Department as a weakening of New Zealand's anti-nuclear position, perhaps resulting from a misconception about the policy-making structure of Lange's Labour Party. The ANZUS crisis may have been inevitable from the moment Lange took power in New Zealand, but the shape it took is perhaps rooted in this misunderstanding. Lange was aware that the US would not substantially change its position; he was more concerned to get beyond the dispute and work to strengthen and broaden what was left of ANZUS afterwards. But the US administration fundamentally believed that given time and enough diplomatic pressure, the New Zealand government would dilute its policy to the standard template of 'nuclear free zones'-a stated commitment to principles of regional and global disarmament, without alliance-endangering prohibitions.46

Australia ventured inadvertently into the spotlight just as tensions between the allies were reaching breaking point. The lead article for the 1 February edition of The National Times was headlined 'Sydney Role in US Missile Tests.' It quoted American sources asserting that the United States would test its MX Peacemaker missile in the South Pacific or Tasman Sea. The MX was an intercontinental ballistic missile with ten independently targetable warheads and a 99 per cent 'kill probability' against Soviet missile silos-a profile arguably characteristic of first-strike armaments. Its extended reach required tests over a longer distance than the usual US testing range, and the Tasman Sea region had been nominated for several years. The Fraser Government had agreed to the provision of facilities in Sydney to monitor the tests, and, according to the article, US officials expected Hawke's Government to continue that agreement.47

In fact, the situation was further advanced than the article described, and as details emerged in the days following it, the press christened the developing controversy 'the MX missile crisis'. On his tour of Washington DC in 1983, Hawke had been prompted by US officials to state his position on Fraser's agreement. He requested an alteration-that the splashdown be situated beyond Australia's exclusive economic zone-but otherwise indicated his consent.48 He did so without ministerial consultation; Hayden did not hear of the matter until the ANZUS Council in the capital a month later. Both Hayden, and later the Defence Minister Kim Beazley, expressed concerns about the decision's consistency with party policy and recommended that Hawke submit it to Cabinet review. But that review was delayed until late January 1985, when Hawke was made aware that journalists were investigating the story. The Cabinet, of necessity, affirmed the decision.49

The February article was impeccably timed.50 Hawke left for Washington by way of Brussels on the day the story broke. Representatives of the ALP Left expressed outrage at the revelations, and six leading members of that faction released a statement condemning the decision.51 The faction's convenor, Gerry Hand, wrote in the press of his 'shock and bewilderment'.52 By the time Hawke reached Brussels on 3 February, the Left was in open revolt, and the Centre Left showed similar tendencies.53 Having learned that if the matter was put to ballot at a special party conference he might conceivably lose, Hawke resolved to withdraw the offer of support for the MX tests. He held a press conference on 4 February in which he carefully weakened his commitment to the agreement, saying it would be a matter for discussion in Washington. In fact he did not have to discuss it, at least on his account: 'My friend George Shultz visited me on my arrival in Washington to tell me that Australia's help in monitoring the MX splashdown was no longer required.'54 Shultz and the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, had apparently decided that any US pressure would endanger the alliance and the Australian bases. Hawke and Shultz issued a joint statement on 6 February to announce the withdrawal of the US request.55

The MX dispute erupted, raged and subsided inside a week, leaving in its wake many rankled letters to the editor and a momentary dip in Hawke's approval rating.56 Nevertheless, for its possible implications, it was dubbed a 'crisis' by the media. The ALP Left flexed a muscle that many at the time thought had atrophied, and intriguingly, the United States administration acquiesced to the direction of an ephemeral Australian political debate. These reactions were largely determined by the proximity of the dispute between New Zealand and the US. The US responded to Hawke's predicament as it did because the alliance appeared fundamentally endangered. The Left did not pursue the victory it won over MX because public consternation about the sudden fragility of the alliance may have engendered a backlash. Both sides chose to exercise caution in the volatile political environment of the wider ANZUS crisis.

Tensions had escalated between the US and New Zealand in the first month of 1985. Lange was incensed by two leaks from US sources to the Australian media. The first of these was information regarding the vessel to be sent to New Zealand. It would be the USS Buchanan, a conventionally-powered Charles F. Adams class destroyer capable of launching nuclear depth charges.57 Whether it would be carrying nuclear charges was not revealed. The second leak, in late January, was a State Department announcement that the ship request was intended to put the New Zealand policy under pressure. Lange wrote, 'I don't know what made the State Department come over macho in the Sydney Morning Herald, but it did, and it sank the Buchanan with it.'58 In an effort to stave off the inevitable, the New Zealand government asked the United States to change its request-to send an Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate in place of the Buchanan. On 3 February, the US rejected this proposal, and resubmitted the original request. A day later, New Zealand announced it would refuse the Buchanan permission to enter its ports.

The reaction in the United States was instantaneous. The New Zealand refusal made headlines in the major papers for several weeks. Infographics about this small, wayward nation adorned long articles, and The New York Times ran a biographical profile of David Lange.59 Loud condemnations were issued by US officials. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger foreboded, 'At the moment, they are following a course that can only be of great harm to themselves.'60 A State Department spokesperson summed up the reaction of the administration, saying 'There are many in this Government who feel we have been diddled by the New Zealanders for seven months and we ought to do something in retaliation.'61

The immediate retaliation was the cancellation of the ANZUS 'Sea Eagle' joint naval exercises, in which the Buchanan was to have been a participant.62 The US House Foreign Affairs Asian Subcommittee, headed by Representative Stephen Solarz, called for hearings on the ANZUS treaty.63 Senator William Cohen introduced a resolution to Congress calling for a cessation of American special trade and security benefits to New Zealand. The State Department acknowledged it was examining economic sanctions as a means of forcing a change in New Zealand's policy. Economic reprisals were eventually rejected, but 'certain categories of military intelligence' would no longer be available to New Zealand, and the administration would 'not argue New Zealand's case with fervour' when Congress examined special trade preferences in vital New Zealand export markets.64

In Australia, in the midst of the MX crisis, the New Zealand refusal was received with alarm. The confluence of the two crises appeared to signal the end of ANZUS, the core of Australia's defence strategies. On 4 March, Hawke implied as much, stating that 'ANZUS is now a treaty in name only'. The United States and Australia issued a joint statement declaring future meetings of the ANZUS Council indefinitely postponed.65 Australia officially sought the middle ground, acting as a mediator between its two allies, though Hawke had already rebuked Lange in a private letter where he stated that 'We could not accept as a permanent arrangement that the ANZUS alliance had a different meaning, and entailed different obligations, for different members.'66

New Zealand remained resolute. It was proposed that the anti-nuclear policy be enshrined in an act of Parliament. Four months after the crisis erupted, the United States announced that it would sever all military ties with New Zealand if such a bill were put to Parliament, and floated the possibility of replacing ANZUS with a US-Australian bilateral treaty. However, when in early December the Lange Government introduced the bill, no action was taken by the United States administration beyond verbal excoriation.67 In April 1986, Bob Hawke returned to Washington, where he discussed with President Reagan the future of the alliance. The two leaders determined that their countries would exchange letters reaffirming the principles outlined in the treaty, to respond together in the event of an attack on either nation. This exchange occurred in San Francisco four months later, at the inaugural AUSMIN consultations between ministers of the two nations.68 There, Shultz and Weinberger delivered the announcement that signalled the formal end of the ANZUS crisis. The United States was officially suspending its military obligations to New Zealand under ANZUS.69 That country, they declared, was 'a friend, but not an ally.'70

Murky waters

When the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Act passed into law in June 1987, it only muddied what were already murky waters. Since the ANZUS crisis, there has been substantial reluctance to officially define the status of the treaty, with both Australia and the US preferring to offer effusive descriptions of their friendship's vitality. The end of the Cold War altered strategic priorities, and for more than a decade, official emphasis shifted away from formal alliance, towards more adaptable 'security relationship' formulations.

In the diplomatic account of the crisis, Australia's role is pushed into the background. It simply worked quietly to preserve bilateral goodwill with both ANZUS partners. Australia's role even further disappears if the MX crisis is treated as a separate event, as many contemporary and later accounts chose to portray it. The narrative above reflects the widespread sense at the time that the two crises were fundamentally the same event. Placing the crises in chronological juxtaposition also illuminates the American response to them: facing two challenges to its strategic direction, it counted its assets and chose to forgive one, and punish the other. This might have crucially informed Australia of its bargaining power within the relationship, but, nervously watching the fate of New Zealand, it was more concerned to protect existing privileges. The lesson that the Australian Government took from the MX controversy was how near it came to generating an even greater crisis, casting its entire defence strategy in doubt. MX chastened Australia, and encouraged it to adopt a policy of non-interference in the dispute, albeit with regular attempts at mediation.

This chapter began by briefly charting the development of the social pressures that gave rise to the ANZUS crisis. The MX crisis demonstrated that the social sentiment that led to New Zealand's anti-nuclear position existed in Australia too. Without an understanding of the anti-nuclear groundswell, it is difficult to make sense of the two disputes. But these pressures are shadowy and ill-defined within the empirical account, and it is necessary to turn to other modes of analysis to examine them.

Chapter 2 Attitudes to ANZUS

Beyond the narrative

In his memoirs, Bill Hayden described his philosophy on foreign policy management:

National or public opinions are well and good, but there are limits to their efficacy beyond our borders. The practical options available, the degree of acceptability of outcomes and due concern for ... moral values, create a bedrock on which those charged with the responsibility of making policy and decisions must stand.71

Hayden was articulating a realist perspective on international relations. Such a position divests social or cultural phenomena of direct relevance to the international stage.72 But as Robert Dean notes, 'the power relationships that produce "autonomous agency" in leaders are inevitably a part of larger cultural configurations.'73 In some instances, as with Hayden-whose stifled sympathies for the peace movement often put him in agonising dilemmas-these arrangements can be complex. In other cases the social sources of foreign policy are clearly apparent. This was exemplified by Hawke, whose pro-American sentiments were openly expressed, and who at one point during the crisis stressed that 'his commitments to port entry and the bases were based mainly on his reading of Australian public opinion'.74

It was a substantial shift in public opinion-across the Tasman-that created the ANZUS crisis. There were geopolitical reasons why New Zealand could take the stance it did, even at the risk of jeopardising the alliance that underpinned its security-among them: being remote from any threat, without a history of invasion, and without a vital role in the global strategic nuclear balance. But even in concert these reasons do not adequately explain why New Zealand embarked on its maverick course, nor why it remained resolute in the face of considerable international pressure to yield.75 Its isolation and comparative geopolitical irrelevance were essential preconditions, but the spark, the impetus towards nuclear prohibition even at the cost of a substantially altered security agreement, derived from a reorganisation of priorities in the public mind. This chapter will focus on the complex role of Australian public opinion in the dispute, but it is useful to briefly review the operation of public opinion in the country initially responsible for the crisis.

New Zealand public opinion

David Lange begins his chronicle of the crisis, Nuclear Free, with a vision of the spectacular and chilling aurora in the Auckland night sky, produced by a United States bomb test over Johnston Island in 1962. He writes of his adolescent resolution:

Otahuhu was no place for a nuclear aurora and its intrusion shattered my complacency... There would be no lucky survivors and no shelters deep enough if the world went mad. I was struck by the conviction that the planet's future depended on our eliminating any possibility of nuclear war.76

The proximity of US and French nuclear testing sites in the South Pacific operated to politicise New Zealanders on nuclear issues. New Zealand has been described as 'a country that appears to flourish on protest movements', and the 1970s were indeed marked by increasing protests on nuclear questions.77 These protests sometimes had governmental sanction. When the French tested a five-kiloton bomb on Mururoa Atoll in 1973, a Labour Government Minister was on board a Navy frigate sent within twenty miles of the test zone, in order to focus international attention on the issue of nuclear testing in the South Pacific.78 Nuclear ships also provoked protest; in fact, nuclear-powered US Navy vessels were prohibited entry into New Zealand from 1969, because the US would not commit to providing compensation in the event of a mishap involving the nuclear engines. The ban was lifted in 1976 after the US accepted the compensation principle. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this precedent is that the ban was never tested: the US did not want to risk creating unwanted frictions with its ally.79 The USS Longbeach, a nuclear-powered vessel visiting New Zealand shortly after the ban was lifted, was received by a large and vociferous protest.80

Broadly speaking, New Zealand opinion polls on ANZUS were uncomplicated. Surveys of threat perception revealed a predictable absence of anxiety.81 Consequently, sentiment on defence requirements was muted.82 No foreign military installations problematised questions of alliance management. Polls on the ANZUS crisis in New Zealand were reducible to two spheres: support for the alliance, and perspectives on nuclear issues.

Nuclear testing, the original source of New Zealand's nuclear awareness, was unpopular-a 1971 survey found 82 per cent of respondents opposed to the French resumption of testing in the South Pacific. By 1986, antipathy toward any country using overseas territories for nuclear testing had risen to 89 per cent.83 The nuclear ships issue was arguably distorted by the prohibition on nuclear-fuelled ships in the early 1970s. In 1978, only a slender majority of New Zealanders supported visits by nuclear-fuelled ships, compared to almost two-thirds in favour of nuclear-armed ship visits. Four years later, attitudes to nuclear propulsion were unchanged, but support for nuclear-armed ship visits had dropped to 46 per cent. The election year of 1984, when nuclear issues dominated the media, did not produce any alteration in the polls regarding nuclear-powered ships, but one pollster found just 23 per cent in favour of nuclear-armed ship visits.84

Against this background, attitudes to ANZUS become the key to deciphering the New Zealand public's role in the crisis. In 1978, three in five New Zealanders believed their government should strengthen or maintain its level of participation in the alliance. By Lange's election year, two-thirds of the populace favoured the retention of ANZUS military ties. Shortly after the crisis erupted in 1985, this support rose to 71 per cent, and a subsequent survey in 1986 produced identical results.85 These clear and increasing majorities indicate that the ANZUS crisis should have caused substantial difficulties for the Lange Government. But three days after the crisis began, a poll found that 73 per cent of New Zealanders approved of the government's decision to turn away the Buchanan. Five weeks later, after the United States had made its anger plain, approval of the government's stance actually climbed several percentiles.86 Whereas for the US administration the ANZUS alliance without ship visits was a contradiction, for New Zealanders it clearly was not. 42 per cent in 1986 wanted their country to remain within ANZUS, but separated from all nuclear aspects. ANZUS with full nuclear involvement had the support of 23 per cent of the population, and just 13 per cent preferred to sever the alliance in favour of 'friendly relations' with the treaty partners.87 Lange and his cabinet had orchestrated a coup, convincing the electorate-despite vehement US rhetoric-that a non-nuclear ANZUS was viable.

Australian public opinion

By the 1980s, Australian foreign policy could be divided into three spheres of descending priority: maintenance of national security, a focus on building beneficial trade links, and a burgeoning leadership role in the region. Only the first and critical sphere was a truly contested space between the government and the public. Eight polls surveying Australian threat perception, from the first in the 1960s up to the point of the ANZUS crisis, consistently showed that half the respondents believed Australia's security was threatened in the short term.88 This high degree of anxiety necessarily operated to emphasise the security obligation for Australian governments. The perceived indefensibility of Australia-as a large continent only sparsely populated-provided the direction of security policy in the form of an imperative: build alliances. To which was added the rider, 'with the West'. The allegiance to the West, as a fundamental tenet of Australian defence philosophy, was the province of the public as the minutiae of security policy was the domain of government. In 1945, one of the earliest opinion polls on foreign policy asked respondents whether Australia ought to 'join with Britain and other Dominions in a common foreign policy' or 'decide for herself how she will deal with foreign countries.' Two thirds of Australians preferred the former option, to cede foreign policy to the British Commonwealth.89 Despite this, the Government of the day embarked on a national foreign policy, and the question did not recur in any subsequent poll.

By the 1980s, a two-thirds majority on a foreign policy issue would not have been so lightly dismissed by any government. Stephen Mills, a journalist whose New Machine Men examined the advent of Australian public opinion research, asked whether the phenomenon represented 'the end of ideology-or at least of political leadership based on principles? Does action which is in the national interest now have to be popular too?'90 His book, written in 1985, stands in the midst of this transition. The number of national pollsters had increased from one to four between 1970 and 1974.91 Gough Whitlam's 1972 campaign was the first at a federal level to employ sophisticated opinion research.92 The 1980s saw measurement of popular opinion so thoroughly permeate policy formulation that ideological or principled positions were now seen as dangerous. Mills argued that 'with the complicating new demands of polls on politicians, it is harder... for politicians to remind themselves that polls are fallible and that the public opinion they measure is still malleable by political action.' For him, the clearest manifestation of this new politics of consensus was the Hawke Government, which he considered unwilling to risk anything not sanctioned by the polls.93

'Generally,' wrote a member of that Government, Bill Hayden, 'the public regarded ANZUS as the equivalent of the holy grail of national survival.' He added darkly, 'This was a delusion, but a beloved one.'94 Hayden's generalisation is significant, lending insight into the assumptions from which he arrived at decisions, and is worth testing against the measurements taken in his tenure. In order to build a nuanced picture of Australian public sentiment regarding ANZUS, this analysis will look at three categories of poll data in turn: public awareness of various aspects of the alliance, public comprehension of the features of the alliance, and the degree of public support for the alliance.

In 1982, when a Morgan Gallup poll asked Australians if they had heard of the ANZUS treaty, one in three responded that they had not. Of those who had, only 41 per cent could name the United States as a member-just a quarter of the entire sample. When the same question was asked six years later, shortly after the crisis, still only two thirds claimed to be aware of the pact. The category of support for the alliance will be addressed later, but the polls on awareness included this data, and the comparison is useful. Those who had heard of the treaty in the 1982 poll were asked-without further prompting on what ANZUS was-whether they believed it was essential to Australia's security. 64 per cent agreed, or 42 per cent of the entire sample.95 By contrast, a 1984 poll asking whether 'Australia should pull out of the ANZUS treaty with the United States' found 71 per cent against.96 The questions are not wholly comparable, but there is a strong implication that more respondents supported ANZUS than knew of it prior to the question, and that support for the treaty was higher among those who were not previously aware of it.

The greater support for ANZUS when it was explicitly defined as a security treaty with the United States implies that the acronym for the alliance did not capture people's interest. The physical symbols of the alliance, to a far greater extent than the treaty document, were the US installations at Pine Gap, North West Cape, Nurrungar and Smithfield. But when asked in 1981 to name as many of these bases as they could, only 35 per cent of Australians were able to identify the most familiar, Pine Gap. 47 per cent named none. Nevertheless, repeating the pattern with the treaty itself, 60 per cent favoured the presence of the bases.97

To what extent did the Australian public comprehend the nature of the alliance? How did they interpret it? Australian elite opinion on ANZUS tended to follow the view of Paul Dibb, expressed in the 1986 'Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities'. He argued that 'There are no guarantees in [the treaty]. It is realistic to assume that the parties will continue to approach each situation in accordance with their respective national interests.' The virtue of ANZUS did not lie in the strength of its guarantee, but in its deterrent value. If Australia could not be certain that the US would come to its rescue, then neither could any potential aggressor.98 However, this was not the prevailing interpretation among the Australian populace, according to most experts. They argued that the public recognised prior experience-Australia's rescue by America in the dark early days of the Pacific War. 'If the chips were really down the Americans would look after us,' was one colloquial expression of the view most analysts assigned to the common Australian.99

The polls are defiantly more complex. 73 per cent of Australians polled in 1984 believed that ANZUS was either 'very' or 'fairly' important for protecting Australia's security, and most nominated the former. But on the issue of trust-the ambiguity at the core of the treaty-respondents displayed scepticism. Asked to what degree they trusted the US to come to Australia's defence, just 28 per cent said 'a great deal'. 44 per cent opted for the more non-committal 'fair amount'. While the percentage for whom ANZUS was important closely equated with the percentage who had some trust in the United States (approximately 70 per cent), there was a marked difference in the number of respondents choosing the less equivocal option in each case (44 and 28 per cent). This disparity probably derives from two sources: concerns about the Australian management of the alliance, and a somewhat provincial judgement of the reliability of 'Yanks'. A further question in the 1984 survey illustrates the full complexity of the public interpretation of the treaty. When asked, 'On balance, who do you think benefits more from our alliance with the US under ANZUS-the US or Australia, or both about equally?', 20 per cent thought Australia benefited most, and 34 per cent said 'both equally'. A plurality, 35 per cent, believed that the United States was the chief beneficiary of the alliance.100

Support for the basic principle of an alliance with the United States is quite apparent; it was essentially unanimous. Three times over twelve years, Don Aitken asked Australians whether they thought 'Australia's links with the United States should be very close, fairly close, or not very close?' In each case, support for at least 'fairly close' links was at approximately 90 per cent. Though Aitken stressed that those most supportive of the alliance declined by eight per cent over the period, the remarkable finding of his polling is the constancy of at least moderate support, particularly in the context of the Vietnam War.101 However, his question, and others that assess the support for ANZUS in isolation, tend to evoke an ideal relationship of common purpose, obscuring the practical problems of maintaining alignment with another nation, which inevitably entails a weighting of costs and benefits.

A clearer indicator of Australian support for ANZUS is one that discards the superficially cost-less formulation of 'close links', and measures along the threshold of dividing lines-where ANZUS is presented as one among a set of exclusive options, with comparable costs and benefits. The importance of such an analysis was demonstrated at the dawn of ANZUS. In 1951, as negotiations began in earnest on a 'Pacific Pact', support for the idea of a treaty with the United States was at 87 per cent; approximately the same figure Aitken found continuing into the 1980s. But when 'America's agreeing to help us if attacked' was presented as quid pro quo for a peace treaty with Japan that would permit it to remilitarise, the survey found only a bare plurality of Australians believed it was adequate compensation. This was despite the question interpreting ANZUS as a guarantee of military assistance in the event of attack.102 The same process, of threshold propositions recontextualising support for the alliance, was visible in New Zealand during the ANZUS crisis, where support for the retention of ANZUS membership remained in the 70 per cent range, but when pitted against port access for nuclear ships, led only by a slender and decreasing margin. The ANZUS crisis, for both New Zealand and Australia, was a rare moment when this 'threshold support' for the American alliance became measurable. It presented a choice between shelter under the US nuclear umbrella and compliance with all attendant conditions, or a rejection of nuclear force and ANZUS with it.

In 1982 both nations were asked whether they supported port visits by nuclear-armed US Navy vessels. In Australia, 47 per cent favoured the visits, and 44 per cent opposed them.103 The difference was actually greater in New Zealand: 49 and 41 per cent respectively. An AgePoll the same year arrived at a very different figure, likely due to the hypothetical formulation of the question. 58 per cent would have allowed US ships to visit 'even if they may be carrying nuclear weapons', and 39 per cent stipulated that no such weapons should be on board a visiting ship.104 Despite the problematic wording, this question is important because it is the only one to indicate how the ANZUS crisis affected Australian sentiment on nuclear-armed ship visits. In April 1985, two months after the crisis began, the pollster repeated the question. 65 per cent of respondents now agreed that US navy ships should have access to Australian ports; just 27 per cent disagreed.105 Polls on nuclear-powered ship visitations simply asked whether respondents approved of nuclear-fuelled ships entering Australian ports. A steady decline in approval, from 59 per cent in 1978 to 44 per cent by 1984, was partially reversed in 1985 after the dispute erupted, with 5 per cent more Australians supporting such visits.106

The MX controversy revealed a different pattern. In the week the furore raged, the media declared that refusing the US on MX would jeopardise the alliance: front pages bore headlines announcing that 'The Treaty trembles!' or 'The US prepares to dissolve ANZUS.'107 But a survey conducted within a fortnight showed that 51 per cent of Australians were against co-operation in the MX missile testing. Only 41 per cent had favoured offering Australian facilities for the testing.108

Both patterns indicate a significant degree of public dissension from what the US administration argued were the concomitant obligations of the alliance. There was a perceptible movement away from opposing ship visits after the crisis broke, as the US demonstrated the consequences across the Tasman-but the shift did not approach the levels of support for 'close ties' with America. The majority that supported the refusal to co-operate on the MX missile tests suggests the public was not necessarily convinced that anti-nuclear positions were at odds with the alliance.

Leading the leaders

There are two approaches to interpreting Australian attitudes to the American alliance in the 1980s. The first begins by recognising the pervasive sense of vulnerability in the community-half the country consistently professed fears of impending national peril. From this position, the clear desire to integrate with the Western alliance is emphasised, and specifically the desire to attach national security to the superpower that spearheaded the alliance. The details of this attachment are downplayed in favour of the philosophy underpinning it. Where the public demonstrated concerns about issues related to the American alliance, this approach stresses the constancy of support for it and interprets the public's concerns as an impractical desire to 'have its cake and eat it too.' This approach is marked by clear majorities and plain messages, and it is the one that informed the Hawke Government and its predecessors.

The second way to approach attitudes to the alliance begins with the original impression of the treaty in the public mind, as an agreement characterised by variable costs and benefits, difficult questions of trust, and sneaking suspicions. The details of the alliance are emphasised, and the consistent public approval of the relationship is offset by evidence of substantial public ignorance about it. This approach sets ANZUS against other political desires, where it did not enjoy the practical unanimity it did in isolation. Apparently contradictory public positions are not viewed as wishful thinking, but as a call for more complex solutions than simple binary oppositions.

The two approaches are not irreconcilable-in fact, something close to the truth of ANZUS lay between them-but reconciling them in a political context required leading, rather than obeying, the patterns of public opinion. The polls demonstrated that the public was prepared to entertain options on the future of Australia's security policy, so long as it accorded with certain basic tenets: remaining within the Western alliance, not weakening national security, and not extending Australia's complicity in nuclear proliferation. The Hawke Government chose to obey public opinion, favouring the first approach to interpreting it, but electoral necessity was a problematic justification for doing so. In fact, in attempting to pacify all sections of the populace, the Government probably encouraged widespread, simmering disquiet on the subject of Australia's future. The disquiet manifested in the passionate public debates about global nuclear risks and the American alliance. These debates are the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 3 Debating ANZUS

At the intersection

In Australia, the ANZUS crisis occupied the intersection of two overlapping debates. The first was the nuclear disarmament debate, which prefigured the crisis, and briefly outlasted it. In as much as the issues it raised were the locus of the crisis, it also spawned the second debate: the argument over the meaning of ANZUS itself. In New Zealand, the ANZUS question remained a battleground of the nuclear disarmament issue; it was wholly contained within the wider discussion. In Australia, by contrast, the ANZUS debate spun away from its progenitor into an orbit of its own.

Public debates have varied origins, but in post-industrial societies the perpetuation of the archetypal debate is filtered and controlled by the media. The participants at this level, experts and opinion-leaders, volunteer their opinions, but it is the debate that coaxes them out; if the issue were not in the media gaze, their opinions on it would likely remain cloistered. People not at the epicentre discuss the issue with interest because it is topical and concerns them-but again, the currency of the debate precipitates the discussion. This form of debate is top-down, and expansive. It was the form of the ANZUS debate, but not the nuclear disarmament debate.

The nuclear disarmament debate was generated by a developing consciousness of nuclear risks within individuals and among groups in society. It began with such realizations as 'the world may end tomorrow', or 'there is now a very real danger that we will not live out our lives.'109 The source of this growing concern was the unforeseeability and uncontrollability, and even the tantalising unthinkability, of the nuclear danger. As people became concerned, they sought out sources of further information not provided in the popular media-instead, usually disseminated among others similarly concerned. The form of this debate, a modern clash of risk positions, is bottom-up, and clustered. The antagonists in such a debate are erstwhile-disinterested authorities, in this instance political and military figures, who are subjected to increasing pressure to respond to the concerns of the risk-afflicted.

A competition of rationalities

The peace movement was primarily a public education campaign. Through autonomous but like-minded groups and networks, it attempted to raise public awareness about the risks of nuclear armaments via the dissemination of information. One of the more influential peace networks, the People for Nuclear Disarmament (PND), occasionally employed press releases, but devoted most of its attention to the community level-organising school visits, theatre performances, rock concerts, pamphleteering, and public lectures.110 Public lectures in particular were a regular and vital component of the peace campaign. In 1983-84, a survey of 2,900 Australians found that 19 per cent had attended a public talk on the subject of nuclear disarmament.111

A 1986 publication, How to Stop the Bomb, illustrates the educative dimension of the peace movement. It gave concerned Australians advice on raising nuclear consciousness, from how to influence various political parties and churches, to organising a petition, vigil or 'peace camp'. One helpful chapter, entitled 'How to win arguments about the bomb', listed sixteen common pro-nuclear arguments, and offered counter-arguments for each.112 The book had two persistent themes that were characteristic of the peace movement: encouraging the interpersonal getting and dispensing of knowledge about nuclear issues, and focussing on local communities. Rising nuclear consciousness brought people together in a decentralised manner, generating information-sharing clusters over small geographic areas.113 Major rallies and petitions briefly united the separate groups, but the focus of each remained on their neighbourhood community. This aspect encouraged participation and broadened the movement, and also lent it an introspective character. For the PND, the movement was as much about personal questions of anger, apathy and violence as about social education of global nuclear risks.114

Ulrich Beck encapsulates this dynamic in his thesis of 'reflexive modernity'. Reflexive modernity, the disposition of post-industrial societies, is characterised by global, barely perceptible and potentially catastrophic risk. These societies are subject to 'hazard immiseration', where those risks begin to oppress individuals within society as they grow increasing conscious of them, in a sporadic pattern of victimization.115 Beck argues that 'risk consciousness and activism are more likely to occur where the direct pressure to make a living has been relaxed or broken, that is, among the wealthier and more protected groups (and countries).'116 In Australia and New Zealand, as well as Western Europe and North America, nuclear consciousness was heightened by comparative wealth and security.

The groups afflicted by nuclear risks became conscious of them through literature or discussion. According to Beck, 'this transmission through knowledge means that those groups that tend to be afflicted are better educated and actively inform themselves.'117 Individuals are driven by an internal need for information about the hazards that lie beyond their control and seem superimposed over their envisaged fate, in the process becoming 'small, alternative experts in risks of modernization.'118 The existence of a large Australian audience for information on nuclear issues is evidenced by the number of books written for it. Of the more than 300 books reviewed in A Peace of the Action, the vast majority have an Australian focus.119 Several common elements run through these books: they broadcast a call to arms, the tone is more often educative than impassioned, scientific data is stressed, and there is a tendency toward grim prophecy.120 The scientific emphasis of the movement was ubiquitous. In The Pursuit of Happiness-a 1987 Australian feature-length drama wherein different perceptions of nuclear risks sunder a marriage-the protagonist memorizes the specifications of modern nuclear arms, so as to convince others of their dangers.121 When Government commissions investigated the nuclear industry, the large peace networks established independent inquiries running parallel to the official inquiry.122

This scientific orientation prepared the movement for a debate on the necessity of nuclear disarmament; what Beck called 'a struggle among rationality claims, some competing and some overlapping.'123 In his analysis, the alternate rationality claims are voiced by the scientific representatives of the industry responsible for the perceived risk, and government operates as a passive and reflexive arbiter. But in the case of disarmament, while science played a formative role in the construction of the nuclear risk, it was government that employed the technologies and unleashed the risk. Science played the role of mediator, with both sides of the debate relying heavily on scientific data to support their arguments.

The competition of rationalities, therefore, was waged between the nuclear-conscious groups and the government. The 1984 Federal elections, dominated in all but the final tallies by the NDP, were a watershed moment in the governmental responsiveness to nuclear concerns. It is notable that it was at the point of political challenge, rather than scientific challenge, that the anti-nuclear debate became two-sided. Of the NDP's campaign, Hayden recollected: 'I instinctively recognised that we would have to move quickly and decisively to establish our ascendancy on peace and disarmament issues.'124 His concern was that the ideals of the NDP might provoke a like-minded reaction from the Left of his own party. In response, the Hawke Government began a public information program. It appointed Richard Butler to the new position of Ambassador for Nuclear Disarmament, which had as much a focus on public relations as upon diplomatic negotiations.125 Hayden's Department of Foreign Affairs began publishing booklets for the public on Australia's role in global nuclear disarmament.126 These documents contain an undercurrent of gentle admonition: suggestions that anti-nuclear activism was inadequately informed and unrealistic in its aims. The A to Z of Australian Disarmament and Arms Control Initiatives addressed the question of the 'joint facilities' as a potential nuclear target:

Some people have expressed concern about possible risks to our security from these facilities. The Government takes the view that, because of their role in preventing nuclear war, the joint facilities directly contribute to the security that Australians enjoy every day...127

In 1986 Hayden's Department commissioned a 'Geoffrey Robertson Hypothetical' televised forum, In Pursuit of the Possible. It records a rare direct exchange of views between representatives of the government (including Hayden and Butler), and of the peace movement. The discussion ranged over various aspects of disarmament, Australia's regional security, the impact of the ANZUS crisis, and the role of the joint facilities. At one point, the academic Andrew Mack was asked to assess the aims of the anti-nuclear movement in the context of ANZUS. He noted that the movement had been successful at 'mobilising support within its natural constituency', but that in response, the majority of the population clung 'ever more tightly to its security blanket': ANZUS.128 Agreeing, Deborah Brooks from the PND identified why the movement had failed to broaden beyond its left-leaning or risk conscious 'natural constituency'. It had not come up with an 'alternative defence' strategy to ANZUS, she said, which it could 'market successfully to the populace.'129

The conflation of ANZUS

In Risk Society, Beck outlines an argument for the spontaneous development of the global grassroots movement against nuclear risks:

The threat from nuclear weapons with unimaginable destructive force does not change. The perception of it fluctuates wildly. For decades the phrase was: 'Live with the bomb.' Then once again it drove millions into the streets. Agitation and calming down can have the same cause: the unimaginability of a danger with which one must nonetheless live.130

There is an important element missing from this assessment, at least from an Australian perspective. In democratic societies, the first and vital mandate from electors to the government is the protection of the nation against external threats. The development of nuclear arsenals, and the notion of a superpower 'nuclear umbrella' under which allied nations sheltered, provided a safeguard against foreign menace. Lurking unmentioned in the background of the risk society thesis is this original risk, the threat of invasion-in a sense, the pre-modern precursor to modern risk. For Australia, a nation that has rarely been invaded but has never felt secure, an understanding of this original fear is crucial to an appraisal of the fate of the anti-nuclear movement and the challenge to ANZUS. The querying of the alliance from the modern nuclear risk position, however cautiously undertaken, was possible in the early 1980s because the perception of security threats was correspondingly diminishing, with the advent of détente and superpower arms diplomacy.

Nations with ordinarily low threat perceptions were more powerfully affected. The Scandinavian nations were, of Western Europe, the most vociferously anti-nuclear.131 New Zealand, perhaps the least threatened nation in the world, articulated the most sweeping rejection of nuclear risks. But elsewhere, passions inflamed on both sides. The principle Beck connects to modern risk society in general is even more pronounced in the case of nuclear risks: 'Precisely as the dangers increase along with political inaction, the risk society contains an inherent tendency to become a scapegoat society: suddenly it is not the hazards, but those who point them out that provoke the general uneasiness.'132 When the New Zealand anti-nuclear groundswell cast ANZUS in doubt, it unintentionally brought down upon the nascent Australian movement the wrath of opinion-leaders and the substantial body of the public who argued for the alliance imperative on strategic, cultural and economic grounds.

The ANZUS debate in Australia opened with a cameo from Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. In late January 1985, as the rift between New Zealand and the US grew inevitable, the Queensland Premier declared a trade war on New Zealand, banning the importation of New Zealand chocolate and beer. He issued a warning to Lange that 'If he goes on with this we'll start a campaign that will knock him off his perch.'133 The Age joined a chorus denouncing the Premier's move:

New Zealand's attitude to the entry of US warships is too important to be reduced to farce. It will have implications for the future of the ANZUS alliance, and the administration of that alliance is strictly a matter for national governments.134

In introducing questions of trade and the role of state governments to an issue of security policy and alliance management, the episode set the tone for the ANZUS debate.

In the week the MX controversy erupted and New Zealand rejected the USS Buchanan, the editors of The Australian received more letters than in any week of the newspaper's history.135 Anger and bitter sarcasm was the tenor of many of these dispatches:

So ANZUS is sabotaged. All across Australia bottles of vodka are being opened in celebration.136

How long will it be before all reference in the history books of our children will have been purged of the Coral Sea battle?137

Come on, be honest, in view of your anti-Australian, misplaced, boot-licking loyalties, at least rename your goddamn paper The American.138

Politicians weighed in on the media debate to articulate perspectives on ANZUS. Defence Minister Beazley dismissed the perceived equivocality of the treaty's guarantee, saying he believed it was 'a silly way to consider the ANZUS alliance.' He argued that 'day-to-day co-operation' on intelligence and defence science, access to US military equipment, joint force exercises, and the opportunity to influence US policy determined the value of the alliance for Australia.139 Deputy Opposition Leader John Howard regarded failure to accept the obligations of ANZUS tantamount to 'lining up with the Soviet Union', and condemned the peace movement as an 'anti-defence' movement.140 Malcolm Fraser declared he had 'never believed that we could secure our own peace by non-alignment. We are too much a prize.' The full complexity of conservative views on ANZUS is suggested in a longer passage, wherein Fraser established the two sources of threats to the alliance:

Those who are historically opposed to the US even though the US was responsible for preventing the invasion of Australia during the Japanese war, and those who believe that anything to do with nuclear weaponry is evil and should be avoided, even if that avoidance would leave one naked and defenceless.141

There are a number of important concerns conflated therein-apparent ingratitude for US intervention on Australia's behalf in the Pacific War, anti-Americanism and its implied pro-Communist source, the irrational evangelism of anti-nuclear protestors, the futility of non-alignment, and a vivid evocation of Australia, denuded and surrounded by predators. Fraser concludes that 'The options are ANZUS, with or without New Zealand, or nothing.'142

Politicians on the other side of the debate emphasised the remilitarisation of the US, and the dangers of nuclear weaponry. The leader of the Australian Democrats, Don Chipp, entered the alliance debate insisting that 'It is the US which has progressively and unilaterally altered the application of ANZUS to fit in with its global nuclear war-fighting strategies.'143 Gerry Hand, convenor of the ALP Left, also emphasised the risks of the US nuclear arsenal and the 'illogicality' of deterrence.144 Frank Knopfelmacher attempted to elucidate the Hawke perspective in a diaphanous, disappearing argument. In his attempt to keep ANZUS afloat, Hawke had fought with some success a 'well-organised fifth column emplaced in the ALP, the media and the universities, largely under various Liberal-National Party governments of the past.' However, the US only required Australia until alternatives to its bases there were established, 'which will not be long. After that we shall become a liability.'145 Knopfelmacher's argument, though at times indecipherable, is enlightening, for it briefly and chaotically unites the various strands of political thought that emerged during the ANZUS debate. It contains denunciations of the New Zealand stance, questions of the motives of the Australian Left and Right, and signals a deep mistrust of American alliance management.

These political perspectives illustrate that this was not a debate between proponents and critics of the alliance searching for a solution, but a debate at one remove and cast in negatives-between critics of the US and its influence on Australia, and critics of excessive idealism and ideology. There is no pattern of call and response in the arguments raised, no procession of argument and counter-argument towards workable solutions. Most importantly, the various political perspectives begin to indicate the proportions that ANZUS took in the public debate-not just a security treaty, but with tendrils linking into issues of trade, cultural ties with the US, fears and memories of invasion, anti-Communism, anti-Americanism, the role of states, the joint facilities, and the health of the Western alliance.

These characteristics carried into the wider debate. At the height of the MX controversy, The Australian warned that if 'Mr Hawke causes ANZUS to be destroyed or put in jeopardy... the real victors will be the Soviet Union and its allies and all those whose goal is the defeat of the Western democracies.'146 The paper's financial editor announced that 'a move to defend ourselves realistically would have horrendous implications for our plummeting dollar. These links are a mystery to the Left.'147 B.A. Santamaria placed the blame at the feet of the Australian intellectual establishment, whose powerful coalition of academics, think-tanks, and 'influential anti-American media outlets like the ABC'-all funded by the taxpayer-ensured that the public would receive only left-wing views on national security issues.148 Geoffrey Blainey was one of few to directly engage the claims of the other side. In his view, the nuclear arms race enabled peace. He argued, perhaps in defiance of the century's historical record, that 'When there are frightening weapons and threats of destruction are strong, you don't get outbreaks of war.'149

A similar dynamic was at work among critics of the alliance. The practical workings of the alliance were not difficult to fault: writers primarily emphasised the vagueness of the treaty's terms, the uncertainty of the defence guarantee in the context of potentially conflicting stakes in the region, the troubled history of the relationship and America's traditional lack of sympathy for Australian regional interests, and the high targetability of the US bases.150 Each of these objections orbited a central idea-that Australia's relationship with the United States 'ultimately represents a trade-off between conflicting desires for security and autonomy', and that the infringements on Australian autonomy had become more grievous than a dubious security guarantee redressed.151 But nowhere were positive alternatives sketched out in any detail. This was the same omission Deborah Brooks conceded in the 'Hypothetical', that no 'marketable' alternative to ANZUS was put to the public. In the absence of proposed alternatives, advocates of the alliance were forced to establish straw doll solutions-most commonly non-alignment or defencelessness-in order to demonstrate the futility of undermining the alliance.

Modern risks, ancient fears

The two debates progressively diverged. The nuclear disarmament debate was successful to the extent that the peace movement elicited responses from the government regarding Australian action on disarmament and arms control. The two sides ran parallel public education campaigns, with the peace movement establishing the agenda and the government articulating counter-arguments, each attempting indirectly to undermine the rationality claims of the other. When the ANZUS crisis erupted, the ensuing debate initially targeted the nuclear disarmament movement as a scapegoat, typically through imputations of pro-Communism. But the anti-nuclear voice in the ANZUS debate was barely audible-being a grassroots movement, it was mostly heard on letters pages. The alliance's critics in the media debate typically did not emphasise the arguments of the peace movement, instead focussing on the practical machinations of the alliance. Increasingly the backlash concentrated on New Zealand, and particularly the figure of Lange.

In March 1985, Claude Forell noted in The Age that the public debate had 'become almost theological in intensity and obscurity.'152 Voices loudly proclaimed and declaimed the alliance, but rarely in conversation; in the process, the shape of ANZUS in the public sphere grew manifold and intricate. Others observed that 'The Australian debate about ANZUS has over the years become increasingly a debate about national self-definition'-a realization that helps explain the rapid polarisation of the debate.153 Notions of what Australia was, and especially notions of what Australia should be, flowed into the debate. These were not malleable ideas; they often drew on ideological sources. Few of the participants in the debate were willing to revise their visions of Australia through argument. Conflicting assessments of the extent to which Australia was threatened were the bases of the various positions. Some saw peril in the periphery; others saw little immediate threat. If the debate were to unearth solutions to the puzzle of ANZUS, it would perhaps have started with rational comparisons of these assessments. Instead, the contrasting perceptions of threat underpinning the arguments went largely unchallenged. The fear of insecurity clashed with the fear of ceding autonomy at an almost primal level in the ANZUS debate-each ranging far and wide in the quest for ammunition.

Conclusion

Staring into the sun

Official Australian summaries of the ANZUS alliance written since its rupture in the 1980s have tended to gloss over its near-death experience. The uncertain status of one of its three members is rarely elaborated.154 The prevailing view is that ANZUS is alive, and though it no longer functions as a full trilateral alliance, in many ways it has never been stronger. On 14 September 2001-fifty years and a fortnight after its signing-it was invoked for the first time, following the devastating terrorist attacks in New York and Virginia.155

Given the nature of the public debate over ANZUS during the crisis, it is not surprising that an official forgetfulness developed in its wake. It allowed Australia to rebuild the relationship with its senior ally, to restore its sense of security. With the end of the Cold War, fears of global nuclear war rapidly faded, and Australia's alliance with America could only through tortuous leaps of logic be portrayed as collusion in an imminent modern Armageddon. Nevertheless, the will to forget the trials of ANZUS is unfortunate in one sense. The character of any alliance is exposed in the moments of crisis it endures. For international security agreements, forged against the threat of international crisis, performance in adversity defines them and determines their value. What the ANZUS crisis showed was that for one partner, the treaty was one piece of a global puzzle into which it had to be made to fit; for another, it was a warm friendship that would not withstand the obligations it came to impose; for the third partner, Australia, it was a fracturing mirror for conflicting national visions.

To Australia too, the crisis demonstrated the fragility of the alliance-not just under the weight of external pressures, but also along dividing lines of public prioritisation. Most of the population wanted to retain the American security relationship, but a majority also opposed lending any assistance to its ally in missile tests. A growing, impassioned section of the community began pointing out ways in which the relationship actually reduced national security in the event of war. Reviewing the complexity of public opinion and the initial trajectory of the nuclear disarmament debate in Australia-and reflecting particularly on the experience of the MX controversy-it is not unreasonable to contend that Australia may have been saved from its own more all-encompassing ANZUS crisis by the ANZUS crisis itself. The crisis that occurred constituted an inadvertent shot across the bows.

The fragility of the alliance revealed by the actual crisis was offset in Australia by the conceptual dimensions to which the alliance grew. ANZUS meant different things to each of those who examined it in the public debate, and for each of them, the things it meant were central in positive or negative ways to their vision of Australia. What arguably was conceived as a security agreement between like-minded nations had by the 1980s developed implications for sovereignty and national autonomy, trade relations, world peace, cultural memory, and political ideology. Consequently, the search for national direction at the height of the ANZUS crisis was in many ways like staring into the sun. The longer one looked, the more unseeable it became.

To comprehend the influence of the crisis on the direction Australia did ultimately take, it is worth returning to Hayden's 1983 agenda of redefining the alliance along a minimalist interpretation of the treaty's terms.156 This was the continuation of an Australian political project established in response to Nixon's Guam statement in 1969, which extended the US nuclear umbrella to the superpower's allies, but emphasized that each ally's conventional defence was their own concern. The political project to reduce the overhead on an apparently devalued treaty began in the early 1970s, and culminated in Hayden's redefinition, although the Dibb report produced in the midst of the crisis might be properly considered its last gasp.157 At an elite level, the ANZUS crisis was the Great Scare, which reversed the direction of this project, and set the relationship on a path of expansion again. It has been expanding, with intermittent lulls and in sudden surges, ever since the crisis revived the conceptual dimensions of the alliance in the national mind.

Appendix A Chronology of the ANZUS crisis

Key Figures

Kim Beazley	Australian Labor Minister for Defence, 1984-90.
Bob Hawke	Labor Prime Minister of Australia, 1983-91.
Bill Hayden	Australian Labor Opposition Leader, 1977-83. Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, 1983-89.
David Lange	Labor Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of New Zealand, 1984-89.
Ronald Reagan	President of the United States, 1981-89.
George Shultz	US Secretary of State, 1982-89.
Casper Weinberger	US Secretary of Defense, 1982-87.

A treaty: 1941-82

27 Dec 1941	Curtin announces to Australian public that 'we must look to America' for national defence.
15 Feb 1942	Fall of Singapore signals British inability to defend Australia against invasion in Pacific War.
19 Feb 1942	Japanese aircraft bomb Darwin.
Aug-Sep 1945	USA decimates Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, forcing a Japanese surrender and ending the Pacific War.
1945-1950	An ideological 'cold' war and nuclear arms race develops between USA and USSR.
25 June 1950	Korean war breaks out; UN Security Council authorises force to effect a ceasefire.
26 July 1950	Australian government announces the commitment of AIF troops to Korea as part of the UN force.
16-18 Feb 1951	John Foster Dulles arrives in Canberra and discusses a draft 'Pacific Pact' with Percy Spender and New Zealand representatives.
12 July 1951	Draft ANZUS treaty initialled by all parties in Washington.
1 Sept 1951	ANZUS treaty signed at the Presidio in San Francisco.
8 Sept 1951	Japanese Peace treaty signed at the Presidio in San Francisco.
29 April 1952	ANZUS treaty comes into force after all instruments of ratification by the three signatories are deposited in Canberra.
27 July 1953	Hostilities in Korean War end in an inconclusive stalemate. 17,164 Australians fought, 339 were killed.
9 May 1963	Australia and US sign the North West Cape treaty, providing for the establishment of a US Naval Communications Station at Exmouth, West Australia-three 'joint facilities' are established on Australian soil over this decade.
1963-1965	Second Indochina War escalates in Vietnam.
June 1965	Australia commits troops to Vietnam.
27 July 1969	Nixon delivers informal remarks at Guam, quickly known as the 'Guam Doctrine'. Promises South-East Asian nations a nuclear umbrella against Soviet attack, but asserts they must rely on themselves for conventional defence. Increasingly viewed as applicable to ANZUS.
2 Dec 1972	Whitlam Labor Government elected in Australia. Relations with Nixon administration develop some tension over Vietnam War and the joint facilities.
8 Dec 1972	Last Australian troops return home from Vietnam. 50,000 Australians fought, 501 were killed.
1975	As the Pine Gap treaty comes up for renewal, Whitlam begins to publicly question the usefulness of the joint facilities to Australia.
11 Nov 1975	Whitlam dismissed. Lingering ALP Left resentment over suspected CIA involvement.

The calm before: 1980-84

Jan 1980	Fraser Government offers US a 'home porting' facility at Cockburn Sound, West Australia, for US naval forces. After Hayden warns that ALP would overturn agreement, US decline the offer.
20 Jan 1981	President Reagan inaugurated.
23 June 1981	Hayden gives a speech to Institute of International Affairs signalling more independence within ANZUS under ALP.
11 Mar 1981	Agreement between Australia and US allowing deployments of B-52 bombers at Darwin. Prime Minister Fraser states in House of Representatives: 'The Australian Government has a firm policy that aircraft carrying nuclear weapons will not be allowed to fly over or stage through Australia without its prior knowledge and agreement.'
1982-1985	Participation in Palm Sunday rallies against nuclear proliferation increases dramatically in Australian capital cities.
11 Jun 1982	Following B-52 precedent, and the Victorian Cain government's initiation of a nuclear-free zone, Hayden announces ALP policy denying port access to nuclear ships. Quickly overruled by his party, damaging his leadership.
31 Jun 1982	US Deputy Secretary of State Walter Stoessel reprimands Hayden in Canberra for his anti-nuclear statements.
3 Feb 1983	Hawke displaces Hayden as leader of the Opposition. As consolation, Hayden takes on the Foreign Affairs role.
5 Mar 1983	ALP wins government in Australian Federal elections.
Jun-Jul 1983	Hawke and later Hayden visit Washington, reaffirming ANZUS ties and distancing previous anti-nuclear stances, but also arguing for a minimalist interpretation of the treaty's obligations.
14 Jul 1984	David Lange's Labor party elected in New Zealand on a resolute anti-nuclear platform.
16 Jul 1984	Annual ANZUS council meeting begins in Wellington, between Shultz, Hayden and representatives of New Zealand's outgoing conservative government. Shultz and Hayden both speak with the prime minister-elect.
Sep 1984	Lange visits New York, and in discussions with Shultz, agrees to try to change policy to accept nuclear-powered, though still not nuclear-armed, ship visits.
Oct 1984	Nuclear Disarmament Declaration, with 250,000 signatories, presented to Australian parliamentary leaders.
7 Nov 1984	President Reagan wins a landslide re-election, carrying all but one state.
23 Nov 1984	The National Times prints a report by a New Zealand group suggesting that MX missiles might be tested in the Tasman, and Sydney might be used for monitoring. The revelation doesn't get any attention at the time.
28 Nov 1984	Weinberger outlines his six major criteria for commitment of US forces to combat, essentially reaffirming and strengthening the Guam Doctrine.
30 Nov 1984	The day before the federal election, NSW academic Jim Falk picks up the story of MX missile testing in the South Pacific/Tasman; several Australian papers run it, but Hawke deflects the issue when questioned by the press.
1 Dec 1984	Hawke government is returned in Federal elections, with a notable showing for the Nuclear Disarmament Party (gains one Senator, narrowly misses two more Senate seats).
12 Dec 1984	'Urgent need for a comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty' resolution, drafted by Australia, passes UN General Assembly with nuclear nations abstaining. Generates some diplomatic friction between US and Australian departments.
19 Dec 1984	The Canberra Times reports leaked information that US intends to request that a Charles F. Adams class destroyer visit New Zealand in March.

The ANZUS crisis: 1985-86

10 Jan 1985	Hawke sends 'top secret' letter to Lange, calling on him to revoke New Zealand's nuclear-free port access policy.
Mid-Jan 1985	After extensive negotiations between US and NZ officials, US submits a request for the destroyer USS Buchanan to visit New Zealand in March 1985 as part of the ANZUS Sea Eagle exercises. The Buchanan is conventionally powered, but capable of carrying nuclear depth charges.
25 Jan 1985	Hawke releases details of his letter to Lange after reports of its contents were leaked to the Australian press.
27 Jan 1985	Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen impounds a shipment of New Zealand chocolates on a technicality, implicitly threatening a trade war between Queensland and New Zealand over its nuclear-free policy.
Late Jan 1985	New Zealand government requests that an Oliver Hazard Perry class guided missile frigate be sent instead of the Buchanan. The US refuses, and resubmits its original request.
1 Feb 1985	The National Times again reports on the Hawke government's agreement to allow the US use of Australian facilities in monitoring the MX missile test splashdown in the Tasman Sea. This time the issue gains traction, immediately drawing a number of angry remarks from members of the ALP left.
1 Feb 1985	Australian media reports first indications of US preparations to 'dissolve ANZUS' as a result of New Zealand's policy.
2-5 Feb 1985	Hawke, in Brussels on his way to Washington, is notified of ALP backlash against the MX missile agreement. Learning that he would probably be defeated if it came to a caucus vote, he resolves to withdraw the Australian offer.
4 Feb 1985	New Zealand turns down US request for the Buchanan to visit its ports in March.
4 Feb 1985	US cancels ANZUS Sea Eagle naval exercise scheduled for March in response to New Zealand's decision.
6 Feb 1985	Shultz and Hawke issue a joint statement in Washington saying that 'a decision has been made by the US to conduct the MX tests without the use of Australian support arrangements,' thereby defusing the MX missile crisis.
6 Feb 1985	Senator William S. Cohen, Republican of Maine, introduces a resolution to Congress calling for a cessation of American special trade and security benefits to New Zealand. Some State Department officials acknowledge they were studying the option of retaliation via economic sanctions. Later in the week, the White House rejects sanctions but says it would no longer lobby on New Zealand's behalf for trade benefits in Congress.
7 Feb 1985	US House Foreign Affairs Asian subcommittee calls for hearings on the ANZUS treaty.
8 Feb 1985	Hayden issues a clarification to the joint statement, denying that it implied an Australian endorsement of the United State's Strategic Defense Initiative and related nuclear programs.
13 Feb 1985	Minister for Defence Kim Beazley Jr commissions Paul Dibb to undertake a wide-ranging survey of Australia's defence capabilities and options.
16 Feb 1985	US cancels anti-submarine joint exercises scheduled for late February in Honolulu. Stated that entire security relationship with New Zealand was under review, and sharing of military intelligence was particularly threatened.
22 Feb 1985	The US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Paul Wolfowitz, casts doubt on the survival of ANZUS as a result of New Zealand's stance.
25 Feb 1985	Lange arrives in Washington to defend his nuclear-free policy.
1 Mar 1985	Lange wins internationally televised Oxford Union debate against Rev Jerry Falwell on the 'morality of nuclear weapons'.
4 Mar 1985	US and Australian governments agree to indefinitely postpone further meetings of the ANZUS Council. In making this announcement, Hawke declares that 'ANZUS is now a treaty in name only'.
5 Mar 1985	Anti-nuclear protesters in Sydney surround two US destroyers with small boats (including the Buchanan which visited Australia in spite of the cancellation of the Sea Eagle exercises).
6 Mar 1985	Former New Zealand Prime Minister and close colleague of Lange, Sir Wallace Rowling becomes the NZ Ambassador to the United States, to State Department opposition.
10 Apr 1985	China announces that it has obtained a guarantee that no nuclear ships will be included in a US ceremonial port call to Shanghai, apparently contrary to the 'neither confirm nor deny' policy.
10 Jul 1985	The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, at the hands of French intelligence operatives.
13-16 Jul 1985	Shultz visits Canberra for talks with Hayden and Beazley (in place of the postponed ANZUS meeting).
31 Jul 1985	Washington threatens to sever all military ties with New Zealand if a proposed anti-nuclear bill is put to New Zealand parliament, and again floats possibility of replacing ANZUS with a bilateral treaty with Australia.
19 Sep 1985	New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer visits Washington for high-level talks with Shultz and Weinberger, bringing a draft of the proposed anti-nuclear bill. The talks fail.
6 Aug 1985	South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone treaty is signed by thirteen South Pacific nations, including Australia and New Zealand. Does not preclude the passage of nuclear-equipped vessels or aircraft, however.
10 Dec 1985	New Zealand government introduces anti-nuclear legislation into Parliament. The bill does not require that the US nominate the nuclear status of visiting ships, leaving the final determination of whether ships are nuclear-free to the New Zealand Prime Minister.
24 March 1986	Paul Dibb submits his 'Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities', commonly known as the 'Dibb Report', to the Minister for Defence. It reaffirms the value of ANZUS but recommends more independence in Australian strategic thinking.
15-18 April 1986	Hawke visits Washington. Arrangements that Reagan and Hawke would exchange letters reaffirming their countries' commitment to respond together in the event of an armed attack in the Pacific against either nation. (This exchange occurs at AUSMIN meeting in August.)
11 Aug 1986	Shultz and Weinberger release a joint communiqué formally suspending the United States' military obligations to New Zealand under the ANZUS treaty.
11-13 Aug 1986	First AUSMIN meeting in San Francisco between Australian and US foreign affairs and defence officials, replacing the ANZUS Council (which had usually met annually, until the crisis).

Aftermath: 1987-89

8 Jun 1987	New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987 passes into law.
25 Apr 1989	David Lange floats the possibility that New Zealand should formally exit ANZUS-an idea that is poorly received by the media and his party, leading (on his account) to his eventual resignation.
9 Nov 1989	The Berlin Wall comes down, presaging the end of the Cold War.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Films

Ansara, Martha. 'The Pursuit of Happiness.' 90min. Australia: Jequerity Films, 1987.

Barrett, Neil, and Heather Eagleson. 'The George Report: a case for nuclear disarmament.' 60min. Australia: Environment Audio Visuals, 1982.

Host, Ian. 'In pursuit of the possible.' 87min. Australia: Film Australia, 1986.

Polls

Australian Public Opinion Polls 264-271. 'Empire Stand on Foreign Policy.' Melbourne: Australian Gallup Polls, 1945.

Australian Public Opinion Polls 788-799. 'US Pact favored; Jap treaty opposed.' Melbourne: Australian Gallup Polls, 1951.

McNair, Ian W., ed. Australian Public Opinion Polls (The Gallup Method) 1973-1987. NSW: Quadrant Research Services, 1987.

Morgan Gallup Poll Finding 538. 'Majority favor visits by nuclear ships.' Melbourne: Gallup International Research Institutes Inc., 1978.

Morgan Gallup Poll Finding 947. 'More people favor visits by N-powered warships.' Melbourne: Roy Morgan Research Centre, 1982.

Morgan Gallup Poll Finding 962. 'Russia seen as chief threat.' Melbourne: Roy Morgan Research Centre, 1982.

Morgan Gallup Poll Finding 1200. 'Indonesia and Russia seen as chief threat.' Melbourne: Roy Morgan Research Centre, 1984.

Morgan Gallup Poll Finding 1291. 'L-NP would have won election after MX missile dispute.' Melbourne: Roy Morgan Research Centre, 1985.

Newspaper articles

Aitken, Don. 'Changing patterns in support for ANZUS.' The Age, 21 February 1985, 13.

'ANZUS pact according to American self-interest.' The National Times, 8-14 February 1985, 24.

'ANZUS/MX: national outcry.' The Australian, 13 February 1985, 16.

Barker, Geoffrey. 'Autonomy traded in for little-used security.' The Age, 2 February 1985, 12.

Bello, Walden, Peter Hayes, and Lyuba Zarsky. 'Missile planners take aim at the South Pacific.' The National Times, 23-29 November 1984, 19.

'The Big Debate on ANZUS.' The Australian, 9-10 February 1985, 16.

Broadbent, David. 'N-ship holed in river manoeuvre.' The Age, 20 July 1983, 7.

Chipp, Don. 'Reneging on NZ.' The Age, 3 October 1985, 12.

'Chocolate ban no help to ANZUS.' The Age 1985, 13.

Cole-Adams, Peter. 'Hayden has awkward questions on ANZUS.' The Age, 19 July 1983, 9.

---. 'Spelling out the real meaning of ANZUS.' The Age, 21 July 1983, 13.

---. 'The untidy history of 34 years of ANZUS.' The Age, 23 March 1985, 11.

Colebatch, Tim. 'Allies seek a way to reword ANZUS.' The Age, 11 August 1986, 9.

Davidson, Kenneth. 'Our interests ignored for American alliance.' The Age, 1 March 1985, 13.

Davis, Ian. 'Diplomat gets new disarmament post.' The Age, 8 July 1983, 1.

'A defenceless Australia would never forgive Mr Hawke and the ALP.' The Australian, 6 February 1985, 1.

Forell, Claude. 'New Zealand's foolish option.' The Age, 13 March 1985, 13.

Fraser, Malcolm. 'No defence guarantees if ANZUS is dismantled.' The Age, 6 February 1985, 12.

Goshko, John M. 'US withdraws from ANZUS exercise.' Washington Post, 6 February 1985, A20.

Grattan, Michelle. 'Hawke, USSR aligned on MX: Howard.' The Age, 9 March 1985, 1.

Grattan, Michelle, Ian Davis, and Michael Richardson. 'ANZUS shelved, says Hawke.' The Age, 5 March 1985, 1.

Gray, Darren, and Annabel Crabb. 'Australian Troop Pledge.' The Age, 15 September 2001, 6.

Gwertzman, Bernard. 'Australian takes middle position in the US-New Zealand dispute.' New York Times, 8 February 1985, 10.

---. 'US canceling anti-sub exercise in its dispute with New Zealand.' New York Times, 17 February 1985, 1.

---. 'US is rebuffed on visit by ship to New Zealand.' New York Times, 5 February 1985, 1.

---. 'US Navy won't go to New Zealand.' New York Times, 17 July 1985, 1.

Halloran, Richard. 'Pentagon draws up first strategy for fighting a long nuclear war.' New York Times, 30 May 1982, 1.

Hand, Gerry. 'Why the MX missile cannot be justified.' The Age, 8 February 1985, 13.

Hawke, Bob. 'Hawke's Statement.' The Australian, 8 February 1985, 1.

'Hawke issues ultimatum to NZ on ANZUS.' The Australian, 26-27 January 1985, 1.

Hayden, Bill. 'Hayden's Statement.' The Australian, 8 February 1985, 1.

Hayward, Dai, and Andrew Kruger. 'The US prepares to dissolve ANZUS.' The Australian, 2-3 February 1985, 1.

Keegan, Des. 'MX tussle finds Government wanting.' The Australian, 7 February 1985, 13.

Kitney, Geoff. 'Ministerial moves to cool the ANZUS debate.' The National Times, 8-14 March 1985, 5, 7.

---. 'The Treaty trembles; Hawke's humiliation signals the end of an era.' The National Times, 8-14 February 1985, 1.

Knopfelmacher, Frank. 'Why Australia and NZ are different in US eyes.' The Age, 22 February 1985, 12.

''Life impossible' after N-war.' The Age, 1 November 1983, 8.

Lohr, Steve. 'Australian chief affirms alliance.' New York Times, 9 March 1985, 3.

---. 'Man in the news; New Zealand A-Arms foe: David Russell Lange.' New York Times, 17 February 1985, 7.

---. 'New Zealand on ship ban: issue of pride.' New York Times, 10 February 1985, 7.

---. 'New Zealand Premier warns US on imposing economic sanctions.' New York Times, 11 Feb 1985, 13.

Loudon, Bruce. 'US Congress to bar Australian-NZ goods.' The Australian, 19 February 1985, 1.

'Missile tests spark left-wing outrage.' The Australian, 2 February 1985, 2.

'New Zealand set to block US port call.' Washington Post, 1 February 1985, A1, A22.

'Nuclear Allergy.' Washington Post, 8 February 1985, A18.

O'Reilly, David. 'Left seeks Centre's support over MX.' The Australian, 4 February 1985, 1.

Powell, Stephen. 'First strike could bring nuclear war: scientists.' The Age, 3 January 1984, 7.

Radic, Leonard. 'Division on value of US alliance.' The Age, 30 June 1981, 4.

---. 'Little support for NZ in ANZUS dispute.' The Age, 12 April 1985.

---. 'Most support US bases.' The Age, 29 June 1981, 1, 4.

---. 'Three out of four oppose nuclear weapons: survey.' The Age, 21 June 1982, 8.

Ramsey, Alan. 'The iceberg that went unnoticed.' The National Times, 8-14 February 1985, 3.

Richardson, Michael. 'US pledges to keep Australian pact.' The Age, 12 December 1985, 8.

Samuel, Peter. 'Samuel's manual for nuclear protesters.' The Australia, 26-27 January 1985, 6.

Santamaria, B.A. 'How the left-leaning academics shot down Hawke's MX proposal.' The Australian, 19 February 1985, 9.

Simons, Margaret. 'Turnout shows peace movement has lost none of its strength.' The Age, 1 April 1985, 1.

'Sir Joh warns NZ will be 'out like a shag on a rock'.' The Australian, 30 January 1985, 1.

Smark, Peter. 'Thousands of peace marchers 'die' in nuclear protest.' The Age, 4 April 1983, 6.

Sun, Lena H. 'Antinuclear efforts among voters motivate New Zealand, Australia.' Washington Post, 7 February 1985, A35.

Toohey, Brian. 'Sydney role in US missile tests.' The National Times, 1-7 February 1985, 3.

Walsh, Maximilian. 'US bases the foreign policy issue.' The Age, 11 February 1985, 12.

Washington Post Foreign Service. 'ANZUS began in an era of pacts.' Washington Post, 7 February 1985, A1, A34.

Whitlock, Fiona. 'Arms race promotes peace, says historian.' The Age, fixme 1985, fixme.

'Words that seal the pact.' The Age, 13 August 1986, 6.

Young, Peter. 'ANZUS not binding, so why the big stick?' The Australian, 5 February 1985, 7.

Books

Caldicott, Helen. A Desparate Passion. Sydney: Random House, 1996.

---. Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do! Milton, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1978.

Carey, Helen, Paul Di Masi, Judy Rickard, and Judy Spokes, eds. A Peace of the Action: An Annotated Bibliography and Teacher Guide on Peace Education. Collingwood: Friends of the Earth, 1987.

Denborough, Michael. Australia and Nuclear War. Canberra: Croom Helm Australia, 1983.

Department of Foreign Affairs. Australia and Disarmament: steps in the right direction. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986.

---. An A to Z of Australian disarmament and arms control initiatives and activities. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Services, 1987.

---. Uranium, the Joint Facilities, Disarmament and Peace. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1984.

Dibb, Paul. Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities: Report to the Minister for Defence by Mr Paul Dibb. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986.

Falk, Jim. Taking Australia off the Map: facing the threat of nuclear war. Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1983.

Hawke, Bob. The Hawke Memoirs. Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1994.

Hayden, Bill. Hayden: An Autobiography. Australia: Angus&Robertson, 1996.

Independent Committee of Inquiry into nuclear weapons and other consequences of Australian uranium mining. Australia and the Nuclear Choice. Sydney: Total Environment Centre, 1984.

Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. Disarmament and Arms Control in the Nuclear Age. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986.

Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade. ANZUS After 45 Years: Seminar Proceedings - 11-12 August 1997. Canberra: The House of Representatives, 1997.

Lange, David. Nuclear Free: the New Zealand way. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1990.

Scott, Gavin, Geoff Holland, and Pat a Beckett. How to Stop the Bomb: An Action Handbook for Australians. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986.

Sharp, Rachel, ed. Apocalypse No: An Australian Guide to the Arms Race and the Peace Movement. Sydney: Southwood Press, 1984.

White, Patrick. 'Australians in a Nuclear War.' In Patrick White Speaks, 113-26. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.

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Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage, 1992.

Bell, Coral. Dependent Ally: a study in Australian foreign policy. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Bercovitch, Jacob, ed. ANZUS in Crisis: Alliance management in international affairs. London: Macmillan Press, 1988.

Camilleri, Joseph A. ANZUS: Australia's Predicament in the Nuclear Age. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1987.

Campbell, David. Australian Public Opinion on National Security Issues, Working Papers. Canberra: Peace Research Centre; Australian National University, 1986.

---. The Social Basis of Australian and New Zealand Security Policy. Canberra: Peace Research Centre; Australian National University, 1989.

Dean, Robert. 'Tradition, Cause and Effect, and the Cultural History of International Relations.' Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (2000): 615-22.

Fisher, Gillian. Half-Life: The NDP: peace, protest and party politics. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1995.

Goot, Murray, and Rodney Tiffen. 'Public Opinion and the Politics of the Polls.' In Australia's Vietnam, edited by Peter King. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983.

Handlin, Oscar. 'Notes on Illusion and Reality in American Foreign Policy.' Australian Journal of Politics and History (1983): 301-07.

Holdich, Roger, Vivianne Johnson, and Pamela Andre, eds. The ANZUS Treaty 1951. Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2001.

Holsti, Ole. 'Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Challenges to the Almond-Lippmann Consensus.' International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1992): 439-66.

Jackson, W. Keith, and James W. Lamare. 'The ANZUS Conflict and New Zealand Politics.' In International Crisis and Domestic Politics: Major Political Conflicts in the 1980s, edited by James W. Lamare. New York: Praegar, 1991.

Marr, David. Patrick White: A Life. Sydney: Random House, 1991.

Matthews, Trevor, and John Ravenhill. 'ANZUS, the American Alliance and External Threats: Australian Elite Attitudes.' Australian Outlook 41, no. 3 (1987): 161-72.

McMillan, Stuart. Neither Confirm nor Deny: The Nuclear Ships Dispute between New Zealand and the United States. New York: Praegar, 1987.

Mills, Stephen. The New Machine Men: Polls and persuasion in Australian politics. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1986.

Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. 5th ed. New York: Knopf, 1978.

Peterson, Christian. Ronald Reagan and Anti-Nuclear movements in the United States and Western Europe, 1981-1987. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

Phillips, Dennis. Ambivalent Allies: myth and reality in the Australian-American relationship. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1988.

Pugh, Michael. The ANZUS Crisis, Nuclear Visiting and Deterrence. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Saunders, Malcolm, and Ralph Sunny. The Australian Peace Movement: A Short History. Canberra: Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, 1986.