Chris

Indeed.

However it’s important not to get hung up on the who said what and who’s right or wrong in this case - this really isn’t a story of a supplier/customer relationship breakdown. There has been political pressure in Australia for its navy to access nuclear sub technology for some time now, because it is very obvious the strategic naval threat comes from China which has nuclear subs. You can’t effectively counter a sub that can remain underwater for 3 months with one that can barely manage 3 weeks. The wrangling over the Australian-French contract will be an interesting sideshow but arguments over who said what to who shouldn’t cloud the important fact, which is that Australia suddenly has a way to acquire and control technology that 5 years ago it simply didn’t think it could get access to.

As far as I can see, the Oz Admiralty never looked too seriously at procuring a nuclear fleet when they were in the market for new boats prior to 2016. That could have been due to cost but it is more likely something to do with technology transfer. You don’t have sovereign control over your subs if you have to return them to the country of manufacture every time they need service or repair. We know that the defunct French deal mandated a great deal of component manufacturing to take place in Australia. There’s no doubt Australia could have maintained its French diesel-electric subs in its own yards, especially if the critical components could be manufactured locally. I strongly suspect that in 2016 nobody was prepared to sign a technology transfer deal with Australia that would allow them to fully maintain nuclear subs domestically. (Just such a deal was signed between Britain and the US before we finally committed to buy the F-35, allowing us to do all maintenance and repair domestically, even on the most sensitive aspects of its systems).

There is now a compelling strategic case for Australia to have access to this technology that Britain has made to the US and the US has agreed to. For Australia to be able to assemble US-designed nuclear subs in Australian yards means they have signed a tech transfer agreement, which is no small matter (the F-35 deal was held up for months by Congressional demands for some extremely detailed assurances about our ability to guard American military secrets).