Explore the latest developments concerning How Australian SSNs.
There’s a saying about submarine warfare: ‘there are two types of naval vessels – submarines and targets.’ Nuclear-powered submarines, SSNs, are the true apex predator of the oceans in war.
The chief of the Royal Australian Navy and soon-to-be chief of the defence force, Vice Admiral Mark Hammond, brought the SSN into the picture in a discussion of multi-domain deterrence at the ASPI Defence Conference on 25 June.
For those that don’t know, nuclear-powered submarines have really only been involved in combat operations twice. First time, 1982 Falklands War, [when the Royal Navy’s] HMS Conqueror sank the Argentinian Navy’s flagship, the cruiser the General Belgrano, with a spread of straight-running torpedoes. After that engagement, the Argentine surface navy did not come back to sea.
Labor senator Raff Ciccone has launched a blistering attack on critics of the AUKUS submarine pact, dismissing a crowd-funded inquiry backed by former Labor ministers as backward-looking and unconstructive.
In a speech to the Senate on Tuesday night, the Victorian argued that opposition to Australia’s planned acquisition of US Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines was driven more by politics and nostalgia than genuine concerns about national security.
Ciccone, the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, took aim at a recently established inquiry into AUKUS, chaired by former Labor minister and anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Garrett and other party luminaries, which is calling for a fresh examination of the program’s strategic assumptions, costs and risks.
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The news that Australia will now only be getting used nuclear submarines should alert the government that AUKUS may prove more myth than reality
As a series of images flashing before your eyes, the AUKUS flip book is beyond bizarre. First up are two right-wing chancers – Scott Morrison, prime minister of Australia, and straw-haired Boris Johnson, UK prime minister – meeting US president Joe Biden on the G7 Summit sidelines in Cornwall, in June 2021. AUKUS was a secret twinkle in their eyes.
The next image is a virtual joint press conference three months later: Morrison flanked by a TV-screen Johnson on one side and a TV-screen Biden on the other – announcing the creation of AUKUS. Prefiguring his cognitive decline – or perhaps Morrison was just forgettable – Biden thanked “that fellow Down Under”. And what was an AUKUS anyway?
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