The United States regularly demonstrates the importance of arms sales abroad, including naval sales. The United States, Britain and Australia announced a security partnership for Australia to buy American nuclear-powered submarines and scrap the previous $40 billion French-designed submarine deal. Without arms sales, the French military-industrial partnership has less power to do such policing. But France’s arms sales abroad fell in 2020, much as the result of the global health crisis.įrance has a vital role in world policing, particularly in the former French Northwest Africa, which the United States largely leaves to France’s forces. In 2015-2019, France made a whopping 72% gain in arms sales, fueled in part by submarine sales to India and Brazil, similar to what it just lost to Australia. Its sophisticated defense industry cannot survive with domestic sales alone. "The delivery of the fuel in sealed reactors and the absence of an Australian fuel cycle could potentially alleviate some of these concerns.The Biden administration announced a deal to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines in an attempt to "reinforce alliances" and send a message to China. France on Thursday reacted with outrage to the announcements that the United States and Britain would help Australia develop submarines, and that Australia was withdrawing from a $66 billion deal to buy French-built submarines.Ĭharles Tiefer, ( ), a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, is an expert on government contracting and the Arms Export Control Act.įrance suffered a crippling blow. "That said, China has claimed that the transfer of the highly-enriched uranium itself represents a breach of the spirit of the NPT," Kaushal said. Nonetheless, the plan seems significantly more risky to me than the French-Australian alternative," he added.īut Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London, said the exemption for naval nuclear reactors has always been there and pointed out that India leased Soviet nuclear-powered submarines before it got nuclear weapons. "The AUKUS partners have tried hard to mitigate the technical and proliferation risks and, to some extent, they have succeeded. I worry that other states with more nefarious goals would face minimal pushback for withdrawing nuclear material from IAEA safeguards, as Australia will do,” he said in a series of tweets Monday. “I’m not worried Australia will develop nukes. “The big proliferation risk is precedent,” said James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. However, the AUKUS deal uses a clause that allows fissile material, the key component in nuclear weapons, to be transferred to a nonnuclear state without the need for it to be inspected by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) when it is not used for “explosive use.” The five main states with nuclear weapons - the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China - are all signatories to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which pledges to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and work toward nuclear disarmament. "The three countries have gone further and further down a wrong and dangerous road for their own selfish political gains, in complete disregard of the concerns of the international community,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a regular news briefing. And Beijing hit back Tuesday, accusing the trio of putting the system of nuclear nonproliferation at risk. The deal - known as AUKUS - exploits a loophole in a landmark global nuclear treaty, which has raised fears from arms control experts.
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