Talk:Australia and weapons of mass destruction

message: It may come as a surprise to many but Australia actively sought nuclear weapons from their inception until the political climate changed in the 1970s. It eagerly participated in nuclear testing in the hopes of sharing nuclear information, and the whole reason for the purchase of the F-111 strategic bomber was that several nuclear bombs would be provided to fulfil their nuclear capability.
Thwarted in acquiring nuclear weapons through scientific co-operation, and later by direct transfer, Australia had advanced plans for the construction of a large nuclear reactor intended to produce weapons grade materials at Jervis Bay (which is under Commonwealth rather than State jurisdiction). The plan was fully costed and political influence was applied to ensure the reactor most suited to weapons production was chosen from among the rival tenders. 
Australia was one of the last countries to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and ratification of the treaty was delayed until after a change of government because it would have interfered with Australia's plans to acquire nuclear weapons. 
I hope to expand the nuclear section of the page to include this history. --Dave 02:02, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

message: I am promoting your article to the GA level.  It is hard to suggest improvements, you seem to have everything covered well.--Konstable 13:43, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: GA

message: It is not disputed that the Australian government is purchasing JASSMs.  It is further not disputed that they are capable of carrying nuclear weapons if appropriately modified.  What I object strongly to is the statement that they were selected on the basis of their nuclear-delivery capability, which was supported only by one somewhat dubious reference.  F/A-18's with JASSM armament have a great deal less strike range than the to-be-retired F-111.  Even the F-35 JSF will struggle.  Yes, you can use air-to-air refuelling, but the logistics of a strike on (for example) Indonesia with an F-35 equipped with JASSM are very difficult (you not only need a tanker close to Indonesia, but fighters to guard the tanker). 
I again come back to the central point - if Australia wanted a delivery system for attacking regional targets, either we'd be retaining the F-111 or we'd be equipping the Collins-class subs with Tomahawk missiles (or developing ballistic missiles, for that matter).  We're doing neither.  Our long-range strike capability is going to be markedly reduced, not increased, over the next decade.  That's why Labor and these guys have been squealing their heads off about the unsatisfactory nature of a JSF purchase. --Robert Merkel 00:30, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going to yank this again.  You have *one* source, a publication from a group dedicated to opposing the international arms trade, claiming that the JASSM has been bought with nuclear delivery in mind (is there any easy way for me to get a copy of that document to check).  --Robert Merkel 07:04, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I do not claim the JASSM was bought with its nuclear capability in mind, I simply note that it is a delivery system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. --Dave 02:34, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but by putting it on this page you are directly implying that there is something unusual about the purchase.  Every fighter plane and submarine on Earth is a potential nuclear weapon delivery vehicle.  --Robert Merkel 02:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I put it on the page because I am interested in seeing delivery systems on WMD pages. I started the Australia and WMD page, and I also edited the Iran and WMD page to include delivery systems. I think the section is important because WMD are next to useless without a delivery system. In fact it is politically prudent to acquire the delivery systems before the WMD, provoking only one international crisis rather than two if it were done in reverse order. No-one really cares about Australia ordering the JASSM today, but if we already had nuclear weapons it would be another story. --Dave 06:04, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, put the JASSM back in, but do you mind the sentence I put at the top of the paragraph on delivery systems?  That said, how hard would it be for Australia to acquire a ballistic missile, for instance?  The government sets up a satellite launching business on Christmas Island, and essentially recreate what SpaceX has done with the Falcon 1 for 80 million USD.  Voila, you have a (liquid-fuelled, admittedly) ICBM with global range.  --Robert Merkel 08:01, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  JASSM nuclear delivery claim... 

message: As per either a recent request at or because this article was listed as fully or partly unassessed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Assessment I have just now completed a rating of the article and posted my results to this page. Those results are detailed above in the template box. Unfortunately, due to the volume of articles that need to be assessed, I am unable to leave detailed comments other than to make the following brief observation: article supplies sufficient depth of knowledge to be classed of mid importance However if you have specific questions, please write to me on my talk page and as time permits I will try to provide you with my reasoning. Please put my talk page on your watchlist if you do ask such a question because in the case of these responses I will only post my answer underneath your question. ALSO if you do not agree with the rating you can list it in the "Requesting an assessment section", and someone will take a look at it.--VS talk 10:22, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment completed for [[{{BASEPAGENAME}}]]

message: This article has been reviewed as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force in an effort to ensure all listed Good articles continue to meet the Good article criteria. In reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that may need to be addressed. 
*The prinicple and major problem for this article is the messy raw links in the chemicla weapons section. These must be properly referenced and formatted in order for this article to remain at GA.
*"Like virtually every other developed nation and most larger developing nations, Australia has weapons systems which could be used to deliver nuclear weapons to its neighbours, if nuclear weapons were developed." - Which neighbour is this referring to? Perhaps reword it a bit more clearly.
*All web sources have to be properly formatted as per below.
I will check back in no less than seven days. If progress is being made and issues are being addressed, the article will remain listed as a Good article. Otherwise, it may be delisted (such a decision may be challenged through WP:GAR). If improved after it has been delisted, it may be nominated at WP:GAN. Feel free to drop a message on my talk page if you have any questions, and many thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this article thus far. Regards, Jackyd101 (talk) 20:03, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Sadly nothing has happened, so this article is no longer a GA.--Jackyd101 (talk) 08:46, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: GA Sweeps

message: Have reverted the American spelling changes recently made. This article was originally written in British/Commonwealth/Australian English and the Wikipedia convention is that an article should retain the spelling it was originally written with. For a more full discussion of this, please refer to the discussion on the Population Ageing article Talk:Population_ageing
Hybrazil (talk) 06:48, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spelling 

message: *AAP, December 14, 2009, Asia unrest may spur Aussie nukes: study, Yahoo!7 News
Possibly of interest to some active within the article. Regards, -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 02:20, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent study 

message: This is a tendentious article evidently written by someone with a bee in their bonnet. The referencing is unacceptable (no page numbers, often no links). For example:
Colonial Period (1788 to Federation)
According to a recent article in Bulletin of the History of Medicine[2] smallpox was used as a biological weapon against aborigines around Port Jackson in 1789. As the alternative source of infection (a transmission from Sulawesi) has been dis-proven,[3] some scholars consider it may also have been used near the Wellington Valley (New South Wales) around 1828.
Criticism (1): reference [2] does NOT claim that smallpox was used as a biological weapon. In accordance with the current state of knowledge, the source of the outbreak remains a mystery, but its deliberate importation is regarded as highly unlikely, both in terms of then current understanding of the nature of smallpox, as well as with respect to the threat that an outbreak would have posed the small colony. 
Criticism (2): with all due respect to the author of reference [3], an amateur historian, the Sulawesi hypothesis is still very much current. The standard view of this outbreak remains that we simply don't know what happened. Incidentally, the author of [3] also concluded that it was not released by colonists as a weapon.
Criticism (3): no reference is supplied for the Wellington Valley claim.
In short, this entire section should be deleted because it misrepresents the sources it cites, and adds nothing further to support the hypothesis stated as fact by the contributor.
The remainder of the article requires similar re-writing to resolve problems related to references (not given, or not given in full), relevance, and insinuation (for example, "Australia has weapons systems which could be used to deliver nuclear weapons to its neighbours, if nuclear weapons were developed" ; my emphasis). While the original contributor might be excited by the possibilities of Australian weapons of mass destruction, this article needs extensive re-writing, although scrapping it and starting again would be more advisable.
Declaration of possible interests: I am an Australian university-trained historian of science and medicine; my poltics are social democratic; I am opposed to any country, including Australia, possessing or developing any ABC weapons (atomic, biological, chemical).
124.168.22.223 (talk) 03:18, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article needs severe revision to remove inaccuracies and biases 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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