School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 55
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Hiding from the light: The establishment of the Joint Australia-United States Relay Ground Station at Pine Gap
    Tanter, R (Nautilus, 2019-11-02)
    The author discusses recently released Australian cabinet papers dealing with a decision in September 1997 to allow the establishment of a Joint Australia-United States Relay Ground Station at Pine Gap to support two United States early warning satellite systems in place of its predecessor, the Joint Space Communications Facility at Nurrungar. The cabinet papers give a picture, albeit one muddied by censorship, of the Howard government’s consideration of ‘a U.S. request to continue Australian involvement in a U.S. space technological system to provide the U.S. with not only early warning of missile attack as a basis of nuclear deterrence, but also the capacity to target a retaliatory nuclear strike in the most effective way as part of a nuclear war-fighting capability. There is little evidence in these documents that senior ministers and their advisors considered these matters with any seriousness.’
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    A Global Nuclear Weapons Ban? Ready Or Not, Here It Comes
    Tanter, R (Australian Institute of International Affairs, 2017)
    Despite the apparent best efforts of Australia, the US and others, the second round of United Nations talks to negotiate a global nuclear weapons ban treaty is underway. With more than 130 countries participating, the proposed ban treaty may come into effect within the year.
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    'Yemen, Australian mercenaries and the shifting sands of Australia–Middle East alliances'
    Tanter, R (Arena, 2018)
    It seems unimaginable that Australia could be involved in the war in Yemen, arguably the world’s worst contemporary humanitarian catastrophe, with more than 10,000 dead, one million cases of cholera, and 11 million in acute need of assistance and protection. Or that Canberra could be building towards a military alliance with a Gulf-state dictatorship with deep involvement in that war—the United Arab Emirates. Or that both Coalition and Labor governments approved—and may well have encouraged—one of Australia’s most senior, decorated soldiers to put on the uniform of that dictatorship, earning millions of dollars in the process. Or that this former Australian Defence Force (ADF) general could go on to plan, build, train and command the UAE’s elite military force, and then oversee more than three years of its operations in a war characterised by highly plausible allegations of war crimes and gross violations of human rights. Not only this but accusations by the Yemeni government of UAE seizure of territory amounting to colonisation, leading to a place of horror, where, as a UN panel of experts reported to the Security Council, ‘Yemen, as a State, has all but ceased to exist’. All this points to a new phase of Australia’s alliance-dependent, high-technology liberal militarisation, rooted, on the one hand, in the export of highly skilled military specialists as senior or command mercenaries, and on the other in the formation of close ties between second order US allies as an American force multiplier
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Touring the American empire of bases with the Marines
    Tanter, R (The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2018)
    In the decade after the end of the Cold War, triumphalist U.S. public intellectuals, liberal and conservative alike, were trying on the mantle of ‘empire’ for size. For many at the time, while ‘US imperialism’ denoted kneejerk leftism, ‘the American empire’ might just be an appropriate acknowledgement of achievement on a global scale, an accolade about reality rather than a matter of opprobrium.
  • Item
    No Preview Available
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    Practical Justice in Doe v. Lumintang: The Successful Use of Civil Remedies Against ‘an Enemy of All Mankind’
    TANTER, R ; Tanter, R ; Ball, D ; Van Klinken, G (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)
  • Item
    No Preview Available
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Japanese remilitarisation today
    TANTER, R ; Totman, S ; Burchill, S (Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand, 2008)
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Introduction to Masters of Terror: Indonesia’s Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999
    TANTER, R ; McDonald, H ; Tanter, R ; Ball, D ; Van Klinken, G (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    With eyes wide shut: Japan, Heisei militarization, and the Bush Doctrine
    Tanter, R ; Gurtov, M ; Van Ness, P (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005)
    The effects and reception of the Bush Doctrine in Japan have to be seen in the light of a long drawn out and now quickening series of domestic legal, political, legislative, and equipment and force-structure changes in Japanese security policy. The Bush Doctrine has been welcomed for the opportunities it affords to accelerate already existing planning preferences for military expansion and the re-constitution of the Japanese state in a "normal" form-a pattern of "Heisei militarization." Heisei militarization is compatible with both a nuclear and nonnuclear Japan. Both options are consistent with the "normality" that Japanese governments are intent on achieving. Existing Japanese latent nuclear weapons proliferation capacity has been supplemented by both a weakening of domestic cultural and institutional restraints and dramatic changes in the external environment, including security threats from North Korea and an apparent US drift toward acceptance of Japanese nuclear weapons. This raises the possibility of a nuclear-armed Japan within the US alliance, as well as beyond it.