80 years since Hiroshima the nuclear threat is on the rise
GUEST: Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, published by Polity.
Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, published by Polity.
PRODUCER: Catherine Zengerer
*This program first appeared on 12 March 2025
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
16 hours ago
- News.com.au
‘We've got to get scary': Australia unready for war, warns expert panel on Sky News
Australia is unprepared to defend itself in the face of rising global tensions, some of the nation's most senior defence and foreign policy figures have warned. In a special Sky News Australia program, The War Cabinet, hosted by award-winning journalist Chris Uhlmann in the historic Cabinet Room of Old Parliament House, the panel agreed on one stark conclusion – if conflict comes, Australia would not be ready. Mr Uhlmann said the location served as a reminder of a time when leadership was tested under extreme pressure. 'Today, with China rising, America shifting, and the global order fragmenting, the threat of major conflict in our region looms once again,' he said. Former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon said the warning time for a potential threat was 'growing much shorter' and argued that keeping the United States engaged was critical. 'We cannot allow a hegemony … that's not democratic in our region,' he said. 'That means doing more of the heavy lifting … and building a force capable of deterring and denying a threat. 'That means, of course, spending more, spending smarter, and being more creative about the way we spend, and to spend far more efficiently.' Alexander Downer, former foreign affairs minister, called the world's strategic situation 'difficult, if not dangerous', pointing to the growing links between China, North Korea, Iran and Russia. Mr Downer said Australia's enduring security partnership with the United States was vital to sustaining stability in the region. 'If this alliance holds, it's properly cemented, if it's well led by the Americans and if we, as members of the alliance, are serious about making a practical contribution to defence throughout spending and our equipment, then we will maintain a balance of power in the world, and that will be a force for peace,' Mr Downer said. 'But if we fail … the risks are huge.' Former Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo warned that China's recent naval exercise off Australia's coast was 'likely a rehearsal for missile strikes'. 'We've got a very different China than the China that Hawke, Keating and Howard dealt with,' Mr Pezzullo said. Cyber security specialist Catherine Mansted said the threat was already on home soil. 'We're certainly not at peace … Chinese military cyber spies are actively probing our civilian critical infrastructure looking for weaknesses … potentially for high-impact sabotage if relations deteriorate,' Ms Mansted said. Strategic analyst Peter Jennings said Australia 'should be worried'. 'This is not a story about the 2030s … this is everything about China positioning to be the dominant strategic power in our part of the world, by military force, if necessary, and it is utterly false for our government to say that somehow they have stabilised the relationship with China,' Mr Jennings said. The panel also warned a Chinese assault on Taiwan would quickly draw in Australia. Mr Jennings predicted it would begin with a blockade to 'cutting of internet cables into Taiwan, stop air traffic and sea traffic into Taiwan' before missile strikes and leadership decapitation. Former naval officer Jennifer Parker said China could also target Japanese and US forces, turning it into 'a regional conflict' where Australia's involvement would no longer be a choice. Dr Ross Babbage said walking away from the US alliance would spark 'public outrage' and stressed Australians needed to understand the stakes. 'We've got to get informed. We've got to get strong. We've got to get scary … invest in things that cause the other guy to change their calculations,' Dr Babbage said. Defence aviation expert Dr Oleksandra Molloy said that in 2014, 'no one expected anything would happen in Ukraine' but it was 'way too late to act'. 'We have time and resources … and we can develop and do it right now,' Dr Molloy said. The panel agreed that, regardless of the scenario, Australia is currently ill-equipped to go to war. 'No one around this table wants war,' Mr Uhlmann said.
ABC News
21 hours ago
- ABC News
Australia's recognition of Palestinian statehood goes beyond symbolism
Australia's decision to recognise the state of Palestine has been a very long time coming and, compared to the announcements by other countries in recent weeks, may seem to have been late out of the blocks. But it is in the very way Australia has come to the announcement that we can get a better understanding of the seismic shift in the broader international position on Palestinian statehood that has occurred in recent months. And it also gives us a path through understanding what the political, and practical, implications of the decision might be. It is easy to reduce an assessment of the recognition of Palestine to claims that it is nothing more than symbolic, or that it will have little practical impact on the ground. But the tectonic shifts underlying the decision are profound. The announcement by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong may have been a decision for the Australian government, but it is entirely a part of a coordinated international movement that has been building since at least the beginning of the year. And it has been a much more complex process than a simple shift from not recognising Palestine to recognising it. In the course of 2025 alone, the position of Israel in the Western world has profoundly changed; the position of the United States in international affairs has profoundly changed; and (often overlooked) the positions of the Arab world and the Middle Eastern region in general have also changed. For years, the international community's position has been driven by a long held weighting of interests in favour of Israel as a democratic state, compared to the two organisations who might claim government status of a Palestinian state: Hamas, designated as a terrorist organisation or the Palestinian Authority, which has increasingly been seen to be incompetent, corrupt, unrepresentative or powerless. Israel's brutal and relentless war on Gaza — with its massive civilian death toll and now the spectre of mass starvation — has robbed the nation of its previous moral authority and left it exposed to allegations of war crimes, breaches of international law and even genocidal intent. Israel's position has always been protected by its greatest backer: the United States. Other countries have tended to either hide behind, or shrug in surrender, at their incapacity to really influence events in Israel, on the basis that they would have little effect while ever it had unstinting US support. But the increasingly erratic international diplomacy of Donald Trump has shaken the rest of the world's leaders into a realisation that, just as they could not wait for a "peace process" to establish the basis for recognition of Palestine, they cannot rely on leadership of the United States to put pressure on Israel on either Gaza or the ever-accelerating expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. The disabling of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the humbling of Iran, by Israel has, if anything helped clear the path, or pressure, Arab states feel they can or should take against Hamas. Many of these disparate changing forces have started to be threaded together in a coordinated way in recent months, particularly via the dialogue established and led by France and Saudi Arabia. But the international community — operating in this new world outside the leadership of the United States — has few levers to pull to affect change. Recognition of Palestinian statehood is one of the few at this point. So for the past month or so we have watched as the international community has tried to maximise the impact it can have with that lever. As Albanese and Wong once again made clear today, the shift in strategic considerations now for Australia — as is the case in the positions of France, the UK and Canada — was that the actions of Israel were actually making a two-state solution impossible because it was literally obliterating the physical basis for a Palestinian state: both by its physical demolition of Gaza and incursions via more illegal settlements in the West Bank. Just as the very spectre of a physical state of Palestine is disappearing, the international community is confronted with little choice but to prop up and develop the Palestine Authority — which has been diminishing in its credibility and authority — as a viable body of governance. This will be potentially the most important practical aspect of the decision — not by Australia but by the international community as a whole: that whatever Israel might do, the international community will be supporting the Palestinian Authority's recognition as a legitimate body of government. The state of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the United Nations' 193 member states. The prime minister has made an unconditional offer of support for recognition of Palestine at next month's meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. But he has made clear that the Palestinian Authority has much to do if it wishes the international community to expand on the support it can give the Palestinian people, and that the international community will be taking a very hands-on role to ensure that its wider goals are met. "There is much more work to do in building a Palestinian state," Wong said today. "We will help build the capacity of the Palestinian Authority, and with the international community, Australia will hold the Palestinian Authority to its commitments. The practical implementation of our recognition will be tied to progress on these commitments. We will continue to provide humanitarian aid with our partners to try to help vulnerable civilians to get basic supplies they needle in a practical sense." The crucial difference here is that, in recognising Palestine, the international community will be upping its demands on being able to get aid into Gaza. Instead of just humanitarian bodies complaining about access, there is the spectre of an international force, peacekeeping or otherwise, both being obliged and committed to supporting those efforts. How that plays on the ground is yet to be seen. But recognition is about a lot more than just setting up embassies. It obliges members of the UN to support a state's right to exist. The growing certainty that the overwhelming majority of countries — and all the permanent members of the UN Security council other than the United States — will now recognise Palestine will keep the pressure on the Trump administration. That might not result in the US recognising Palestine, but it will maximise pressure on the US to intervene with Israel to provide aid to the residents of Gaza. It also raises the bar on the questions of international law involved in Israel's actions. For example, Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza becomes an attack on another country, not just an assault on what is for all intents and purposes an occupied territory within Israel. While the US is expected to veto the statehood call, the expanded recognition of Palestine will also increase the authority of the United Nations to act, even as its legitimacy is undermined by the Trump administration. Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
ABC News
2 days ago
- ABC News
Zero Day Attack TV series envisions fallout of imagined Chinese invasion
A newly-elected president makes an extreme sacrifice under great political and military pressure. A local fisherman, struggling after a typhoon destroys his livelihood, acts for the enemy. A couple deliberate over whether to finalise their divorce as conflict looms — and if they should flee to China. All these scenarios are explored in a new TV series in Taiwan, which dramatises the days leading up to an imagined invasion by Beijing. "You are able to capture little snippets of humanity in this potential moment of threat," Janet Hsieh, who plays President-elect Wang Ming-Fang in the anthology's first episode, said. Inspired by the likes of Black Mirror, the series — called Zero Day Attack — consists of 10 episodes, each directed by a different person. The premise of each chapter strikes close enough to Taiwan's current reality to unsettle viewers who have been living with the threat of Beijing simmering closer and closer to the surface for years. The Chinese Communist Party claims Taiwan is part of China, despite the fact the party has never ruled the island, which is governed by a democratically elected president and legislature. Beijing has derided the series, with Defense Ministry spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang accusing the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of "peddling anxieties and attempting to provoke war". "The film is plunging Taiwan into the flames of war," he said. What it has done is prompt discussions about everything from the political motivations behind the series through to what citizens would do if a war were really to break out. "In Taiwan, it's quite rare for productions to confront this kind of subject matter so directly — in fact, there's often an unspoken agreement to avoid it," actor Kaiser Chuang, who plays a central figure in the series' ninth episode, said. "We're not necessarily here to provide the answers — film and art rarely do — instead, we want to prompt people to think. "I see this series as a valuable opportunity to tear away the veil of 'don't talk about politics'. Funded by the Taiwanese government's culture ministry as well as a controversial and hawkish local billionaire Robert Tsao, the series is lucky to have been made. More than half of the crew asked to be anonymous in the credits for fear of reprisals and impacts on their career while some staff, including a director, pulled out of the production, showrunner Cheng Hsin Mei told Reuters. "Participating in such a production carries the risk of being blacklisted, so some crew members took part under pseudonyms," Taiwanese film critic Tang-Mo Tan told the ABC. "Many said the drama is seemingly designed to slowly stoke public fear, influence the [next] recall vote … and openly support [President] Lai Ching-te's 2028 re-election bid," Chinese state run-TV network CGTN reported. As a Taiwanese-American, Janet Hsieh is lucky she doesn't feel any such pressure on her career. Well known locally as the host of travel show Fun Taiwan, this turn to a high stakes political thriller is a major new challenge for Hsieh. Her character is a complex one, a young, newly-elected president, who comes to realise that the party — including her father — expects her to be a puppet. In one jarring scene, the president-elect's father scolds her about her manners while addressing the party's chairman. "She has pressures and stress coming from all over the place," Hsieh said. "Whether it's internal, within her party, within the government, within her family, with her father, it's coming at her from every single angle, and she has to kind of navigate this in a political and in a personal way." The series delves into the myriad of ways China could — and in some cases already does — squeeze Taiwan, well beyond military action. Episodes explore the connections many organised crime gangs have back to China and how temples are vulnerable to infiltration. "My character is someone who becomes infiltrated, he originally works in aquaculture in a rural area, essentially a fisherman, but after a devastating typhoon disrupts his livelihood, he becomes involved with people connected to infiltration activities," Chuang tells the ABC. "Infiltration, by its nature, works subtly — it gradually alters your values, your judgement, even your sense of national identity and awareness of crisis, until you grow numb to it." Hsieh describes Zero Day Attack as a series that — in a first for Taiwan — is tackling the elephant in the room. So far it has secured release in Taiwan, Japan and Indonesia, and its distributors are working to get it into more international markets, including Australia. "[This threat is] just always there, but yet, no drama has ever dramatised it before," Hsieh said. "I really hope that this series isn't about polarising. The message isn't about choosing one side or the other or even pushing a certain value or thought on anybody. "It is bringing out a subject that is on the forefront of everybody's minds, presenting it in a way that is saying: 'Look, here it is. What do you think about it? Let's talk about it.'" Last year a 17-minute trailer was released and created a lot of hype, and in central Taipei at least, it seems a lot of people are interested in watching the series. "The atmosphere in the trailer was quite intense," local Wang Shengfu said. "It really gave me the sense that a cross-strait conflict might actually happen. "Taiwan's political divide is quite clear-cut, works like this could spark discussion but I also think there's a chance that politicians might use the show to promote their own political agendas." That has already happened. Mr Tsao has also funded other resilience efforts, including the Kuma Academy, where many Taiwanese citizens go for "civil defence" classes. "This film isn't meant to scare people, we simply hope it helps everyone be a little more prepared for situations that could potentially happen," Mr Tsao told reporters at the premiere of the show's first episode at a cinema in Taipei's trendy Xinyi district. "In fact, many foreign journalists visiting Taiwan find it puzzling, they see how nervous the international community is for us, but wonder why the Taiwanese themselves don't seem worried at all. "This film also aims to strengthen people's psychological resilience — meaning, when something happens, we don't panic and we know what to do." Chinese state media reporting on Zero Day Attack has accused it of being "built on [President Lai Ching-te's] fear and distortion". President Lai is loathed by Beijing, which calls him a "dangerous separatist". "Many said the drama is seemingly designed to slowly stoke public fear, influence the [next] recall vote … and openly support [President] Lai Ching-te's 2028 re-election bid," state run-TV network CGTN reported. Very recently Mr Tsao backed a mass recall motion, seeking to unseat more than 30 legislators from the main opposition party the Kuomintang. This came after months of political gridlock and division in the parliament, where the KMT, in alliance with a minor party, has the majority. In the days leading up to the July 26 vote, the KMT released a parody of Zero Day Attack. While seven lawmakers are yet to be voted on, the majority of the ballots took place late last month, and not a single person was successfully recalled. Taipei resident Chen Hongzhu predicts this political polarisation will impact the viewership of Zero Day Attack. "Some of my friends with different political views tend to look into whether the creators have any political affiliations before deciding whether they're willing to trust or to watch," she says.
