Acclaimed documentary filmmaker and Mullumbimby’s own, David Bradbury, is showing his latest film The Road to War, an excoriating examination of the AUKUS defence agreement, at the Uniting Church at 6pm on Friday, August 30.
The Road to War is a powerful exploration of the expansive implications of the AUKUS agreement, which locks Australia into a three-way pact with the US and United Kingdom for the purchase and engagement of nuclear-powered submarines using weapons-grade uranium, compromising our sovereignty and our safety, and costing Australia over $350 billion for decades into the future.
Nuclear war?
David Bradbury, who will speak at the screening, says; ‘I was driven to make this film because of the urgency of the situation. I fear we will be sucked into a nuclear war with China and/or Russia from which we will never recover, were some of us to survive the first salvo of nuclear warheads’.
This commitment to exposing the futility of war, and the actions of the nefarious weapons companies profiting from its misery, is the through-line in many of Bradbury’s films. From the award-winning Oscar-nominated Frontline on Australian war cameraman Neil Davis, Chile Hasta Cuando which garnered Bradbury his second Oscar nomination, and Nicaragua No Pasaran, among many others.
Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer for instance, reported a near 50 per cent increase in profits last year – to $240 billion – as the wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Gaza, and elsewhere fed their coffers.
Yet the greatest challenge facing the world, as Bradbury describes, is ‘the existential danger of climate change; ‘We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from climate change to direct all our energies to dealing with that, not more wars. That is the real enemy which has already “invaded” our country and is wreaking havoc already, not China’, he says.
Australia–US ties
Concerns for the loss of sovereignty over the management and activation of these weapons under the strictures of AUKUS are well known, and The Road to War explores much beyond this. The web of strategic machinery that now ties Australia into the US military construction, planning and activation is, as The Road to War makes all too clear, based on the unchallenged narrative of China’s ‘aggressive military build-up’ in the Asia-Pacific – where the US currently has hundreds of overseas military bases while China has a total of four bases across the world.
Through AUKUS we have committed to a vast infrastructure of war and contributed to the escalation of the threat of nuclear war, for decades to come at immense expense. It damages our long-standing commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which successive Australian governments have supported, and which claim to continue to support, allowing nuclear-capable B52 bombers to be stationed at Tindal airbase in the Northern Territory.
Voice of reason
John Lander, Deputy Ambassador to China during the Whitlam government, is a voice of diplomatic reason in the face of these belligerent foreign policy imperatives driving AUKUS and its secrecy – the full extent of its civil, military, and political implications may never be known to us.
Professor Hugh White, veteran investigative journalist Brian Toohey, Kellie Tranter and tireless peace activist Dr Sue Wareham make a formidable team of interviewees, interspersed with contemporaneous news reporting and archival footage. Together they bring the concerns for the impact of AUKUS, ranging from fossil fuel reliance, nuclear proliferation, and national insecurity, particularly from the inevitable targeting of the US military base of Pine Gap near Alice Springs that would ensue in any hot war.
The Road to War takes us behind the glib rhetoric of the fearful Chinese menace, itself a throwback to the 1950s Cold War ‘yellow peril’ imagery, and questions the logic of locking Australia into a weapons system and military orientation driven by American concerns against our major trading partner in our region. As Gough Whitlam said, Australia should seek ‘security with Asia, not security from Asia’.
Hiroshima
This month was the 79th anniversary of the horrific US atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, which obliterated both cities, killing an estimated quarter of a million people, almost all of them civilians, and wounding 95,000 more. This dark anniversary is a sobering reminder of the inescapable horrors of war that The Road to War so expertly addresses – the road to war, the inescapable logic of war, begins with procuring the weapons to wage it and we are, with AUKUS, already on that road.
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