The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, even in the height of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Labor and the opposition enthuse about AUKUS and what a jobs bonanza it will provide and how it will upskill hundreds of Australians in nuclear high tech.
No doubt the time will come when these subs will deploy Trident D5 nuclear-tipped missiles, which the British chose because of their ability to kill ten million Russians! The operational deployment of nuclear capable B52 and the more lethal B2 bombers in RAAF Tindal, enlarges the Chinese targeting set beyond the ‘joint facilities’ at Pine Gap and Exmouth.
Any war with China is likely to escalate to a hot, nuclear war, either by design or inadvertently, in which our cities will be targeted.
However, Australia has no publicly released plans for civil defence, other than two booklets published in 1984/86, which are currently unavailable. The text is identical in both booklets and comes from the UK and the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but the covers are radically different.
The earlier booklet featured a missile/mushroom cloud threatening a cityscape but this was replaced by the placatory bushscape picture where grazing animals look at the mushroom cloud without panic. The text in both is ‘comforting’, claiming nuclear war is survivable and that there is no radiation damage to future generations.
Einstein, one of the initiators of the Doomsday Clock, stated, ‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.’
When Jan Barham was Byron mayor she went to Hiroshima and, as a mayor for peace, listed Byron in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The purposes of the Mayors for Peace are to contribute to the attainment of lasting world peace by arousing concern among citizens of the world for the total abolition of nuclear weapons through close solidarity among member cities as well as by striving to solve vital problems for the human race such as starvation and poverty, the plight of refugees, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation. Byron has a responsibility to oppose this drift to war and maybe a good start would be to declare our region a nuclear free zone.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
