THE US-Australian joint defence installations were almost certainly Russian nuclear targets during the Cold War. However, Australia's cities might well have survived unscathed if superpower tensions had erupted into a global conflagration, according to a top secret intelligence assessment released by the National Archives of Australia.
More than three decades after it was written, the Australian government has finally declassified its most secret study of the potential impact on Australia of a nuclear war between the US and the former Soviet Union.
Unlike the apocalyptic scenario in author Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, the Office of National Assessments largely dismissed any danger to the nation from global radioactive fallout or stratospheric distribution of smoke from burning cities.
The office questioned if Australian cities would be targets for Soviet missiles, suggesting the US's southern hemisphere ally would be a ''low priority'' in a global nuclear exchange.
''In the aftermath of strategic nuclear war, there would be massive economic, demographic and political change in the northern hemisphere, which would pose much more serious problems for Australia than radioactive fallout,'' the office told the then prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, in December 1980.
In a strategic assessment written in the context of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, the office warned that the US-Australian naval communications station at North West Cape in Western Australia would be a high-priority nuclear target if Cold War tensions led to global war.
''As the nuclear conflict escalated and the prospects of its containment receded, we judge that nuclear attacks on some or all of [the joint defence] facilities would probably occur,'' the office advised. ''Where each side was using, or was judged likely to use, its submarine forces to strike at the opposition's cities, the USSR would rank North West Cape as an important target.''
The risks of nuclear attacks on the Pine Gap signals intelligence satellite ground station in central Australia and the missile launch detection facility at Nurrungar were considered ''somewhat lower'' because those facilities were ''not an integral part of an offensive strategic nuclear weapons system''. However, the office thought it probable that they would be targeted in an all-out nuclear exchange.
It was anticipated an attack on North West Cape would kill some 2000 people in Exmouth. Strikes against Pine Gap and Nurrungar raised the possibility of radioactive fallout over Alice Springs, Woomera and other towns in northern South Australia and it was considered a small risk of fallout over Adelaide could require ''temporary evacuation''.
Nevertheless, the office argued that ''in the scale of horrors usually associated with nuclear war, the direct physical effects on Australia of an attack on the joint defence facilities would not be catastrophic; apart, possibly, from Adelaide, the main Australian cities would not be significantly affected''.
Direct attacks on Australian cities were acknowledged as a possibility but the intelligence agency's view was that the Soviet Union ''would probably see Australian cities as low-priority nuclear targets''.
The veteran Australian nuclear disarmament campaigner Helen Caldicott was highly critical, saying the agency had ''severely downplayed'' the threat to Australian cities and the risks of global radioactive fallout.