Selling Non-Proliferation: U.S.-Australian Cooperation on Radio Australia in 1965 Indonesia

In the tense and confusing weeks prior to the regime change in 1965 Indonesia that brought down the Sukarno regime and installed General Suharto, the Indonesian government escalated its nuclear rhetoric.  While Indonesia had first announced its intention to become a nuclear power in November 1964, in the summer of 1965 President Sukarno began to advocate nuclear proliferation as part of his ideology of the New Emerging Forces.  By early August, reliable Japanese intelligence sources had informed the Australian ambassador in Jakarta that a  nuclear explosion would probably take place in October.
            This paper explores the joint U.S.-Australian response to the Indonesian threat of nuclear proliferation, examining efforts to broadcast Radio Australia newscasts and commentaries that countered Sukarno’s radical ideas on nuclear weapons.  Drawing on materials at the National Archives of Australia, it illustrates the close cooperation between the United States and Australia as the crisis in Indonesia intensified.  It also demonstrates that the prospect of an Indonesian nuclear explosion, assumed to involve the assistance of the Chinese, was taken very seriously by both Canberra and Washington.  Sukarno’s policy of defiant proliferation is a critical, and heretofore neglected, dimension of the global politics that underlay the Indonesian regime change in October 1965.