Vital strategic installations such as the top-secret intelligence site at Pine Gap are more than ever at risk of direct attack by China in a conflict. Beijing has scant regard for such facilities’ role in averting war and, as of 2025, can hit them with conventional missiles without chancing dangerous nuclear escalation.
Canberra’s options under this new scenario are unfortunately few, unsatisfactory and expensive.
For decades, Australia has hosted sites that have been tempting targets for powerful adversaries—principally the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China—that had the capabilities to strike those sites and the potential to benefit from doing so. Of particular interest to these countries were cooperative Australian-US sites such as Pine Gap, which provides intelligence and missile warning support, and the Harold E Holt naval communications station at Exmouth, which provides communications to submarines.
While these installations served Australian and wider allied needs, the primary attraction for Moscow and Beijing was that by striking those sites in a conflict, they could affect the warfighting power of their most powerful enemy—Washington—without attacking the US homeland directly and risking retaliation.
Despite this appeal, the potential for attack was restrained by policy and technology. The Kremlin always recognised that, in a crisis with fingers on nuclear triggers, harming Washington’s ability to detect incoming attacks or communicate with its missile submarines could spectacularly backfire. In turn, the weapons most likely to be used—intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM)—were inaccurate enough that they needed nuclear warheads to reliably destroy such targets. Using such weapons pre-emptively would have been dramatic escalation, risking an atomic US response and conflicting with Beijing’s nuclear no-first-use policy.
Today, such sureties no longer hold.
While Russia now poses a much lesser threat than it did during the Cold War, China’s star has risen. China has also shown little interest in capabilities designed to moderate conflict. For example, even in times of crisis, it has routinely ignored the hotline that was installed to allow communication with Washington.
While Beijing’s no-first-use nuclear policy still broadly holds, in 2025 the United States declared that China’s DF-27 ICBM was in service and could be equipped with manoeuvring conventional warheads accurate enough to hit ships.
With such a weapon, China can now strike anywhere in Australia without pressing the nuclear button.
Further, the range of strategic targets that would tempt Beijing are increasing, most particularly the nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) that will operate from Fleet Base West in Western Australia. A total of five such British and US submarines will begin operations there the next few years, along with up to eight Australian boats entering service from 2033.
Since SSNs are a key wartime asset that are exceptionally difficult to detect and destroy once submerged, there are enormous incentives for China to destroy such vessels while they’re at the pier. Any successful attack, aside from weakening Australia’s defence, would be a major environmental disaster, with potentially several SSN hulks leaking radioactive material into the ocean barely 35 km from Perth, a city of more than 2 million people.
So, what can be done to mitigate these risks? Unfortunately, not much and nothing easy.
As a starting point, the Australian Defence Force, the US and other friendly forces need to plan and train to operate without key installations and military assets. They also need to build backups where feasible.
Beyond this, a ballistic-missile defence system could work but the costs are staggering. ICBMs travel too fast—around Mach 22—to be intercepted by systems such as the famous Patriot. The best bet would be the US’s SM-3 Block IIA, which comes in at around A$40 million apiece. But how many to field? How many DF-27 ICBMs will China deploy?
Further, missile interceptors have great difficulty in intercepting highly manoeuvrable hypersonic glide vehicle warheads of the type that the DF-27 can be armed with, rendering the potential for successful defence in doubt.
Finally, for SSNs in particular, there’s the option to move the vessels to a less dangerous location farther from populated areas. But considering that upgrades to existing facilities to accommodate the nuclear boats are already slated to cost A$8 billion, an entirely new remote facility would surely cost multiples of this.
None of these options is ideal, and all will put even more strain on the defence budget. But the alternative is simply to accept that once-secure key capabilities might now be wiped out at a moment’s notice and hope for the best. That, surely, is an even worse outcome for the national interest.
