During the 10th NPT Review Conference, the US, UK and Australia submitted a working paper entitled “Cooperation under AUKUS Partnership” and circulated another non-paper on 9 September 2022 to Agency Member States, referring to their nuclear submarine cooperation as naval nuclear propulsion. In response to their misleading remarks, the spokesperson of the Chinese permanent mission in Vienna gave the following opinion:  

The description as given in these papers of the trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation confuses military activities within a country's sovereignty with acts of nuclear proliferation. The two documents circulated by the three countries are attempts by them to conceal the true nature of their trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation, which is nothing but an act of nuclear proliferation, and to mislead the international community by trying to make this dangerous and illegal nuclear proliferation activity look innocuous and legitimate by referring to it as “naval nuclear propulsion”.  

The naval nuclear propulsion involved in the AUKUS nuclear submarine cooperation is in essence an act of proliferation in direct violation of Articles I and II of the NPT and the objective set out in Article II of the IAEA Statute to the effect that no Agency safeguards shall be provided “in such a way as to further any military purpose”. Article 14 of the CSA, which gives an “exceptional clause”, does not apply to the trilateral cooperation. Moreover, no CSAs can contradict, much less override the NPT as parent law.  

In stark contrast to the indigenous naval nuclear propulsion programmes such as those of Brazil and other countries, the AUKUS partnership, is not a simple matter of indigenous development by a sovereign state of nuclear material used in its military vessels. On the contrary, the AUKUS partnership involves the blatant, direct and illegal transfer, for the first time in history, of tons and tons of nuclear weapon material from two NWS to a NNWS, making it an outright act of nuclear proliferation. These two cases should not be mixed up.  

The deceptive conduct of the three countries has failed to deceive the international community. During the 10th NPT RevCon, countries including Indonesia expressed concern about AUKUS cooperation in a working document, which was supported by numerous NPT states parties.   

China also articulated relevant, legal and substantive facts to clarify the issue at the RevCon. China urges the three countries to stop their acts of nuclear proliferation immediately, cease their misleading rhetoric, stop their double standard on nuclear proliferation and do more for the benefit of the global non-proliferation system.