International Agreements Committee
Corrected oral evidence: Amendments to the UK-US mutual defence
agreement
Tuesday 8 October 2024
Extract
:
Thank you, Chair, and apologies for not being with you in person.
It just occur
underpinned this conversation. One is whether we are the junior
partner in
this relationship and how we prevent ourselves from being it.
Secondly, I
am not sure that the internal governmental due diligence has
been
accurate enough to provide answers to some of the very incisive
questions
that have been asked, so maybe this should be considered.
Putting that to one side, what is the value of this MDA to the
AUKUS
partnership and how does it interrelate with the agreement on
naval
nuclear propulsion that the Government signed recently?
Paul Carter:
It is probably appropriate that I take that one. The first bit
was about what the value of the MDA is in this agreement. It is
probably
worth saying that they are two completely separate agreements.
The MDA
is bilateral between us and the US, and has been going for some
60-plus
years. The agreement that we have under AUKUS is the AUKUS
naval
nuclear propulsion agreement. It is a trilateral agreement
between us, the
UK and Australia. It is about conventionally armed
nuclear-powered
submarine capability, so not as wide and broad-ranging as the MDA
in
terms of weapons technology.
This is an extension of an agreement that we already had, which
allows
information sharing with Australia. Once this comes into force,
it will enable
us to transfer technology and equipment. For example,
Rolls-Royce will be
building the PWR3 technology reactors, which we will build on
behalf of
Australia for it to use in its construction, which it plans to do
in Adelaide.
Without the MDA and the bilateral change, we could not be doing
AUKUS
pillar 1. We need the US technology. The future SSN that is going
to be
built in two countries, with probably a single supply chain, more
or less,
has trilateral technology. US technology is being inserted into
our design
to support AUKUS and make it a much more ambitious and lethal
capability. That is the value. Without the MDA, we would not have
the
ENNPIA or AUKUS pillar 1.
Full evidence
