1. Most of the evidence showing actual efforts to acquire or develop the bomb has already been documented by Jim Walsh and others. For a comprehensive review of the history of efforts, assessments, bureaucratic processes, and debates on the nuclear option in Australia, see Jim Walsh, “Surprise Down Under: The Secret History of Australia’s Nuclear Ambitions,” Nonproliferation Review (Fall 1997), pp. 1–20; Richard Broinonwski, Fact or Fission?: The Truth about Australia’s Nuclear Ambitions (Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2003);
2. Wayne Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000);
3. Wayne Reynolds, “Rethinking the Joint Project: Australia’s Bid for Nuclear Weapons, 1945–1960,” Historical Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1998), pp. 853–857; Michael Carr, “Australia and the nuclear question. A survey of government attitudes, 1945–1975,” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of New South Wales, 1979.
4. 1953 Strategic Basis; 1956 Strategic Basis; 1962 Strategic Basis; 1963 Strategic Basis; 1964 Strategic Basis. In 1953, Minister for External Affairs Richard Casey identified “communist imperialism based on the mainland of China” as the primary threat to regional peace and stability. Cited in Neville Meaney, Australia and the World: A Documentary History from the 1870s to the 1970s (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1985), p. 593.
5. For an overview of Australia’s fears of China, see, for example, Alan Watt, The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy, 1938–1965 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967), pp. 247–248;