One of the interesting titbits of all this is that even if the nearby port is considered not worth the nuke for whatever strategic planning reasons, it’s almost

One of the interesting titbits of all this is that even if the nearby port is considered not worth the nuke for whatever strategic planning reasons, it’s almost a certainty that, outside of a weird “you nuked once, so we’re going to nuke just once too” scenario, Australia (where I live) has at least one if not two or three nukes coming it’s way in all but the most limited nuclear war scenarios involving nuclear powers. (for instance India and Pakistan exchanging nukes could potentially remain a very regionally limited conflict despite the catastrophic death toll) Depending on the exact planning and strategic goals it’s hard to imagine a significant nuclear war that doesn’t involve trying to eliminate at least one if not all of these three targets. - Nuke 1 -> Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap - It’s got the CIA, it’s got the NSA and it’s got the NRO, its got 38 radomes housing antennas drawing down secret classified satellite data from the whole hemisphere of satellites and is part of the entire ECHELON/ 5 Eyes program - Nuke 2 -> Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt - 1 Megawatt VLF Transmitter, most powerful in the Southern Hemisphere, designed for communicating with underwater submarines from the USA, Australia and likely capable of also doing so to any cooperating NATO nations … in short its for sending the kind of signal to an underwater submarine that would be used to tell a ballistic missile submarine to follow the orders in the green yellow blue or red folders. One of the highest likely targets for a nuke on the planet (along with its sibling VLF stations around the world) if you ask me… - Nuke 3 -> RAAF Base Edinburgh, heart and home to the coordination centre of the Jindalee Over the Horizon Radar Network, a network of linked ionospheric frequency radar transmitter and receivers as well as ionosondes to monitor the state of the ionosphere which when combined give it a claimed capability to monitor air and sea movements over 37000square kilometres, as far as “3000 kilometres away” according to the official documents, and with a sensitivity that is apparently good enough the prototype was able to pick up a rocket launch in china 5500km away during testing in 1997 (so the real thing can probably do a bit better than the claimed 3000km range)