Experts have called on Congress to support the transfer of secret information nuclear technology to Australia because AUKUS is vital in the containment of China in the Pacific.

Testifying before the Armed Services congressional committee which is currently investigating “The Pressing Threat of the Chinese Communist Party to U.S. National Defense,” the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr, and deterrence policy expert Melanie W. Sisson, PhD from the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology urged congress to push forward with overcoming the export controls to share nuclear technology with Australia. They called it vital to U.S. defense in the pacific.

Harris told the committee on Feb. 7 that AUKUS was supremely strategically important and that would help the United States dramatically.

“AUKUS is supremely important,” Harris said. “We’re going to need to put our shoulder to the task for Australia, which has a tremendous military.”

“For them to have a long reach of a nuclear submarine force would be dramatic. It would help us dramatically. It would change the balance of power in the Indian Ocean.”

Calling the plan for the U.S. and the UK to share their nuclear technology with Australia a significant step forward, Harris cautioned it would only be a significant win if the U.S. followed it through in the long term.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to get through this export control issue with Australia,” he said. “We could have every good intention in the world, but we could be bound up by our own regulation and our own regulatory policy.”

Harris also pushed back on the concern that Australia would not have nuclear subs in the water for 30 years, saying that a joint effort from the three nations would see the task completed in the next decade.

“We put a man on the moon in eight years, and we developed a COVID vaccine in one year. We can do this,” Harris said. “If we put our hearts and minds to it, and our resources to it, and by ours, I mean the United States, the UK and Australia, we can do this faster than that.”

The comments from the former commander come as AUKUS allies prepare to announce the plan of how and at what price the Royal Australian Navy will obtain eight nuclear-powered submarines.

Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles has said previously that Australia did not underestimate the challenge that was involved in arming itself with the capability but that the government was confident that the trilateral partners would be able to meet the challenges.

“AUKUS is central to that,” Marles said.

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“I think what you’ll see is when we ultimately do announce the optimal pathway that we’ve been working on with both the United States and the United Kingdom, that what it really is, is a genuinely trilateral effort to see both the UK and the U.S. provide Australia with a nuclear-powered submarine capability.”

AUKUS was unveiled in September 2021 in a surprise joint announcement between U.S., UK, and Australian leaders that would see Australia armed with nuclear-powered submarines and take part in research cooperation in ground-breaking fields like quantum computing, undersea capabilities, hypersonics, and artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has hinted that Australia could get a brand new submarine class with the U.S. and UK working together on the design and build. It comes as the UK is currently in the process of developing the successor to its Astute-class nuclear submarine.

“It’s a joint endeavour. Whether that is the sharing of technology, and the understanding of how to do it, the sharing of the build, or the sharing of the design,” he said after a meeting between Australian and UK ministers on Jan. 2.

Meanwhile, Sisson told congress she believed that the United States’ alliances and regional diplomatic engagement were a key part in countering the CCP  because they improved its situational awareness in the western Pacific and increased the U.S.’s ability to counter strategic competition.

AUKUS, she noted, was important as it was a visible demonstration to the Chinese regime of “how widespread the commitment is of its regional neighbours and beyond to certain standards and expectations of behaviour.”

She noted that alliances like AUKUS would limit the environment in which the CCP would be able to pursue their interests “in ways that are at a minimum problematic and most illegal and dangerous.”