In the 1950s the government tried to prepare the public for nuclear war. When the hydrogen bomb and ICBMs were invented they gave up on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
"The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell"
The full movie ~45 minutes is here: https://vimeo.com/532331716
We have emergency warning systems that can do all the modern stuff like cell/tower area broadcast/push, websites, data feeds, and radio/tv station protocols for major enough events… which are all nationally coordinated, but actually activating them is delegated to state level control, so a national emergency is passed down to the state emergency management organisations… but while Australia would absolutely know we’ve got nukes incoming (5 Eyes intel, and our own massive over the horizon radar systems) and probably have some idea where they are headed… that’s a military matter with no publicly documented process.
We have a publicly documented process to handle a biological incident (weapon or accident doesn’t change how you deal with this much once it’s happened) and we’ve got a publicly document procedure for re-entering space debris (which we’ve actually used recently due to some random spaceX debris in a farmer’s paddock) …
But we have no plan for if we’re going to get nuked… which is only partly understandable.
We’re not exactly spread out enough that a dedicated nuclear attack couldn’t exterminate >90% of the entire population of Australia. Depending on the missile and it’s MIRV/Decoy ratio and the yield of the weapons, you could probably get above 90% with 3 or 4 ICBMs. There’s no infrastructure for sheltering, and we’re completely unprepared for the aftermath, having a plan that details how fucked the survivors might be is … not something I think a lot of government ministers want to sign their names to… bad optics…
However the counter argument is we’re a major US ally providing material support to US overseas military power projection by way of naval ports (which we just made more important as part of our sub deal making those ports more useful for US nuclear submarines) our significant regional radar coverage (JORN is quite the beast of a radar) and us hosting secure downlinks for the US orbital assets covering this hemisphere and us hosting a major communications facility which would likely play a role in ensuring the final communication of orders to submerged nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the event that a nuclear war actually happens. I find it hard to imagine Australia won’t have at least a couple of nukes headed out way somewhere early on the list of targets even if it’s not so much about Australia as it is about destroying and degrading the ability of the US armed forces to operate in the indo-pacific region.
So on the one hand… probably going to happen in the event the shit hits the fan so hard nuclear war starts… on the other hand there’s not a lot we can do to prepare or defend right now against the sudden outbreak of nuclear war. So why worry anyone with detailed plans for horrific doom. Sure if tensions rise we might get some US missile defence systems that could help make it less doomsday, but that kind of military planning is probably a classified bullet point on some future planning list based on one or more of the treaties Australia has with America already.
Oh and there’s the classic “On the Beach” if anyone is looking for more of this kind of horrible disaster scenario stuff.
This seems like an enormous risk factor more than anything else. Australia and the EU are essentially vassals of the USA, but Australia seems wayyyy more vulnerable to armageddon. Since everyone's packed into such a tight space.
So what if people panic and murder or attack each other or loot or anything else? In a nuclear exchange, I'd argue pure and unadulterated anarchy is the only morally correct option, as the concept of "state" and "society" just failed catastrophically.
The book was
First and Final War: A Basic Information Manual on the Effects of Nuclear War Applied to Australia (1986) [2]
and featured reasoning as to why Australia would be high on a first strike list, primary as a MIRV target covering radar and signaling installations.
Also some early work on blast radius and fallout spread.
It bears repeating that the submarine communications station (in Australia, there are others) responsible for sending fire commands is the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt [3]
That still gets a laugh in Australia.
[1] https://www.uwa.edu.au/Profile/David-Blair
[2] https://www.amazon.com/First-Final-War-Information-Australas...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...
Nuking Australia’s cities would do precisely nothing for Russia or China’s strategic position in the event of a nuclear conflict - and the threat to do so doesn’t deter us from launching nukes at either because we don’t have any to launch regardless.
So while a strike against communications infrastructure only would indeed be aimed at facilities in remote enough locations that the general population need not worry too much about the nuclear part of the war that just happened… if they expand the target list to include the Australian navy’s facilities, then Perth and Sydney are in for a pretty bad time.
Would Australia really still be a country if all it's major population centers are evaporated and turned into craters? It would be a pyrhic victory.
The Chinese DF-5 has that range, the Russian RS-28 Sarmat has a range of 18,000 km.
The assumption in the mid 1980s was that any 'first strike' against the US by Russia would first target global radar and submarine commnications with other hard targets stacked up immediately behind .. in order to sow confusion and minimise chances of counter strike orders.