Greetings and salutations.
As well as being a place where the Despairing Survivors Await Unavoidable Doom, Australia is also seen at times as a place, along with New Zealand, which would have been likely to avoid nuclear attack in a WWIII scenario. By the 80's, this is probably not true: both have US radar stations, port facilities, or other installations that would probably be targets, and given the kind of megatonnage that the USSR had to throw around by that point, they'd probably be hit hard.
My question is, when does this become true? At what point does the USSR have enough long-range missiles that clobbering fairly low-priority targets in Australia-NZ becomes likely? It's almost certainly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but when in the interval 1962-1980 would you put it?
(This comes from looking at Turtledove's recent "Valley-Westside War", in which a 1967 nuclear exchange seems to have collapsed not only the US, but everyone else on the planet. I've been pondering who gets off fairly lightly from a '67 nuclear exchange, and I'm unsure whether Australia or NZ would get hit or not).
Bruce