Documentary maker David Bradbury is bringing his new film, The Road to War, to Newcastle this week.
Bradbury, an Academy Award nominee and former ABC journalist, said the film "brings into sharp focus why it is not in Australia's best interests to be dragged into an American-led war with China".
Bradbury said defence analysts he interviewed in the film raise concerns that Australia is being set up to be "the US proxy in its coming war with China".
He is concerned that "the United States is goading the Australian government into a war with China".
"This will be like no other war we've ever experienced," he said.
Bradbury says he's no fan of the Chinese Communist Party or totalitarianism, but believes Australia should be neutral in any conflict between China and the US.
China may have tried to covertly infiltrate and influence Australian life, as research has shown, but Bradbury says this doesn't mean China wants to invade Australia.
"They just want our resources," he said.
Bradbury has more than four decades of journalistic and filmmaking experience. He has covered many of the world's trouble spots since the end of the Vietnam War - Southeast Asia, Iraq, East Timor, revolutions and civil war in Central and South America, India, China, Nepal and West Papua.
He was nominated for an Oscar for documentary feature in 1981 and 1987 for producing the films Front Line and Chile: When Will It End?.
"I've seen a lot of war - been ambushed and shot at several times, was lucky to survive, been in Iraq when ISIS was on the prowl again and it was very dangerous."
Bradbury said he was driven to make his new film "because of the urgency of the situation".
"I fear we will be sucked into a nuclear war with China and/or Russia from which we will never recover.
"We must put a hard brake on Australia joining in the current arms race as the international situation deteriorates. We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from climate change."
He said the Labor and Liberal/National governments appear not to have "learnt anything from being dragged into America's wars of folly since World War II" - Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Politicians who think that America can save us with its vastly superior IT and modern weaponry are kidding themselves.
"The Yanks lost Vietnam, despite their huge firepower. They lost to a bunch of 'feral' warlords and drug dealers in Afghanistan 18 months ago, abandoning the Afghani people back into feudal times.
"They will lose to China, as my interviewees - who have over a century of collective experience in foreign policy and military analysis between them - point out."
Military analyst Dr Richard Tanter raises concerns in the film that the US military's spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, will be a nuclear target of any major armed conflict between the US and Russia or China.
"The generals in Moscow and Beijing would have it as a top priority on their nuclear hit list," Dr Tanter said.
Dr Tanter's research has found that Pine Gap would detect the "first critical seconds" of nuclear weapons "lifting off from their deep underground silos in China or Russia" and direct nuclear retaliation on the enemy.
Kellie Tranter, a Maitland-based lawyer and peace activist, appears in the film.
It will be screened at Star Hall Mayfield on Friday at 6.30pm.
