By Greg Ogle
ADELAIDE — On July 15 the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald (and page 3 of the Melbourne Age) announced a "US plan to abandon Australian bases". The story was based on a recently declassified Pentagon document. It said that a new satellite system being developed in the US would make foreign bases like Nurrungar obsolete.
Nurrungar is currently the ground station for the US Defence Support Program (DSP) satellites, originally developed as part of strategies to fight the Soviet Union. The system was designed to detect intercontinental missile launches and to target retaliatory strikes. Nurrungar receives and processes information from the DSP satellites and relays it to the main ground station in the US.
The new system, known as FEWS (Follow-On Early Warning System), would use on-board computers to send data from one satellite to another and then on to the US, by-passing the Australian ground station.
The most important aspect of the SMH/Age story is not the news itself, but the fact that it was "news". The story was not new at all. According to the reports themselves, FEWS is only in its earliest development stage, is subject to questions over its projected $US12-17 billion price tag and would not be in operation for seven to eight years. Even then, Nurrungar may still have a back-up role.
Six years ago in A Base For Debate, Professor Des Ball said that it "would be reasonable to expect" that the type of technology which is now FEWS would be available in the near future. Certainly with the end of the Cold War there are new requirements and the new system would better assist the US in fighting the more localised wars it is now involved in. While FEWS remains a long way off, both Ball and the new reports concluded that Nurrungar would not necessarily close.
So if the story was not new, and given the difficulty we have getting other peace issues taken up, why were we reading this non-story on the front page of one of the major dailies? Certainly there was a declassified document to focus on, and the Pentagon had not so publicly stated its intentions previously. But even the two FEWS contracts which have been tendered are a year old.
Media response
But the Australian media recognised the story as "news" because Nurrungar was news. The peace movement had put Nurrungar in the headlines earlier this year with its protest over Easter.
Indeed, it was a tribute to the impact of the Nurrungar campaign that the media came to the peace movement to ask for comment on FEWS. Several mainstream radio stations and ABC TV news carried comment from the peace movement.
Australian Democrat Senators Wooten and Spindler raised the hope that the United Nations could use the facility for international monitoring, while peace groups affiliated to the Anti-Bases Campaign were the only ones talking about the dangers of the improved war-fighting system and about returning the land to the Aboriginal owners.
For its part, the government's usual position of saying as little as possible about US bases fitted well with something that was after all a non-story. Army spokesperson Brigadier Adrian D'hage fobbed off the story claiming that speculation about Nurrungar's future was premature and that "the base would continue to have a valuable role well into the future".
But foreign minister Gareth Evans went beyond this. The Adelaide Advertiser the next day carried Evans' confusing claim that Nurrungar could conceivably be more valuable than ever. Arguing that Nurrungar could be linked to the system which destroyed launched missiles, he said that the new technology would be valuable for Australia's security. It could "protect Australia if a regional neighbour developed a ballistic missile threat".
Apart from the strangeness of this need to defend ourselves from a non-existent weapons capability (and one which would only be acquired through Australian and US arms sales in the region) two things are noticeable in Evans' claim.
First, the system which Evans was referring to is essentially a rehash of Ronald Reagan's dubious Star Wars system, which Australia had formerly opposed. And secondly, Evans' reply simply ignored the fundamental point of the FEWS story. The proposed system had satellite to satellite linkage and did not require a ground station at Nurrungar. Even if the threat was real and the new system did provide this protection, Nurrungar would still be obsolete.
But Evans had managed to muddy the waters and was not pursued by a technologically illiterate and politically naive media. There was no story in the original news from Washington, and nobody from the media asked the obvious: if these are really "joint" US-Australian bases. why do we only find out about such things from Pentagon documents?
Other questions
The media also missed other implications. It may be that an alert journalist or analyst in the US picked up the declassified documents and realised the news potential about an obscure technology which was 10 years away. But news is rarely made in this way. most stories are promoted, fed to journalists, not found.
Whether or not the story was a plant is perhaps a moot point. The fact is that this public airing has some interesting spin-offs in terms of US-Australian relations.
According to the Herald article, one goal of FEWS was the phasing out of foreign ground stations so that the US would not have to "rely on someone else's good will to provide our essential missile warning".
Here the Australian peace/anti-bases movement can take some credit.
It is not that the Australian government is directly
threatened by the peace movement or even that the Australian government would actually demand that the bases be closed. But Nurrungar has been in the news, and there are definite advantages in turning down the political heat on the bases.
Trade
Apart from protests against Nurrungar, the National Farmers Federation has talked about using the bases as a bargaining chip in trade talks. And most recently, a similar strategy was being suggested in relation to the dispute between Qantas and Northwest airlines. While not directly involved, the peace movement has been important here because these groups heard of the bases only because of the work of the peace movement.
Simply to threaten to use the bases as a bargaining chip (or to be able to demonstrate that there is political pressure in Australia to use them) weakens the US bargaining position. If the bases were to be used in trade talks, then something would need to be traded away to take them off the bargaining table. Thus the US must tread more softly (or slightly less hard) to ensure that they do not make it to the table.
In short, US defence posture is potentially weakened by closing Nurrungar, but their commercial position is weaker if it is maintained. The peace movement has helped expose an Achilles heel in US dominance.
Of course it would be just as speculative to claim that this was behind the appearance of the non-story. But the question remains: why did this non-story become "news" — and why now?