by Brian Toohey
Menzies even tried to dictate US policy in South America. Battle warned Washington in a secret cable on 5 November 1962 that Menzies did not want Kennedy to back a Brazilian proposal for a nuclear-free zone in South America along the lines Calwell was proposing for the entire Southern Hemisphere. Unhappily for Menzies, the White House briefing paper prepared for Kennedy’s meeting with Calwell in July 1963 suggested that if the Labor leader raised the proposed Southern Hemisphere nuclear-free zone, the president could say the ‘US is sympathetic with the principle of a brake on further proliferation, but it should not upset the existing military balance’.
Battle objected that backing the Brazilian proposal would ‘certainly be grasped by the Opposition as indirect US support for its own proposal’ and would be an ideal weapon with which to attack Menzies, who had branded Calwell’s idea as ‘suicidal’ and ‘one of the craziest proposals I’ve ever heard’. Menzies took the bold step of publicly claiming that the US government had told him of its strong opposition to the Brazilian proposal. Calwell called Menzies’ bluff, threatening to ask Kennedy when he met him in July whether this was true. The US secretary of state, Dean Rusk, refused to bail Menzies out, saying in a 23 November 1962 cable, ‘We have no record of any such discussion by Menzies.’ But he couldn’t rule out the possibility that something might have been said while Menzies was alone with Kennedy.
It would be surprising if Menzies had raised Brazil in conversation. He wrote to Kennedy on 20 July 1962 suggesting, perhaps a touch pompously, ‘I even hope that on my next visit to Washington I might have the opportunity not to discuss concrete problems, but have the kind of generalised conversations with you which is one of the advantages of civilised life.’ Kennedy had ready access to just about any intellectual or artistic luminary he cared to meet, amid other sources of companionship. Had he known about it, Menzies would have been upset by the CIA biographical note on Calwell, which said the agency was unconcerned about the possibility that the Labor leader might become PM.
North West Cape’s importance to the US at the time can be seen by its status as the most powerful of the three major US VLF stations. NWC had a maximum output of 2.5 million watts. The other two, one at Cutler, Maine and the other at Jim Creek, Washington state, were not as well situated as NWC for the US to communicate with its fleet in large parts of the Pacific and Indian oceans. All three utilised the way VLF signals follow the curvature of the earth, allowing communications with submarines over much longer distances than straight-line radio transmissions. Because submarines can receive VLF well below the ocean’s surface, this avoids the riskier alternative of putting an antenna up to the surface to receive higher-frequency signals.
The NWC base is situated on a long peninsula at Exmouth Gulf, about 1200 kilometres north of Perth. The first design contract was issued without any public announcement in January 1961.4 The 388-metrehigh central tower was the tallest in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. It and a surrounding circle of 300-metre-high towers hold up a web of transmission antennas, with the receiving antennas 60 kilometres away. (NWC also hosts high-frequency antennas that are less important.) Although not acknowledged for the first three decades of the base’s existence, the VLF’s radiated power at the normal operating level of one million watts posed a health hazard to staff, let alone at the much higher levels sometimes used. A 1993 US Navy report said new procedures could reduce the hazard to safe working levels.5
New US ambassador Ed Clark, a Texas lawyer close to President Lyndon Johnson, formally opened what was still officially called the US Naval Communication Station North West Cape on 16 September 1967. Clark is mainly remembered in Australia for his folksy speech that day, which stressed the great deal the US had got for leasing 2666 hectares of prime coastal land for the base. In a ceremonial handing-over of the rent to Menzies’ successor, Harold Holt, Clark famously presented the prime minister with one peppercorn payment for the first year’s rent in full. It was certainly a good deal for the tenant. The landlord wasn’t allowed to inspect the place or have any say over how the tenant behaved.
Although the base was renamed the US Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt on 20 September 1968, nothing else changed. There was no improvement in Barwick’s abject definition of what constituted ‘consultation’. The US Naval Security Group, a subsidiary of the NSA, operated a secret eavesdropping unit at NWC between 1967 and 1992 and still operates one under a different name at Pine Gap near Alice Springs.6
Congress was not told about the NSA unit at NWC until 1972, and Australian governments were not told until even later. However, a former NSA officer wrote that NWC ‘intercepts traffic in the Sunda Straits and in the Indian Ocean’.7 Because the NSA’s electronic snooping goes well beyond military communications, this activity would not comply with the NWC agreement, which stipulated that the base’s activities must be confined to defence communications. In addition, NWC’s high-frequency transmitters were heavily committed to relaying signals to assist the US in mining Haiphong harbour and inland waterways in Vietnam in May 1972 without first consulting the McMahon Coalition government.8 The US commitment to consultation meant nothing.
16
DANGEROUS ADVICE FROM IGNORANT AUSTRALIAN OFFICIALS
‘The Soviets could decide to go after our communications system to our submarines.’
US Defense Secretary James Schlesinger1
The new Labor government elected in December 1972 picked the hardest way to implement its policies on the three most important US bases in Australia—North West Cape, and the ground stations linked to US intelligence-gathering satellites at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and Nurrungar near Woomera. Although in later decades Labor strongly supported the presence of US military facilities, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and his deputy, Defence Minister Lance Barnard, had solid party backing to renegotiate all three bases.
Immediately after winning the election, Whitlam and Barnard accepted without protest the advice of the Defence Department head, Sir Arthur Tange, that the need for extreme secrecy meant Labor must abandon its clear election promise to tell the public, in general terms, what Pine Gap and Nurrungar did. This was bad advice—more could have been revealed without harming security.2 In contrast, they made a much harder, and ultimately futile, attempt to assert Australian sovereignty over the US naval communications station at NWC. Barnard said in a parliamentary statement on 28 February 1973 that the government would negotiate changes to NWC to ‘obviate any possibility that Australia could be in a war—and nuclear war at that—without itself having any power of decision’. Given the horrific destructive power of nuclear weapons it was an admirable goal, but probably unachievable without closing NWC. Barnard’s statement upset hawkish US officials such as the defence secretary, James Schlesinger, and President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
In April 1973, I reported that a senior Pentagon official had told the AFR that Australia would never be allowed to see, let alone veto, the coded messages sent to US nuclear submarines through NWC, but that the US would be willing to release more information about Pine Gap and Nurrungar.3 When Whitlam asked his officials to convince the US to compromise on NWC, their response was reluctant, even derisory. Despite their disdain for the PM’s supposed naivety, the officials’ own understanding of US nuclear strategy was woefully inaccurate, or in some cases non-existent.
They got off to a bad start after Whitlam asked Australia’s Washington embassy to find out where NWC stood in the American system for communicating orders to submarines. Although NWC had been an issue in Australia since Menzies had tried to damage Labor over the base in 1963, the ambassador, Sir James Plimsoll, replied on 20 March 1973 that he was unable to throw much light on the subject. In a stunning mix of insult and ignorance, Plimsoll’s answer recommended a standard reference book that gave examples of ‘radar and tracking facilities’ in Canada and Alaska and had nothing to do with communicating with submarines. He also referred to a scholarly paper titled ‘Rec
onnaissance, surveillance and arms control’ and a book, Secret Sentries in Space, neither of which had the remotest relevance to the question he’d been asked.4
Undeterred, Whitlam then asked Plimsoll to lead negotiations on NWC in Washington starting on 11 June 1973, and Defence and Foreign Affairs officials prepared a position paper for the talks. Whitlam told the negotiators to make clear to the US that the Australian government had the power ‘physically to stop the station functioning’.5 There is no record of whether they did so.
The paper, stamped ‘Secret’, began with basic information confirming that NWC relayed messages to submarines, ships and planes via its VLF and high-frequency (HF) transmitters. It explained that VLF was crucial because it was the only effective way to communicate with submerged submarines, and gave the extraordinary range of the transmitters at NWC: far beyond the Indian Ocean, east to Panama, north to the Aleutians and west to Africa.
Despite repeated claims that the ANZUS alliance provided highly classified material from America to Australia, the paper revealed that Australian officials were disturbingly ignorant of US nuclear war-fighting policy. In discussing how submarines would be ordered to launch nuclear missiles, it wrongly stated that it seemed ‘likely that the US would use only stations situated on its own territory for so important an order’.6 When Plimsoll summarised the 11 June 1973 negotiations in a secret cable to Canberra on 15 June, he said the Americans had bluntly rejected the discussion paper’s assumption that the US would only be likely to send a firing order from its own territory. Instead, the Americans said messages were always passed via multiple routes and multiple modes to ensure they were reliably received.7
The position paper also asserted that the possibility NWC would come under nuclear attack was ‘extremely remote’. Schlesinger was much less dismissive. When asked in Congress on 7 February 1974 if his ‘counter-force’ strategic doctrine would increase the chances of nuclear war, the US defence secretary said, ‘I think that is a fair, logical inference.’ On 11 September that year he told Congress, ‘The Soviets could decide to go after our communications system to our submarines’ and gave the VLF station at Cutler, Maine as an example. Because NWC was at least as important as Cutler, it seems that all VLF stations could be nuclear targets. The Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence body, warned Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in 1980 that if USSR cities were attacked or threatened, the ONA ‘would rank North West Cape as an important target’.8
Despite the US’s point-blank refusal to agree not to relay firing orders to nuclear missile submarines through NWC, Plimsoll reported that the Americans had said during the 11 June 1973 negotiations that ‘consultation with Australia about any impending crisis would be automatic’.9 This commitment soon proved worthless. There was no consultation before the Yom Kippur War later that year, when the US put NWC and other bases in Australia on full alert on 11 October. Nor was the government informed, much to Whitlam’s displeasure, when NWC was used on 25 October to communicate a general nuclear alert to US military forces in the Western Pacific and Indian oceans. The US had clearly had enough time to notify the Australian government, but never thought to do so.
Barnard was dispatched to Washington in January 1974 to salvage something from the wreckage of his February 1973 policy statement to parliament. The upshot was that an Australian would be titled deputy commander of what would now be called a ‘joint’ communications station—but another US officer would take charge if the US commander was absent or indisposed. Australian submarines would gradually make more use of the VLF transmitter but would pay around $1 million a year for access to the base for which the US paid a peppercorn. More Australians would work there, but none could access the US cypher traffic. Apart from that, the best Barnard could extract from Schlesinger was an agreement to hold more policy consultations.
The first of the new wide-ranging talks between officials occurred in September 1974. In August 1976, I published extensive quotes from the top-secret official report of the talks.10 This time the Americans had explained why NWC was particularly significant: it was the only VLF station whose signals could be received in the south-west Indian Ocean—a factor that could ‘become more critical later in the decade’ if the US deployed submarines with the powerful Trident missiles in the Indian Ocean.11
NWC was also important for communicating with US nuclear attack submarines in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. The Americans conceded that these submarines sometimes operated in the Indian and Pacific oceans without explaining their potentially destabilising impact on the nuclear balance. Sometimes called ‘hunter killers’, they have a critical role in US nuclear war-fighting strategy as they are able to trail Russian nuclear-missile-carrying subs with the aim of sinking them at the start of a nuclear war.12 This would undermine the other side’s retaliatory capability to deter a first strike—something the US refused to rule out. The Australian officials did not mention this problem, although it was of obvious relevance to NWC and became more so after China later deployed four nuclear-armed ballistic-missile submarines.
However, the officials did criticise Schlesinger’s nuclear war-fighting doctrine during the September 1974 talks, saying that Australia could support NWC’s role in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction where submarine-launched missiles were likely to be confined to deterrence. They said with uncommon bluntness that Schlesinger’s proposed use of nuclear weapons for ‘surgical strikes’ could change the character of the nuclear relationship to one where ‘Australia might see US policy as risking the use of nuclear weapons in circumstances that were unacceptable to us. In these circumstances, Australia could hardly be expected to facilitate a nuclear campaign in support of US policy.’13 The US side responded by saying that ‘relying on massive retaliation, with all its catastrophic risks, was essentially a bluff’, so more limited options were needed. The difficulty with the doctrine was that a limited war could easily escalate into a full-scale nuclear exchange.
After raising good questions that didn’t attract convincing answers, the Australian side ended the talks by saying they were satisfied that the existing arrangement for the US to use NWC ‘was unimpaired’.14 It was not clear why.
I reported in August 1974 that after the Australian officials returned to Canberra they complained that they had not seen Schlesinger’s congressional evidence where he said the Soviets could decide to attack VLF stations. A senior JIO official, Bob Mathams, cabled the Washington embassy to follow up these concerns.15 The answer was that both the diplomatic and military officials in the embassy had failed to understand the crucial importance of Schlesinger’s congressional answers about VLF stations being targets and had never relayed them to Canberra. Mathams said in a subsequent top-secret minute that my article’s reference to the officials’ concerns about Schlesinger’s statement to Congress ‘may be used to support a contention that NWC is a nuclear target and that US officials were less than honest in the discussions of this matter with the Australians’.16 They were indeed less than honest.
The same lack of candour applied to the Americans’ claim during the joint discussions that tight controls would prevent an accidental or unauthorised launch of a submarine ballistic missile. A fuller account would have acknowledged the serious risks of a nuclear war starting by accident or misunderstanding, as evidenced by the numerous close calls during the Cold War. As the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons concluded in 1996, ‘The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used—accidentally or by decision—defies credibility.’17
Given the risks, Whitlam’s desire to have greater control over NWC was not quixotic. Until all nuclear weapons were abolished, he accepted a role for deterrence between the superpowers. But the magnitude of the destruction if a war occurred by accident or otherwise helped explain his desire to stop Australia, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, relaying orders via NWC to fire nuclear-armed missiles from submarines. The
practical sticking point was that the US—which hadn’t ruled out the first use of nuclear weapons—would never agree not to use NWC in a nuclear war. Whitlam ended up accepting this, but he was entitled to feel that a more determined diplomatic effort could have achieved a concrete commitment from the US to consult Australia.
My observation as a journalist during the Whitlam years is that most government departments made a serious effort to serve the government. This was a key reason why much of Labor’s policy was quickly implemented. Some senior diplomats and officials in Defence were the dishonourable exceptions.
A summary of the destructive power of submarine-launched warheads also helps explain Whitlam’s approach. When Labor came to power, the Polaris submarines each carried sixteen missiles, whose lack of accuracy best suited them to attacking cities and industrial centres. China was the main target for the submarines based in the Pacific. Each missile could hit a city with an explosive power of 1 megaton (over sixty times bigger than the power of the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima). The more devastating Poseidon missile began to replace the Polaris in the early 1970s, and was itself replaced by the more powerful and long-ranging Trident missile. The precision and manoeuvrability of the Trident’s warhead lets it attack military targets as well as cities anywhere on the globe. Each of the US Navy’s fourteen big Ohio-class submarines can carry up to twenty-four Trident missiles, each with up to fourteen manoeuvrable warheads with a yield of up to 475 kilotons. Each submarine could destroy 336 cities.
The US and Russia have since agreed to reduce the number of submarine-launchable warheads on each side to 700, but that’s still enough to destroy 700 big cities and kill hundreds of millions of their inhabitants. Worse, these agreements seem unlikely to be renewed.