Omega Campaign Of 1968-69

An Important And Well-Earned Victory, Flaws Aside

- Maire Leadbeater

2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the “year of revolution”; mass factory and university occupations in France, the rise of the civil rights movement in the US, and defiant upheavals in Italy, Northern Ireland and Pakistan.  And world-wide rage about the US-led war on the people of Vietnam. New Zealand’s 1968 uprising was the protest action against a proposed US Omega navigation facility with strategic military and nuclear war-making implications. The high-profile campaign galvanised the student movement and the broad Left – the unions, progressive churches, academics and peace groups.(1)

There was a new local target for all the anger and despair people felt about US aggression in Vietnam and the escalating nuclear arms race.  Cold War superpower rivalry seemed to be bringing the world to the brink of disaster:  it was around this time that the BBC documentary “The War Game” depicting the horrifying aftermath to a nuclear strike on Britain screened in New Zealand cinemas. For the campaigners, the proposed station represented a direct consequence of New Zealand’s military ties with the US – dealing us into the “war game”

Omega Was Our “1968”.   

Our “1968” is a bit of our history well worth celebrating because the proposed Omega transmitter was never built here.  So, it was a significant win for the local campaign.  When the US proposed to site the station across the Tasman a strong campaign, well supported by Owen Wilkes, Phil Howell and other New Zealanders, forced a decade long delay.  

The Australian Government accepted the project in March 1971 but the Omega transmitter did not open for business until 1982.  The giant tower, Australia’s tallest man-made structure, was built in Gippsland, Victoria and remained there until 2015 although it had been decommissioned as a defence facility in 2008.  The decision to demolish was made after an unfortunate base jumper plunged to his death from the tower because his parachute failed to open.  (2)

The public narrative of the New Zealand government of the day was that the protest campaign was irrelevant to the US decision to site the station in Australia.  According to Prime Minister Holyoake: “As for the claim of the Omega critics that this agitation led to the selection of Australia rather than New Zealand, you will be familiar with the Aesop fable about the rooster who thought his crowing made the Sun rise”. (3)

However, Holyoake was being disingenuous; the now declassified Government documents from the time cast a new light on the saga. In April 1969 a US Navy technical team led by Captain MX Polk visited.  Polk was an effective and disarming salesperson, and happy to defend his project in a media conference.  A few days later, Cabinet agreed “that the United States authorities should be advised that in view of the expenditure likely to be involved New Zealand is unable to offer facilities in New Zealand for the establishment of an Omega station”.(4)

It was decided that no public announcement would be made until after a decision to site the stations in Australia had been announced.  The United States was advised and no formal request for New Zealand to host an Omega station was ever made.  As I will detail subsequently, the Government played a game of charades with the concerned public for the next two years.  

Omega: Important Navigation Aid In Pre-GPS Times

Omega was a world-wide system of navigation which relied on Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio waves, which have the advantage of being minimally attenuated by the ionosphere. The narrow band hyperbolic transmissions thus remain stable many thousands of kilometres from the source. The Omega system required receivers to be located strategically around the globe, each one of which transmitted sequentially.  Ultimately eight Omega transmitters were established:  in Argentina, Liberia, Norway, La Reunion Island, Japan, Australia, North Dakota and Hawaii. One was also briefly sited in Trinidad.

The debate in New Zealand was sparked by a June 1968 article in the Christchurch Press stating that the US Navy planned to build an Omega transmitter in the mountains of the South Island. US naval experts favoured a mountainous site because at the time the favoured way of setting up the transmitter antenna was to string it across a valley from high points on either side.  According to the Press report, US experts had already inspected three sites in the Lake Sumner and Lake Pearson areas and the Omarama district of North Otago.

A Special Emergency edition of the University of Canterbury student paper Canta came out less than two weeks later and it spread throughout the country with a record total sale of 72,000 copies.(5) Canta told its readers that an Omega station was set to be an essential submarine navigation aid and would therefore make us a key nuclear target if war broke out. On 28 June when 4,000 people marched through Christchurch it was the largest anti-war demonstration the city had seen.  In Wellington trade unions demonstrated at the opening of Parliament. 

Omega Made Owen Wilkes’ Name

After a solid ten days doing preliminary research in the Library, Owen Wilkes* sent away requests to obtain US Government Research and Development reports, one of which specifically described how Omega was compatible with and enhanced the performance of navigation aids already installed in missile submarines. 

The controversy was unusually high level and technical and leading academics and intellectuals played strong roles in teach-ins and debates. University physicists were prominent up and down the country: RJ Offen at Otago, RM Gould at Victoria and Geoff Austin, Don Hutton and Phil Howell at Canterbury.  Phil Howell, a radio engineer, wrote copiously for activist publications, newspapers and other journals.

His writing combined analysis and technical information with a passionate emphasis on New Zealand’s right to maintain its sovereignty.  In an article for the New Zealand Methodist he ended with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that there be a referendum and if sufficient people wanted to shelter under the US nuclear umbrella then, perhaps, we should become like Hawai’i, an overseas state of the Union. That way we would at least have voting rights and representation rather than being an “expendable portion of the United States military empire...” (6) Activists drew heavily on this technical research and expertise in their articles and lobbying.

In August 1968 the Royal Society presented the report that Government had commissioned and pro and anti-Omega forces drew different conclusions from its rather bland findings. The report said that the Omega transmitter would be of no direct use to New Zealand for coastal shipping as a station is unusable within about a 1,000-kilometre range. But External Affairs officials sent out a background “not for attribution” paper to media outlets emphasising the Royal Society conclusion that Omega should be “useful” as a long-range system because of New Zealand’s isolation.(7)

Omega was a military project led initially by the US Navy, and the debate in New Zealand focussed on the likely application of the new technology. The scientists judged that all the evidence, including that from electronics journals and other US publications, pointed to Omega being commissioned to meet the needs of ballistic missile submarines. US spokespeople insisted that Polaris submarines would not be fitted with Omega receivers and New Zealand spokespeople assured the public that Omega was not accurate enough for missile launching.

In 1982 Owen Wilkes, key contributor to the 1968 campaign, returned home to New Zealand after working at the prestigious Stockholm Institute for Peace Research (SIPRI) and the Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO).  He had continued to research navigation aids, including Omega, and he said he had got it wrong – Omega was not used for ballistic missile submarine navigation.(8)  

In 1987 Owen and his Norwegian peace research colleague, Nils Petter Gleditsch, published a scholarly tome about radio navigation aids Loran-C and Omega which details the uses for Omega – not for ballistic missile submarines but for a wide range of other roles in US counterforce strategy, including hunter-killer submarines. (9) The key driver of the project seems to have been the need to coordinate anti-submarine warfare – for hunter- killer submarines to work in coordination with Orion long range aircrafts, anti-submarine helicopters and ships.  This would be facilitated if all used the Omega system.

Desmond Ball, prominent Australian defence strategist, said of the hunter-killers that target Soviet submarines that they have “a counterforce capability essentially similar to that of ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) ...” and because they threaten Soviet second-strike capability “they are inimical to stable deterrence”.  (10)

So, the protestors were right and wrong at the same time. Right that Omega was planned as a key element of US nuclear strategy, but wrong about the ballistic missiles’ submarines. Instead, these vessels used a combination of inertial guidance and the global low frequency radio navigation aid Loran-C. 

The explanation for this error is complex – it is likely that Omega was considered for ballistic missile submarines until 1966 and authoritative technical literature including defence publisher Jane’s supported this scenario based on Omega’s underwater reception capabilities. With the benefit of hindsight, Wilkes and Gleditsch suggest there should have been a stronger research focus on the Loran-C navigation system. 

Submarines carry an inertial navigation system which measures the vessel’s motion from a fixed starting point using a gyroscopic system. Inertial guidance systems need to be realigned with a surface-dependent navigational system. These days the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) has made radio systems such as Omega and Loran-C redundant. The Omega navigation system shut down in 1997, although the Gippsland tower continued to be used for some years after that as a uni-directional communicator to submarines.

* Several years later, in the mid 1970s, Owen Wilkes went on to become one of the founders of what is now CAFCA. And, in the 1980s, he was a founder of the Anti-Bases Campaign. Murray Horton’s obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm. It is also worth mentioning just where the September 1982 Press reference (endnote 8, cited in the above subsection) was found – in CAFCA’s Security Intelligence Service file. As for Owen’s own file, despite him having been dead since 2005, the SIS has still not agreed to release more than a token amount of it. Ed.

The Game Of Charades

Captain Polk referred to a likely cost to New Zealand of the construction as being somewhat less than $2 million. Owen Wilkes’ research in US journals suggested a figure of $1.6 million (roughly equivalent to $28 million today) for the capital cost and $300,000 a year running costs. Quite an ask for no clear gain to the host country; Omega was not going to be useful for New Zealand shipping because of the “near zone effect” and the Omega transmissions would have a negative impact on important local research projects concerned with very low frequencies.   

However, the level of protest was certainly the reason for not announcing the decision. George Laking, Secretary of External Affairs, recommended to the Prime Minister that the US Ambassador be advised that we would not announce the decision because “it would imply that the agitation against a station on grounds of opposition to nuclear involvement with the United States had had an impact”.(11) Similar messages were passed on to Canberra. I have been able to find no hint of how the US reacted to this news, but it does not seem that they challenged their junior ally. George Laking cabled this advice to his colleague Frank Corner in Washington:

“It will clearly be of considerable importance in the context of US/NZ relations that the Government’s position is not repeat not misrepresented. It will be necessary to ensure that there is no repeat no suggestion that the Government has bowed to the illogical agitation that the United States proposal has caused in New Zealand”.

“The Prime Minister has agreed that no repeat no indication of the Government’s position should be given until the United States authorities indicate that an Australian site has been selected .... There is presumably a possibility that the Americans may be able to make more specific and more favourable financial offers if they wish for other reasons to have the station in New Zealand but the Prime Minister gave no repeat no encouragement of this possibility”. (18)

In 1976 a PRIO publication by Albert Langer (with Owen Wilkes and Nils Petter Gleditsch) revealed that the US Navy had settled on using an Australian site as early as May 1969.  A contract for the transmitter and equipment was let at that time with Litton Industries, Littcom Systems.(12)  Subsequently, technical advances made it possible to build the Omega antenna as a tower rather than a valley span(13), but whether this development was prompted by a lack of suitable remote valley sites in Australia is hard to judge.

“Don’t Ask, “Don’t Tell”

While this clandestine “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation persisted, the debate and campaign went on unabated.  Nicholas Turner, a Rightwing journalist with unusually friendly connections to key figures in the Department of External Affairs and to the Prime Minister, wrote a long critique of the movement and its “misuse” of source material during the controversy.(14)  Turner did find errors in quotes, but went on to make a few misquotes himself. Predictably, this notched up the rhetoric from the anti-Omega proponents, who were aware of Turner’s pro US views on the Vietnam War. 

Cock magazine called him a “scurrilous conniving, petulant intelligent deceitful and arrogant CIA/Ky pimp”. (15) (Apparently, Turner was present in the entourage of South Vietnamese leader Air Vice Marshal Ky, when Ky visited New Zealand in 1967. In later life Turner viewed the Vietnam War as having helped to stem the tide of Communism in South East Asia, and to that extent it could be claimed as a victory for the US – although they “stayed too long”(16)).

However, it seems that even Nicholas Turner was not told of the 1969 Cabinet decision. In 1972 he was writing pro-Omega articles for the Australian media from his base in South Vietnam. He enquired in 1972 whether New Zealand ever “indicated to the United States authorities that it did not wish to have a station built in New Zealand?”(17)  

Prime Minister Holyoake answered indirectly saying that New Zealand never received a request but the “likely cost was certainly very much a factor in our minds at the time and the Omega Project Office was made well aware of this, but as you know there were other aspects such as the effect on scientific research.”(19) Sir Keith Holyoake commented that he looked forward to meeting Turner and his wife on their imminent return to Wellington from South Vietnam.

Anti-Omega campaigners were aware of Turner’s connections to Ministry officials. Phil Howell described him in a letter to the Christchurch Star as an: “exegetist for the Royal Society, ‘fall-guy’ for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Devil’s advocate for a gratuitous foreign military installation on New Zealand’s soil...’(20)

For their part, officials were not averse to a little digging about their opponents. One memo is headed “Omega: Personalities In The Dispute” and it records the comments of US diplomat Roger Schrader who had met with two US expatriates living in Dunedin, both vocal critics of US foreign policy and one of them a leader in the anti-Omega campaign.  Written comments on the bottom of the report ask “would Security Service be interested?” The response was “Suggest not”.(21) An amusing interchange yes, but a reminder also, that for a Government tied into military alliances with the US, anti-war activism poses a real threat, one against which it will use secrecy, subterfuge and even surveillance.

Tremendous Boost to 70s’ Anti-Bases Campaign

The Omega campaign stopped the construction of the facility in New Zealand and significantly delayed its construction in Australia. It gave a tremendous boost to the strong anti-base campaigns of the early 1970s:  against Project Longbank at RNZAF Base Woodbourne, Blenheim (nuclear test scorekeeper), the Mount John Observatory, near Tekapo, Mackenzie Country (supplying data to the US Aerospace Defense System) and the campaign for the demilitarisation of Harewood (Christchurch Airport).

As a final comment I was dismayed to see documents relating to the early 1980s’ discussion about installing an Omega monitor in the Gracefield laboratory of the former DSIR (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research).  It was said to be one of more than 40 in various countries used to collect data to improve the system. A 1983 press clipping from the Evening Post affirms that the monitor was installed.(22) I don’t know of any protest about this - by this time, no doubt, most anti-war activists were focussing on US nuclear warship visits.

Endnotes

  1. Omega Action Committee, CND, International Fellowship of Reconciliation, Dunedin Voice of Women, Peace Committee of the Society of Friends, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – and many others.
  2. “Australia’s tallest man-made structure, the Omega tower, demolished in Gippsland”, 22/4/15. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-22/omega-tower-australias-tallest-man-made-structure-demolished/6412100
  3. Letter from PM Keith Holyoake to Nicholas Turner, 22/8/72. National Archives: (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade) 35/11/2/6 Part 5A “New Zealand Affairs-Economic Affairs- Scientific Liaison with other countries-USA: Omega Navigation System”.
  4. National Archives (Treasury) 52/1010 Pt 1 ‘Omega Navigation System’.
  5. See Owen Wilkes, "Protest; Demonstrations Against The American Military Presence In New Zealand: Omega 1968, Woodbourne 1971, Mount John 1972, Harewood/Weedons 1973 (Wellington: A Taylor, 1973).
  6. New Zealand Methodist, 5/11/70.
  7. Owen Wilkes, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and Ingvar Botnen, "Loran-C And Omega : A Study Of The Military Importance Of Radio Navigation Aids" (Oslo: Norwegian University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press [distributor], 1987). p. 233-34.
  8. Press, 2/9/82.
  9. Wilkes, Gleditsch, and Botnen, "Loran-C And Omega : A Study Of The Military Importance Of Radio Navigation Aids".
  10. Quoted in ibid.p.156.
  11. Memo George Laking to Prime Minister, 24/4/69 35/11/2/6 Part 5A.
  12. Memo from George Laking to Frank Corner, 24/4/69, 35/11/2/6 Part 5A.
  13. Albert Langer with Owen Wilkes and Nils Petter Gleditsch. “The Military Functions Of Omega And Loran C”, PRIO publication 11-19, 2nd printing May 1976, p. 254
  14. New Zealand officials were aware of this tower development in December 1970.  (Memo from Secretary of Foreign Affairs, 15/12/70, marked for Australian and New Zealand eyes only.  35/11/2/6 Part 5A)
  15. Nicholas Turner. “Omega: A Brief Inquiry Into The Misuse Of Source Material In The Omega Controversy”, Wellington, 1969. 
  16. Albert Langer with Owen Wilkes and Nils Petter Gleditsch. “The Military Functions Of Omega And Loran C”, PRIO publication 11-19, 2nd printing May 1976, p.253.
  17. “War Stories: Vietnam Journalists Share Examples Of Courage”  https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/vietnam-stories/1967/war-stories-vietnam-war-journalists-share-examples-of-courage-1.495465
  18. Letter from Nicholas Turner to Sir Keith Holyoake, 31/7/72. National Archives: 35/11/2/6 Part 5A.
  19. Letter from PM Keith Holyoake to Nicholas Turner, 22/8/72. National Archives: 35/11/2/6 Part 5A
  20. Christchurch Star, 22/9/70.
  21. Note for File, “Omega: Personalities In The Dispute”, 17/6/69. 35/11/2/6 Part 5A
  22. Evening Post, 4/3/83.

Wilkes, Owen. "Protest; Demonstrations Against The American Military Presence In New Zealand: Omega 1968, Woodbourne 1971, Mount John 1972, Harewood/Weedons 1973".  Wellington: A Taylor, 1973.

Wilkes, Owen, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and Ingvar Botnen."Loran-C And Omega : A Study Of The Military Importance Of Radio Navigation Aids".Oslo: Norwegian University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press [distributor], 1987.


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