What Goes On

At Those Pacific

"Weather "Stations

By Ken Mcgregor

It’s hard to believe tiny and forgotten Canton Island is doing her bit for the nuclear arms race.

Or Norfolk, Pitcairn, Tutuila

and Easter Islands, for that matter.

Spread widely across the South Pacific, they all, however, have or will have very soon, busy teams of US scientists unobtrusively going about their business.

Living apart from the townships of these islands and seldom mixing with residents, the scientists are operating relay stations, variously described as anything from “pure” weather centres to “communications projects”.

The stations are not merely, at great expense, looking for rain clouds; they are more likely connec

ted with communications experiments or tracking, for the US Air Force, anything from satellites to French nuclear tests or intercontinental missiles out of the US missile centre at Kwajalein, Marshall Islands.

One theory is the stations are aiding the experiments into the new multi-purpose missile, which Presi dent Nixon recently announced was currently being tested.

The missile shoots out from either the West Coast US or Kwajalein, and, in flight, ejects other comple mentary missiles which veer off in varying directions.

The varying directions of the weapon would explain the huge distances between the Islands stations.

There could be more stations, of course, on islands such as Midway, Christmas and Johnston.

What's going on?

Talk on Norfolk Island is that this island’s intriguing station at Collins Head, with its majestic 120 ft high aerial towers systemically decimating the local birds, is no less than an Early Warning Station for Australia.

Pitcairners have no such grandiose ideas about the station, but no one’s quite sure what’s going on at station headquarters. The island is currently hosting its second “Geodetic Team”, after the first team returned to the US, via Tahiti, late last year.

On Canton Island, despite a flurry because someone in the US Defence Department forgot to ask co-owner of the island, Britain, for permission to begin delicate tracking operations, it’s understood experiments (or some thing) are underway.

The cat was let out of the bag early last year when air force planes out of Pago Pago, American Samoa, started unscheduled trips to Canton {PIM, July, 1969, p. 28).

Movements at Canton were news to Britain’s Foreign Office, which at the time sent out hurried requests to the nearest British post, Tarawa, to find out what was going on.

Fortunately, there was no wrangle over the atoll similar to the one that took place just before the Pacific War.

Easter Island is another favourite landing place for the US Air Force in the Islands these days, even more so than LAN-Chile, which was to start jet services in early March.

Easjer Islanders agree that their island’s position as a monitoring station for French nuclear tests in the nearby Gambier Islands is still of value to the US. A recent visitor, however, told PIM the islanders now felt the local US team was concerned with its own country’s experiments.