While Washington sets the priorities and commands decision-making, Australian operational staff at the base are outnumbered by Australian ‘guards and gardeners’.

In the fast-moving first moments of the US conflict with China, Australia won’t have time to consider whether to become involved.

The Australian locations that have been made into forward war-fighting military bases against China, like Darwin, Fremantle and Tindal, operate as arms and legs of the US military machinery. And if they are the ‘arms and legs’, then the radomes and dishes of the Pine Gap intelligence and surveillance base are the ‘eyes and ears’.

Pine Gap is already an active war-fighter base, a key part of the United States global system of intelligence and military capability. The satellites of Pine Gap have been helping the US – in places like Gaza, Ukraine and Afghanistan – fight its wars for years, collecting intelligence, identifying targets, monitoring movements, helping to direct the drones and missiles and bombers.

In the first moments of a serious US conflict against China, the Prime Minister of Australia will call an emergency meeting of the National Security Committee (NSC) to approve Australian involvement.

By then, though – as we saw with Iran’s defensive strikes after the February attack by the United States – missiles defending China from apparent American attack will already be on their way and close to impact on the US bases on Australia soil.

The first target for destruction, the most important – with its ability to give the US instant real-time warning of missile launch locations, numbers, trajectory, and the targets of Chinese missiles – will be the US base of Pine Gap.

How do we know? A former Deputy Commander of the base and a highly respected Australian defence and intelligence analyst, Paul Dibb, has conceded the point:

“The joint US–Australia intelligence facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs will be by far China’s most important and time-urgent nuclear target.”

“The joint US–Australia intelligence facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs will be by far China’s most important and time-urgent nuclear target.”

It will be too late to listen to China’s warning to Australia this month that war is not just a theoretical risk. Following a series of earlier US test firings, on 6 July a Chinese Jin-class submarine test-fired a nuclear-capable hypersonic JL-3 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile. This unstoppable ballistic missile with its re-entry speed of 24,500 km/hr could reach Pine Gap in about five minutes after sub-sea launch.

It will be too late for the people in Alice Springs, 20kms north of Pine Gap. As Kieran Finnane reported in Declassified Australia, the first they would know would be the rumble and flash of the impacts and the rising mushroom cloud and a poisonous wind. No emergency sirens would rent the air, nor evacuation orders be broadcast, as none exist.

In Canberra, the meeting of the National Security Committee will be quickly cut short after word of the first impact is received, and the participants hurriedly ushered to a secure ‘situation room’ in the half-built bunker under Parliament House.

There they will have little time to consider the costs of their ‘full knowledge and concurrence’ embrace with the United States. They’ll most likely give the nod to orders for some Australian military responses, and then sit wide-eyed and stupefied at what they knowingly let happen, as US bases along with unlucky nearby towns around Australia are turned to dust.

Few details and little control

The responsible Australia government ministers have long insisted they have “full knowledge and concurrence” of the actions happening at the base the end of Hatt Road, 26 driving kilometres south of Alice Springs.

Sitting on Indigenous land and sovereign Australian territory, the ‘Joint Space Research Facility’ at Pine Gap was virtually handed over in December 1966 by the Liberal government of Harold Holt to a far-away nation ostensibly to conduct “space research”, which in reality was for illegal spying and carrying out catastrophic war.

The Whitlam government famously opposed the presence of US bases on Australian soil. In a parliamentary debate in May 1963 on control of America’s new Naval Communications Station at North-West Cape in Western........

© Pearls and Irritations