N.Z. agrees to Omega monitor

Press, 4 March 1983, Page 1

N.Z. agrees to Omega monitor

PA Wellington The Government has agreed to help the United States improve its Omega radio navigation system. Omega was once a contentious issue in s New Zealand because it can be used by nuclear-armed submarines and the United States initially looked at this country as a site for a transmitter. The United States Ambassador, Mr Monroe Brown, and the Minister of Science, Dr Shearer, yesterday exchanged notes agreeing that the,D.S.I.R. should have an Omega monitor installed at its Gracefield laboratory. The American Embassy said the unit would be one of more than 40 in. various countries used to collect data to help improve the system. The Omega system is based on eight transmitters in Norway, Liberia, Hawaii, North Dakota, Reunion

Island (off the African east coast), Argentina, Australia, and Japan. It is a world-wide, allweather, low-frequency radio navigation system which can pinpoint positions of ships, aircraft, land-based vehicles, and shallowly submerged submarines to within two kilometres of accuracy during the day and four kilometres at night. When the United States was setting up the system in 1968, it looked at a number of possible sites in New Zealand to establish a transmitter.

Peace groups opposed this because they felt the Soviet Union would target the Omega transmitters in any war to distrupt the operating capability of United States nuclear submarines.

A paper prepared for the Labour Party by the peace campaigner, Mr Owen Wilkes, at the time mentioned “a public protest per-

haps more vigorous than that which developed over the commitment of New Zealand troops in the Vietnam war.” The apparent evil in Omega was its unique capability to give submerged submarines a navigational fix, Low-frequency radio waves penetrate seawater, meaning that submarines could navigate by the Omega system at depths of 10m to 12m. This was the first system allowing reliable submarine navigation without the need to put an antenna on the surface. The United States Embassy said yesterday that the new monitoring unit to be set up in New Zealand would consist of a “small amount” of recording equipment. It would be installed by the United States Coast Guard but run by the D.S.I.R. The New Zealand department would have access to all the data obtained, the embassy said.