As clickbait, the saga of
OceanGate’s Titan submersible belongs to the same genre of
real time news countdowns as the boys
trapped in the Thailand caves, the trapped
miners in Peru and the 18 month old baby girl trapped
down a well in Texas. Except in the Titan’s case….
The minute by minute staples of real time coverage (the
search is entering its third day, the crew’s oxygen supply
is running out etc etc) were bogus. The US Coast Guard
Service (the managers of the search effort) had been told
with a high level of certainty that secret sonar devices had
indicated the sub had fatally imploded around the time when
first contact had been lost.
But here’s the thing.
If that fact had been conceded at the outset, the story
would have focussed on the location of the US listening
devices and on their wondrous ability to detect abnormal
incidents at immense depth, hundreds of kilometers out into
international waters. On that point, the 24/7 news coverage
of the “search” served a useful role for the Pentagon in
diverting public attention.
Looking ahead, the same
over-riding need to return that listening system to secrecy
will probably blur any attempt to retrieve the true cost of
the Coast Guard search. Those costs will almost certainly
not be borne by OceanGate’s insurers. Any insurance
company worth its salt would have a field day in court
grilling the Coast Guard as to why it had added to the
escalating costs of a search effort that it knew (with
almost total certainty) to have been in vain. In all
likelihood, the Pentagon will quietly pay the Coast Guard
for its efforts at distracting public and media attention
away from the US military’s hitherto unknown tools of
maritime surveillance.
Local resonance
Still,
that US maritime detection system has to have serious
implications for the viability of the Australian
nuclear-propelled submarine fleet central to the AUKUS
military pact. If, in 2023, maritime surveillance is as
sophisticated as the Titan incident would suggest, isn’t
it likely that by the time those Aussie nuclear submarines
are delivered and in service (Which won’t be until the
early 2030s and 2040s) they will be readily detectable by
China, and therefore somewhat redundant? Evidently, there is
an arms race – or ears race – currently underway to
render the oceans fully transparent, for the military
purposes of detection and destruction.
That looming
reality is of course, a $A468 billion problem for the
Australians to ponder. Yet New Zealand is also being wooed
to join AUKUS in some as-yet unspecified secondary capacity,
on the basis that AUKUS is a necessary component of the
Western military stance towards China. Before we sign on,
the public deserves to be informed as to whether
anti-submarine warfare detection (and counter-defence
measures) will soon render the expensive crown jewels of the
AUKUS alliance all but obsolete.
We also need to know
the likely cost to our exporters to China, if New Zealand
does publicly sign up to AUKUS. There would surely be some
form of retaliatory action taken by China. We also need to
know what access, if any, our tech sector will have
to transform and monetise any of the advanced cyber
technology that the US is reportedly willing to share with
New Zealand, on condition that we agree to climb on board
the AUKUS train.
Will access to that super-duper
secret cyber tech know-how be limited solely to the
SIS/GCSB/NZDF? Probably. If so, how could that possibly
compensate and console our farmers and foresters if and when
Beijing decides to punish our decision to join AUKUS by
obstructing our current range of exports to China. Would
tourism from China also be negatively
affected?
Plus… How, exactly, would our subordinate
role inside an aggressive forward projection pact like AUKUS
overlap with our membership of the Five Eyes security
alliance? Within Five Eyes, New Zealand is seen to be
something of a dovish outlier, when it comes to the imminent
threat that’s allegedly posed by China to Western
interests around the world, and in the Indo-Pacific region
in particular.
In that respect, being wooed to join
AUKUS could be seen as an attempt by our allies to
neutralise our dovish tendencies. Doves tend to have a hard
time co-existing with hawks.
Eyes and
Ears
There’s also a good reason why everyone calls
it Five Eyes and not Five Ears. Five Eyes reflects the
historical emphasis on aerial and satellite surveillance
from afar. It does not suggest the current scale of
intrusive listening being conducted by the West’s
security services via phone taps, maritime surveillance, and
by the active monitoring of the private messages carried by
underwater telco cables.
Five Eyes members had their
annual get-together in New Zealand this week, behind the
usual blanket of secrecy. Surely – one would have thought
– New Zealand should not have to sign up to the AUKUS pact
in order to gain privileged access to top-shelf
cyber-security secrets. Shouldn’t New Zealand being a
paid-up member of the Five Eyes alliance give us automatic
access to that kind of stuff – and if not, why not? Why
are we being encouraged to take the additional step of
signing up to some as-yet unspecified supportive role within
AUKUS?
Of course, we can only speculate about the
motives for imposing an extra burden of subservience on New
Zealand. For what it’s worth, my guess is that the US would
always be wary of sharing the really advanced digital
technology and systems knowledge with New Zealand. Look what
happened the last time they did that.
I’m not
talking about ANZUS, but about the fact that New Zealand
proved to be a relatively easy point of entry penetrated by
Nicky Hager in the mid 1990s. It was Hager’s book
Secret Power that first revealed the existence of the
US global eavesdropping system called Echelon. He was able
to do so because he could take full advantage of the lax
precautions then in place within our security services. For
such historical reasons, New Zealand is probably not seen to
be a safe pair of hands. Participating in AUKUS looks more
like a way of our allies keeping us in line, rather than a
means of actually sharing the truly important new cyber-tech
know-how.
In the meantime, China tends to be extra
nice to New Zealand on trade access. To repeat: that’s
solely because we’ve been seen to be a peaceable maverick
among Western powers when it comes to our defence and
security attitudes to Beijing. If we are to abandon that
stance in favour of joining AUKUS, we need to be very clear
about the cost/benefit outcomes of doing so.
It would
be such a shame, Chinese diplomats are probably already
indicating to their New Zealand counterparts, if your farm
and forestry exports happened to run into lots more
regulatory red tape, longer port clearance delays and new
phyto-sanitary standards. Lets just hope that there is an
informed public debate on the likely downstream costs and
benefits before any decision is made that ties New Zealand
into playing an official role inside AUKUS.
Songs of
survival news
Coverage of people facing death in real
time may have become a staple of 24/7 news, but there’s an
older tradition of songs along the same lines. Here from
1960, is a blow by blow tale of a small child in peril in
the Australian outback:
And here’s a similarly
inspirational Canadian minng rescue mission, also told
grippingly in real time:
Less happily, here’s Abner Jay
doing a song about the loss of the Thresher nuclear
submarine in 1963. Jay usually made his eccentric recordings
as a one-man band, but this early track has his performing
with a band, and with heavenly choral overdubs to
boot:
