- AUCKLAND, (AFP) - An American
soldier will Friday raise a red flag over a lonely Pacific atoll and in
the process begin the last stage of a multi-billion-dollar effort to find
out whether it is possible to shoot down an incoming ballistic missile.
-
- The flag will warn locals that there will be no fishing
this weekend on Kwajaleins 1,722-square-kilometre (655-square-mile) lagoon
-- the world's largest.
-
- Part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein
is home to the United States Army's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense
Test Site.
-
- This week the Pentagon said that on July 14 it would
launch a Minuteman II ballistic missile from California's Vandenberg Air
Force Base. Twenty minutes later and 7,700 kilometres (4,774 miles) to
the west, at Kwajalein, an interceptor missile equipped with an "exo-atmospheric
kill vehicle" will be launched in the hope of hitting the Minuteman.
-
- Miss or hit, pieces of the missile will splash down into
Kwajalein.
-
- Security on Kwajalein is heavy with extra US military
police bought in. In May the environmental organisation Greenpeace sent
its ship Rainbow Warrior II to Kwajalein. Two people were arrested.
-
- An activist, Alice Leney, is currently living in an observation
post on the atoll, watched by a Marshall's patrol boat.
-
- Kwajalein's landscape is littered with radar domes, missile
launchers and pieces of hardware that travellers are not allowed to know
about -- and a golf course down the side of an enormous runway.
-
- Around 2,500 personnel live on the main island at Kwajalein
and Roi-Namur Island while the 10,000 Marshallese who once lived around
the 90 islets are now confined to 32-hectare (80-acre) Ebeye.
-
- Kwajalein was occupied for thousands of years by Micronesians
who lived off the rich fishing grounds in the lagoon. Spain and Germany
both claimed it and occupied it for a time and from 1914 it was taken over
by the Japanese who developed a naval base there.
-
- In February 1944 the United States hit the atoll heavily
before soldiers went ashore. In the three-day battle that followed, 142
Americans were killed -- against 4,938 Japanese dead.
-
- During the 1940s and 1950s Kwajalein supported the atmospheric
nuclear testing programme at nearby Bikini and Enewetak.
-
- In the late 1950s, growing Soviet success with ballistic
missiles prompted the US Army to try developing its new Nike-Zeus and Nike-X
missiles which were to shoot down the incoming missiles. This led to the
first use of Kwajalein, to fire the missiles at rockets launched from California.
-
- Kwajalein played a key role in former US president Ronald
Reagans proposed Star Wars defense system and although the programme has
waxed and waned over the years, there has always been a steady flow of
tests on the atoll.
-
- Greenpeaces Alice Leney on Kwajalein, who is keeping
an internet diary for the organisation, described the scene: "The
incessant sound of the lagoon lapping the sand; the gentle breeze in the
palms; the constant drone of mosquitoes; the lights of a missile launch
pad. Ah well, it cant all be perfect....
-
- "The Americans have imported a large number of military
policemen for the coming test I am told, and they would like the Marshall
Islands to contribute, as surely nations that are friends would look after
one anothers interests."
-
- But she said President George W. Bush had abandoned US
commitments to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming which was to have prevented
sea level rise which threatens atoll nations like the Marshalls.
-
- "Do I detect an incywincy little double standard
here? Sea level rise threatens to obliterate the entire nation of the Marshall
Islands if we continue to avoid taking action. The Marshalls are nothing
but a nation of atolls and coral islands.
-
- "Will the US stand "shoulder to shoulder"
with the Marshallese on this issue, or only on the issues that suit the
US?"
|
