Pine Gap provides early warning of missile launches.

Pine Gap provides early warning of missile launches.

CANBERRA - Australia is being locked deeper into America's global military agenda with the construction of a new spy base in Western Australia to help the United States wage wars in Asia and the Middle East.

The new facility, to be built at Geraldton, north of Perth, will join the existing major US spy bases at North West Cape, also in WA, and Pine Gap near Alice Springs, both of which have played key roles in in previous conflicts.

Further communications bases may also be built in Australia to provide US troops with instant and highly detailed battlefield information.

Canberra has already tightened its security co-operation with the US through a range of measures including participation in the proposed "son of Star Wars" national missile defence system, increased training, and new military hardware designed to enable Australian troops to fight with American forces abroad.

Although already drawing fire for potentially further embroiling the nation in US conflicts and raising its profile as a possible nuclear and terrorist target, the new base is unlikely to draw serious political opposition.

The Coalition Government and the Labor Party are strongly committed to the US alliance, regarding it as the cornerstone of Australia's defence strategy - even with the furore between the major parties over the nation's involvement in the Iraq war.

The agreement to build the new installation, revealed yesterday in the Melbourne newspaper the Age, followed three years of secret negotiations, although Washington had two years previously indicated its wish to add new electronic and communications facilities in Australia.

Existing US spy bases in the country are central to its global security system. Pine Gap, known as the Joint Defence Space Research Facility, is one of the world's biggest and most important US satellite ground stations, harvesting electronic intelligence and providing early warning of missile launches.

The Naval Communications Station Harold E. Holt near Exmouth in the remote northwest of WA - the most powerful transmitter in the Southern Hemisphere - provides very-low-frequency radio signals to US and Australian submarines.

Until 1999 the US also operated the Joint Defence Facility at Nurrungar, near Woomera in Outback South Australia, which during the Cold War was the only station capable of monitoring any first-strike missile launches by the former Soviet Union.

Nurrungar was one of the USSR's highest-priority nuclear targets, a threat confirmed in top-secret US intelligence threat assessments declassified several years ago.