For several years the women in the campaign to shut down the base have been piecing together bits and pieces of information about the highly top secret, controversial intelligence operations carried out here. Beginning over seven years ago women who entered the base read documents they saw in various buildings. They worked together with investigative journalist Duncan Campbell to make sense of what they had found, and they pieced in bits of knowledge from other books, such as Nicky Hagar's Secret Power . New information about US plans to station weapons in space, including nuclear weapons, have recently completed the picture, as explained below.

It was proved early on that the base had won awards for its work in intercepting the strategic communications of all sides in the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. Later documents demonstrated that the base was collecting vital commercial information on various major arms and devlopment deals, and that a special office in Washington DC, the Office of Intelligence Liason, had been specifically set up to feed information on European contracts, etc., to the US business community. This information, passed to Duncan Campbell, then became part of the basis for similar newspaper reports in the United States, such as the Chicago Herald Tribune stories and the series in the Baltimore Sun. These, together with the Nicky Hagar book, also formed part of the information which was reproduced in a 1998 Report to the European Commission, "The Appraisal of Political Control" - which includes discussions of violations of civil liberties through US/UK spying on trade unions and ordinary citizens. These concerns have been further taken up by MPs such as Norman Baker, Alice Mann, Tony Benn and Ann Cryer, whose late husband Bob Cryer had called an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on the NSA and Menwith Hill, as well as by MEPs Ellie Poojit van Rogan, Christine Oddy, David Bowie and Peter Crampton.

However, 1997 and 1998 saw major turning points in piecing together the puzzle palace of the National Security Agency and its cohort, the US Space Command . These turning points were caused by increased communication with and contact with the Colorado-based Citizens for Peace in Space. Their visit to Menwith Hill last year was a source of mutual revelations, as was our visit to Colorado Springs only last month. The picture we have been building for several years is finally filling out in even more meaningful, though menacing, ways.

The new generation of military satellites can both hear (any electronic signal, including financial transactions) and see (via infraredphotography, etc.) everything on the various surfaces of the planet. Recent tests, as well as the literature of the US Space Command itself, confirm that the next step is to put orbiting weapons into space, so as to fully dominate the high ground . They intend these weapons to be both nuclear in nature and/or powered by nuclear fission, as in the case with orbiting lasers. Reagan's Star Wars is not finished. The only surprise, for some people, is that the weapons will be targeting the surface of the earth, not simply shooting at missiles far out in space. This will give the United States complete control over the planet on both an economic and physical force dimension. The project's supporters are aware of this, and their language reflects it. As Professor Michio Kaku and Dr. Karl Grossman express it, there will be hundreds of Chernobyls orbiting over our heads. This is not the kind of national security that women and children can afford, or anyone else for that matter.

The plans of the US Space Command, and the activities of the US National Security Agency, must be brought more widely to public attention. The matter is an urgent one. We must act now, before the envisioned siting of these weapons by the year 2020.