PEACEMONGER: Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher.

• Author: Littlewood, David

PEACEMONGER: Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher

Editors: May Bass and Mark Derby

Published by: Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa, Wellington, 2022, 196pp, $35.

An alternative sub-heading for this book might well have been 'Researcher, Activist, Writer, Anti-Spy'. It is the first full-length account of the life of Owen Wilkes, best-known as a pioneering peace researcher between the 1960s and the 1990s, but who also made significant contributions to New Zealand archaeology and conservation work. Following an introduction by co-editor Mark Derby, the book comprises twelve chapters written by Wilkes's friends, colleagues and collaborators, as well as a timeline of his life and a bibliography of his publications.

That the list of Wilkes's publications extends over eleven pages is an indication of just how prolific he was. Despite not having formal tertiary qualifications, he was able to employ a self-taught research methodology to amass information and expertise on a broad range of subjects. His principal focus was on piecing together evidence from a wide range of publicly available, but often obscure, government and military sources to reveal the existence and purpose of foreign military installations. These extended from the use of a small nuclear reactor to power the US McMurdo Base in Antarctica, to the role of large US military facilities in the Philippines, to the presence of an electronic surveillance centre at Tangimoana. Wilkes also enjoyed stints as a guest researcher at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, and at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Perhaps his greatest success was in helping to expose that a planned Omega navigation station to be installed in the South Island high country could be used by submerged US submarines for locational and missile-targeting purposes. The resulting protests meant construction of the planned Omega station was abandoned by the New Zealand government and shifted to Australia.

The various contributors to the book are ideally placed to shed light on the full range of Wilkes's body of work. His exposure of the US installation of a nuclear reactor in Antarctica is documented by a journal article he published in 1978 with Robert Mann; his research into foreign bases in New Zealand is covered in chapters by Murray Horton and David Robie; his stints at peace research institutes in Norway and Sweden are detailed by Nils Petter Gleditsch...