A phone call was all it took. The UK prime minister Clement Attlee rang Menzies in September 1950 after the British high commissioner in Canberra had passed on a top-secret message on 16 September. The message, from Attlee to Menzies, said in part, ‘I am telegraphing to you now to ask first whether the Australian Government would be prepared in principle to agree that the first United Kingdom atomic weapon should be tested in Australian territory and secondly, if so, whether they would agree to our experts making a detailed reconnaissance of the Monte Bello Islands so that a firm decision can be taken on their suitability’. Menzies agreed without hesitation. The matter was not presented to Cabinet. The test date was to be sometime in 1952, as British scientists were scrambling to finalise construction of a workable nuclear device at Aldermaston. The British surveyed the remote Monte Bello Islands under the codename Epicure, the first of many codenames, to ensure that the area would be suitable to test Britain’s first ever atomic weapon. The agreement stitched up during that phone call still resonates.
Maralinga was neither Australia’s nor Britain’s finest hour. Both countries behaved at times with questionable ethics and little regard for future consequences. Later investigations revealed that insufficient safeguards were in place to protect people and land, even allowing for the less developed understanding of matters atomic back then. The harm done to the Indigenous population was substantial and shameful. The test authorities said openly at the time that there was ‘nothing to suffer damage except spinifex and mulga’ at Maralinga, despite the long and complex history of Indigenous presence there. One top-secret document prepared by the Australian minister for Supply Howard Beale when planning for the permanent test range said, ‘Revocation of an existing aborigines’ reserve would be involved … this could be achieved without undue difficulty as the area has not been used by aborigines for some years’. This statement was false.
Most of the events at Maralinga and the other nuclear test sites were top-secret. Today it may come as a surprise to the average person that Australia had a central place in the development of the atomic bomb. School history curricula tend not to mention this fact. Yet, while this country sacrificed much to assist Britain’s aspirations to become a nuclear nation, we did not benefit from it. The evidence suggests the opposite. The UK became the world’s third atomic power, after the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), while Australia was left with a radioactive contamination problem that cost tens of millions of dollars to mitigate. The report of the Royal Commission in the mid-1980s succinctly described Menzies’ actions in making Australian territory available without strong safeguards as both ‘grovelling’ and ‘insouciant’ – two words that capture perfectly the tone of controlled anger displayed throughout the report. The terms of the agreement struck between Australia and Britain, loosely worded as they were, were not to Australia’s advantage in either word or spirit. It is hard to imagine another country accepting the same conditions. Australia accepted them without any particularly strong overt pressure from the UK and even volunteered to bear part of the cost, which the British had not requested. The weight of colonial history provided the true pressure, reflecting how Australia saw itself in relation to Britain at that time.
Canada, suggested in the late 1940s as a possible test location for British bombs, was in many ways a more logical ally in nuclear weapons development. Like Australia, and in contrast to the UK, it had large swathes of lightly populated territory. Unlike Australia, it also had a well-developed research effort in the field and existing collaborations. Canada had a formal nuclear technology development relationship with the US and Britain – the ABC partnership – as part of the Manhattan Project. This gave Canada far higher status than Australia in the world’s small nuclear club, a status that would have ensured Canada a greater share of the fruits of the nuclear weapons research had the tests gone ahead there. Indeed, the British dangled the carrot of detailed weapons design information in front of the Canadians. Later, in 1963, Canada even began its own nuclear weapons development program before abandoning it and divesting itself of its permanently stationed nuclear weapons of US origin in 1984.
The UK couldn’t have access to the US test sites, so Canada was the next choice. The British surveyed seven sites there and favoured the remote northerly port of Churchill in Hudson Bay, part of the Province of Manitoba. However, when the Canadians learned that the British intended to conduct at least 12 major atomic bomb tests that would severely contaminate a new 450-metre circle each time, they swiftly declined. The Canadians were a little too concerned to protect their own interests.
Australia did not have the same standing in British eyes as Canada. Although both countries were former colonies, Australia had no form at all in the field. Until the postwar era, the best Australian physicists went abroad to do their research, including the great Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, who launched his formidable career at Cambridge’s legendary Cavendish Laboratory as a student of nuclear physics pioneer Ernest Rutherford. Australian nuclear physics research really got started when Oliphant, back in Australia, lured Ernest Titterton from the UK in the early 1950s. Titterton set up the Department of Nuclear Physics at Canberra’s fledgling Australian National University (ANU). The British atomic weapons test plan was being formulated at the time, and Titterton is prominent in the Maralinga story. The two men fell out though. Oliphant, one of the world’s most eminent scientists, was vociferously opposed to scientific secrecy and was considered by the Americans to be a security risk. The test authorities shunned him when he later became a critic of the nuclear tests in Australia.
This story is not as simple as the oppression of a former colony by a fading imperial power, however. Australia entered into the agreement with considerable ambitions of its own. The Menzies government had its reasons, not all of them sycophantic. One incentive was to maximise the value of the country’s newly discovered and extensive uranium resources. Uranium was the raw material for both atomic weaponry and atomic energy, but few countries in the world possessed it in such large and accessible quantities. Second, the Australian Government believed that if nuclear war loomed, assisting Britain with its nuclear program would help guarantee Australia’s own protection by Britain at least, and possibly the US as well. A third reason was that in the 1950s, Australia toyed with the idea of both civilian nuclear power and its own nuclear weaponry. Who better to learn from than the British (especially as the US would not countenance the idea)? But none of these ulterior motives came to fruition.
This story of many parts is also a Cold War tale. After the end of World War II, the British wartime leader Winston Churchill declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe. This ideological divide – between the West on one side and the communist nations headed by the USSR on the other – soon sparked an arms race based upon the devastating new weapons demonstrated in Japan. The Soviet Union, with considerable input from the atomic spies who feature later in this book, tested its own atomic bomb just four years later, in 1949.
The Cold War brought secrecy and suspicion into the dealings not just between enemies, but also between allies. In Australia, the Cold War ruptured security relationships with both Britain and the US. A spy ring uncovered after the war at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra implicated a number of Australian public servants (although no charges were laid). The British rocket tests at Woomera, also in the South Australian desert, were temporarily suspended because of these security concerns. Australia was forced to convince both the UK and the US that it could keep security secrets. Australia’s domestic spy service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), was established in 1949 during the dying days of the Chifley Labor government, under explicit pressure from the two allies. Despite the advent of ASIO, and the even more shadowy Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 1952, neither Britain nor the US really trusted Australia. In the end, Britain provided no nuclear secrets to Australia, and Australia was peculiarly reluctant to ask for
them, even when they were being gathered on its own soil.
This is a story of scientific progress as well, and particularly the relatively new science of nuclear physics. Many of the main protagonists in the Maralinga tale were physicists. Some were well inside the Maralinga tent, such as the head of the series, William Penney, and the scientist often said to have been ‘planted on Menzies’, Ernest Titterton. Titterton was famously characterised as a Dr Strangelove figure, and his reputation was trashed during the McClelland Royal Commission. Penney’s reputation came out the other side rather better, though still damaged by the cloak and dagger. Other scientists, particularly the Australians Mark Oliphant and Hedley Marston, were on the outer. They had grave doubts about the nuclear tests in Australia and paid a professional price for raising them.
The science itself is amazing. A once largely worthless heavy element, uranium, had suddenly and dramatically revealed its hidden explosive energy potential at the beginning of World War II. Physicists working in Britain recognised the significance of ‘splitting the atom’ and developed practical ideas about how to fashion an explosive device. They handed these over to the US Manhattan Project. Within six years, the basic physics that had brought to light hitherto unknown capacities in uranium had resulted in a bomb powered by uranium being dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later was powered by plutonium, a step-up in technology. Plutonium, a most unnatural and dangerous material, is one of the most important things to understand about Maralinga, because when plutonium fell to earth there it changed the landscape forever.
Australia’s media underwent a profound transition during the decades of this story. The articles published in the Australian media at the time of the nuclear tests, and particularly in the early years, were often deferential to Great Britain, overtly patriotic, uncritical of atomic weaponry or actively in favour of it, focused almost exclusively on storylines provided by official information, and lacking scientific detail or analysis. Almost always, statements from test personnel and from the Australian Government immediately allayed any safety concerns raised in these stories. Many of these assurances were shown later to be unfounded. A few contemporary stories were critical of delays to scheduled tests or raised questions about the safety of Indigenous people in the area and the cost-effectiveness of the Maralinga facility. Some were apparently motivated by ideological opposition to the federal government. But the general thrust of most stories and editorials was support of the test series and the nuclear ambitions that underpinned it. The high-profile scientists involved, such as Penney and Titterton, were not subjected to scrutiny.
This began to change in the mid-1970s with a series of stories characterised by a productive scepticism towards the governments involved in the testing, a far higher level of scientific literacy and insight, a diversity of sources and a willingness to confront the government with evidence of untruth and cover-up. With hindsight both the initial phase of secrecy and cover-up and the later uncovering seem inevitable. In fact, the same information controls were in operation in the late 1970s, and the Coalition government of the time, under Malcolm Fraser, was no keener to reveal the truth of Maralinga than the Menzies government before it, albeit for different reasons. But the rising voices of aggrieved military veterans and the advocacy of a small number of politicians such as Tom Uren provided new sources. The markedly different ways the British tests were covered by journalists in the two eras can be explained largely by the approach of the media and the anger of those harmed by the tests, not by changes to the operation of government. The journalists did a much better job in the later era, forcing a lot of the story into the light.
In the saga of nuclear colonialism portrayed in this book, a non-nuclear nation ceded part of its territory to an emerging nuclear nation to test the most destructive weapons ever invented. Australia provided the site, the political backing, many of the running costs of the Maralinga range and some of the logistics and military personnel. But the UK was always in charge. The absence of close contemporary scrutiny of these tests by either the Australian Government or the media allowed the test authorities to conduct experiments of exceptionally high risk and lasting danger. Many hundreds of Indigenous people lost access to their homelands and their traditional ways of life, swept away from the desert test sites like detritus. Military personnel from all the countries involved, but especially those of Britain itself, were exposed to radiation that may have made them ill. The test series included particularly dangerous experiments that left significant radioactive contamination at Maralinga. The nuclear tests were not subjected to the media scrutiny and analysis befitting their importance until many years later. In fact, the British nuclear tests are among the most significant events in Australia’s history not subjected to contemporary media scrutiny.
What are we to make of the events at Maralinga in the 1950s and 1960s? Australia was not a nuclear power. The nation was in a highly ambiguous position – it was the staging ground for nuclear weapons testing, but the tests themselves were run with obsessive secrecy and control by another nation, the ‘mother country’ herself. This made Australia, at least initially, curiously powerless and inept in dealing with the tests. The absence of media coverage and public debate created a gap in most people’s understanding of Maralinga, making it in many ways a uniquely tangled national issue, still obscure and perplexing. The fallout from nuclear colonialism in Australia was plutonium-soaked land, certainly, but also growing recognition of the risks inherent in abdicating control over the nation’s destiny. The mysteries of Maralinga and its toxic legacy continue to haunt Australia as the red dust of the old desert test site still swirls and the thunder echoes across the plain.
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Maralinga buried, uncovered
It was a dry wind,
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand,
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth
Paul Simon, ‘The Boy in the Bubble’, Graceland, 1986.
Mid-May 1984, autumn, and the plains of Maralinga are cooling down after a hot summer. At the moment it doesn’t get much above 22 degrees Celsius during the day, unlike in summer, when the daytime temperatures can exceed the mid-40s. At this time of year it goes down to a chilly 5 degrees Celsius overnight. The Maralinga lands are to the north of the Nullarbor Plain, on the eastern edge of the Great Victoria Desert, Australia’s largest desert. Maralinga is 850 kilometres from Adelaide and just north of the Indian–Pacific train line that carries passengers and freight across the continent. Tietkens Well, dug by the English explorer William Henry Tietkens in 1879, is the earliest token of European presence. The landscape is mostly flat, with some gently sloping hills on the horizon and many sand dunes. Most of the terrain is capped by rugged travertine limestone, up to 3 metres thick in places, forming a rocky crust. Its top surface has been busy eroding over millennia into dust that swirls constantly and often whips up into fierce, blinding storms. The overwhelming colour of the landscape is red, broken by the olive green of the stunted, scrubby saltbush, the needle-leaved mulga and the tussocky spinifex that dominate the vegetation. Bird life abounds – there are over 100 species in the area, including bellbirds, honeyeaters, bustards and kingfishers, and bird song is one of the dominant sounds, other than the wind.
The abandoned Maralinga atomic weapons testing range forms part of the western extremes of the much larger Woomera Prohibited Area, a chunk of South Australia that could accommodate England within its boundaries. The British used Woomera for even longer than Maralinga, to test postwar rocket technology. The entire area was surveyed by the legendary Australian bushman Len Beadell, who lent an air of larrikin myth to this vast expanse of outback. He told rollicking tales of his surveying adventures during the mid-1950s, assessing the land for its usefulness for testing atomic weapons. The surveying project was top-secret at the time,
though Beadell later wrote about it in two popular books that told the story of his time in the bush. Beadell and his men liked what they saw at X300, as they dubbed the area, and reported back to Professor William Penney, the head of the British nuclear weapons test authority, that it would be perfect for the task. Penney visited to see for himself, spirited there secretly in October 1953, and was well pleased. ‘It’s the cat’s whiskers’, he said. History would soon follow.
When it did, this ancient landscape saw some remarkable sights. Hydrogen-filled balloons bobbing around in the bright sky, bristling with measuring gear. Fifty-five-tonne metal scaffolds called, inexplicably, feather beds rising from concrete pads to hold simulated nuclear warheads that glinted briefly in the sun before being blown sky-high with trinitrotoluene (TNT). A Royal Air Force (RAF) Valiant aircraft releasing a bomb 10 000 metres in the sky, creating a mushroom cloud 150 metres above the plain as men in summerissue military shorts turned their backs to its sun-like brightness. Fifty-two-tonne Centurion tanks and other military vehicles scattered around seven major bomb sites. A village with a cinema, a swimming pool and single-men’s quarters made from prefabricated garages eventually large enough to accommodate thousands of men. An airstrip that felt the weight of both military and civilian aircraft. A network of sealed roads covering 130 kilometres that made travel around the site fast and easy. Then, suddenly, the forces of history departed and the site fell silent. But never again would it be pristine.
Atomic Thunder Page 2