One of Penney’s many lasting contributions was Blue Danube, Britain’s first tactical nuclear weapon. The design of the weapon was solid, sound and (according to many, including official historian Margaret Gowing) better than comparable American bombs at the time. A fission weapon powered by plutonium, it was similar in many ways to the Fat Man device detonated over Nagasaki. However, its unique design features made it more efficient and easier to assemble, control, aim and store.
Penney brought an excellent problem-solving mind to the task and oversaw four secret research and development groups that worked on key aspects of the bomb’s design. The team also worked with a wide range of commercial engineering contractors and manufacturers throughout England and Wales. They managed to maintain a secret operation despite the many people involved. As Jonathan Aylen put it:
Blue Danube’s practical development was a product of a wider ‘warfare state’ of Cold War Britain, not just the product of a few boffins. In truth, the first atomic bomb was designed in suburban centres and built in ordinary factories down prosaic back streets by regular workers – men and women – in towns across industrial Britain.
There is something ineffably British in this process, just as when the Maud Committee used laboratory word games to come up with the most impenetrable codenames for work done in plain sight.
So Blue Danube was created in the dingy factories and hastily built research and development laboratories of postwar Britain. It came into being in a roundabout way, untested, during extraordinary and tumultuous times. The leaders of the project to create it, including the brilliant mathematical physicist Penney, were confident that it would work. But confidence is not enough. Weapons must always be tested. As the HER project proceeded, and the scientists conveyed their reports to their political masters, the next step was clear. Blue Danube would have to be exploded. Since the nuclear spies and the McMahon Act had put Nevada and New Mexico off limits, the question arose: where could the fledgling British nuclear deterrent be tested?
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Monte Bello and Emu Field
We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs …
We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.
Ernest Bevin, UK foreign secretary, at GEN.75, 1946.
I saw this ominous black atom bomb sitting on the top of the tower, bolted in place, winched up to the top on guiderails that I’d laid in. And I saw a crow sitting on it. I said to the crow, ‘if I were you, I’d shift’.
Len Beadell, legendary surveyor of Central Australia, speaking in 1991 about the first Emu Field atomic test held in 1953.
Australia in the 1950s was not a country casting a critical eye at the development of, or consequences arising from, nuclear testing. There is little evidence of the doubts and fears which American scientists who pioneered the nuclear project expressed.
Paul Malone and Howard Conkey, Canberra Times, 1984.
The McMahon Act was a terrible blow to William Penney and his team at Aldermaston. They had designed a technologically advanced atomic weapon, but they couldn’t test it at the American sites. As Penney said later in his statement to the Royal Commission, ‘I consistently took the view that I would prefer to use the existing American facilities, either in Nevada or the Pacific’. He was most at home in Nevada, where he had earned his nuclear weapons stripes in the inner circle of the Manhattan Project, and where he could work among trusted colleagues.
The decision to bar outsiders looked permanent in 1946, and the British had no time to lose. Some behind-the-scenes negotiation for ongoing low-key co-operation had taken place, albeit with some onerous conditions applied by the Americans, but all hope collapsed in 1950 when Klaus Fuchs was exposed as an atomic spy. The US could not afford to dice any further with disaffected scientists looking to make a high-minded ideological point. The decision was final. The Americans amended the Act in 1958, well after the first British atomic device had been tested, and invited them back. But until then Britain was on her own.
Penney assumed the next option would be Canada, which had been directly involved in the Manhattan Project. He was familiar with its expertise and infrastructure and conducted a feasibility study there in the late 1940s. In addition to a test site, he was looking for a long-term collaboration. The aim was to conduct the first British test in the northern summer of 1952. The location needed to be quite particular, because Penney was keen to test the effects of detonating a weapon based on his Blue Danube design aboard a ship. He wanted to analyse the minutiae of a phenomenon known as base surge, which involved a large upward movement of radioactive water into the air, when the products of a nuclear explosion mixed with fine droplets of water. Disappointingly, none of the seven ports he examined was suitable for a shipboard detonation. Nevertheless, Canada remained on the drawing board.
According to official British historian Margaret Gowing, Penney envisaged one or two annual trials for several years, at a site generously staffed and equipped with instruments. He recommended 200 scientists, 50 technicians and 100 industrial workers, at huge potential cost, for the first trial. ‘Most of the scientists would be provided by Britain, with help from the Canadians in chemical analysis and radiological safety, and most of the industrial workers by Canada; Canada would undertake the construction work; costs would be shared on an agreed basis.’ Canada’s wartime experience in contributing to the Manhattan Project provided a strong platform for a Canadian test program.
Penney had a variety of criteria he applied to the seven potential Canadian sites, mostly to do with climatic conditions, infrastructure and isolation. Churchill, Manitoba, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, seemed ideal, even though the shallowness of its port made base surge observations difficult or unlikely. Churchill is about 1600 kilometres north of the provincial capital of Winnipeg and extremely remote, not to mention unspeakably cold during a substantial part of the year. Today it is best known as a tourist destination to view polar bears in the wild. In his report, Penney acknowledged that the area would be contaminated by the proposed tests but described the land near Churchill as ‘valueless’.
History shows that the British never did test a nuclear weapon in Canada. In fact, as scholars John Clearwater and David O’Brien noted, there is no evidence ‘to show that the elaborate proposal, which included detailed plans for roads, barracks and other infrastructure, ever went to the ministerial level’. When the extent of the proposed contamination of the Churchill site became clear, the Canadians quietly shelved the idea. Again, Britain was on her own.
Meanwhile, Australia came up on the radar. This peaceful backwater of a country seemed a natural choice in many ways: developed, Western, a member of the Commonwealth and a former colony. It possessed huge potential sources of uranium, uninhabited islands and swathes of desert. At that moment in history, a noted Anglo-phile, Robert Menzies, headed its government.
The fact that Australia had virtually no background in matters nuclear, other than the largely expatriate contribution to physics research of Mark Oliphant and a few other scientists, was irrelevant. Britain would control the science. What they needed was space, not scientists and technologists. Prime Minister Attlee made the first approach, and Menzies was almost certainly taken by surprise. Nevertheless, when he received Attlee’s top-secret cable on 16 September 1950, followed up by a telephone call, his instinctive eagerness deterred him from consulting colleagues. Australia’s Monte Bello Islands had cropped up because Penney’s interest in observing base surge had led to canvassing island locations. It rose to the top of the list when relations with the US over atomic matters deteriorated with the arrest of Fuchs, and the Canadians went cold on the sub-Arctic site at Churchill. Other Pacific island nations were also considered but discounted. Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria was briefly on the list but not pursued because of its meteorological conditions.
A swift survey to confirm Monte Bello’s suitability for the proposed historic first British test followed. The top-secret Oper
ation Epicure was overseen by Major General AJH Cassels in the UK Services Liaison Staff Office in Melbourne and by Sir Frederick Shedden, the secretary of the Australian Department of Defence. Their cover story was that they were investigating the feasibility of extending the UK rocket testing project. An ASIO officer joined the survey, the first time the new domestic spy service was involved in the push for atomic weapons. The Royal Australian Navy provided HMAS Karangi as the survey ship and sent HMAS Warrego to prepare a detailed chart of the complicated maritime features of the island group, since little information was available at the time. The project used the term Western Islands, rather than Monte Bello, to maintain secrecy. As well as charting the islands, the crew of the Warrego found an immensely rich natural environment, which they outlined in their report. Many of their biological samples eventually found their way to the British Museum in London.
Epicure was swift indeed. Karangi had done her work by 27 November 1950 and steamed back to Fremantle, bearing a trove of information. Data included depth soundings and information on the tides and the winds. The Epicure results were submitted for review to the AWRE and government representatives in London, where they found favour. In February 1951 the British chiefs of staff agreed to a shipborne atomic test at the Monte Bello Islands. Epicure had established that a maritime explosion and base surge could be tested there.
In fact, Epicure was so quick that some people, particularly the slow and steady Shedden, were concerned about making serious decisions with long-term consequences under undue time pressure. The survey confirmed that October 1952 would be the best time for the test – indeed, October was probably the only feasible time of the year. Attlee confirmed the details with Menzies on 27 March 1951. Attlee added, coyly, ‘We can settle later the details of finance and machinery’.
As it happens, these details were never properly settled. The Australians behaved as though agreeing to pay for expensive parts of the test operations in Australia would be something of a bargaining chip to obtain knowledge from the British tests, but did little to actually deploy this supposed advantage. Gowing later wrote, with magnificent understatement, ‘The Australians agreed to this without striking a hard bargain over technical collaboration’. And so an initially secret deal was agreed, well before most members of the Menzies government, let alone the Australian people, knew. The massive operation had less than 18 months to be organised, and the Monte Bello Islands were a world away from the British Isles.
Penney, who ventured forth from his base at Aldermaston to take charge, was in his early 40s when he directed Operation Hurricane at the remote Monte Bello Islands. Born on 24 June 1909 in Gibraltar, he was educated in England and the US and held PhDs from both Imperial College London and Cambridge. His expertise in blast waves from explosions led him to the Manhattan Project, which in turn, he told the Royal Commission, guided his work on the nuclear tests in Australia. He led the Australian atomic test series for all the major trials, although from 1954 he became increasingly involved with the testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Pacific and delegated some Australian tasks to AWRE deputy head William (later Sir William) Cook.
Penney remained director of the AWRE until 1959 and later became chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He was a fine-looking man, tall with broad shoulders and a strong, square face that sported thick-rimmed glasses. He had a smooth, posh accent that often seemed to be on the brink of sophisticated merriment. He was also dignified and likeable. In fact, even royal commissioner Jim McClelland could not despise him in the way he despised Ernest Titterton, though he hated everything that Penney presided over in Australia. In an obituary in 1991, Penney was described as ‘a friendly, undevious and usually humorous man’ and ‘a shrewd administrator and good judge of people’. For his work on developing the British bomb and beyond he was knighted, and later made a life peer, taking the title Baron Penney. To many who knew him, though, he was simply Bill – or indeed Buffalo Bill, after Maralinga’s Buffalo series. When he fronted the Royal Commission in London in February 1985, he had changed physically, with one newspaper describing him as ‘a small round man with round glasses and wispy white hair, wearing crumpled tweed clothes under an equally crumpled coat’.
Another towering figure in this saga, who made the British nuclear tests possible with a stroke of his pen, was the Australian prime minister. Robert Menzies, an unashamed Anglophile, began his second tenure as prime minister in 1949, and it lasted 16 years. In fact, his enthusiastic co-operation with Britain’s nuclear testing program was a defining characteristic of his prime ministership. It fitted in with his overall desire to reinvigorate the relationship between Australia and the UK, which had been bruised in some ways by World War II and the Depression.
His enthusiasm for nuclear testing was not considered strange at the time. Despite the initial shock at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many people in the West saw atomic weaponry and energy as positive and forward-looking developments, a view encouraged by US and British propaganda. Also, if Britain was doing it then that was fine by Australia. As secretary of the AWTSC John Moroney remarked in 1993, the times were different. The ‘closeness and strength of feeling between’ Britain and Australia, said Moroney, ‘was a very tangible thing then, but virtually incomprehensible to many now’. To many Australians, Britain was the ‘Mother Country’, and Australians visiting the UK, even for the first time, talked about ‘returning home’. While some segments of Australian society were resentful that Churchill had tried to stop Australian troops from leaving the Middle East to defend Singapore and Papua New Guinea from the Japanese during the war, the majority of Australians saw loyalty to Great Britain as a natural part of the order of things.
This close relationship helped to secure the original agreement and set in train a long series of events still not completely resolved. The connection between the UK and Australia altered during the nuclear tests saga and its aftermath. The initial Australian willingness to agree to British requests for weapons testing became less ardent over the 11 years they lasted. Even at the beginning, though, Menzies knew that atomic testing could be politically difficult. He asked Attlee to delay finalising the official arrangements for the first British nuclear test until after the Australian election of May 1951 that returned the Menzies government for its second term. Such was not the fate of Clement Attlee, who lost his election in October.
Momentum was not lost, however. British wartime leader Winston Churchill, who was returned to power, was well onside with the idea of a British nuclear deterrent. When he learned, to his surprise, just how far advanced plans were, he was impressed and enthusiastic. A strong influence was his chief adviser Lord Cherwell, who barracked relentlessly for the UK to build its own A-bomb. To do this, Britain finally had to face facts and give up on the US. Plans for Hurricane were formally agreed between the UK and Australia on 27 December 1951.
Menzies kept much information about the British plans to himself and the small group of advisers and public servants such as Frederick Shedden who were closely involved. In the earliest stages, only Menzies, the minister for Defence Philip McBride and the treasurer Arthur Fadden knew. After striking the agreement to test the British bomb in Australia, Menzies constructed a formidable apparatus of secrecy. Most of his Cabinet still knew little or nothing, even after the Churchill ascendancy. The meetings were top-secret, and only limited information was shared outside the tight circle of insiders.
Meanwhile, much furtive activity was underway. The Monte Bello Islands had no infrastructure, so a massive operation began to deliver all the paraphernalia of a nuclear test and its associated scientific studies. The movement of navy vessels from Fremantle created some speculation though. As well as Karangi and Warrego, the navy deployed HMAS Mildura to assist with setting up the site. Karangi ferried heavy equipment, including a prefabricated hut, two 25-tonne bulldozers, a grader, a number of tip trucks, several electrical generating sets, twenty 1.8-kilolitre water tanks, a mobile transmitter and rec
eiver, and the plant needed to establish refrigerators.
The whole thing took on the appearance of a major naval operation, which proceeded without any public acknowledgment. The grapevine along the Western Australian coast became progressively more active as sharp-eyed locals put two and two together, and the odd newspaper story also hinted at what was afoot. However, and remarkably, secrecy was maintained to the satisfaction of the authorities. When the Australian Government finally announced to the public that Operation Hurricane was about to begin, the media release congratulated all concerned: ‘Indeed, the degree to which secrecy about the really vital matters has been preserved is a splendid tribute not only to the security officials but also to the loyalty, integrity and sense of respect displayed by everyone concerned in the vast project’.
Soon after agreeing to provide Monte Bello to the British for atomic testing, the Australian Government realised they needed to formally exclude people from the test site. Although Monte Bello was remote and rarely visited, naval activity in the area could provoke curiosity. The odd nosy boatie might just turn his rudder in the general direction to have a bit of a look. To head off this possibility, the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 passed through federal parliament, making unauthorised entry illegal. At first, the Act embraced only Monte Bello, but it later covered Emu Field and Maralinga (and later still the US signals monitoring station at Pine Gap), effectively excluding citizens by law from portions of Australian territory. The prohibited area extended over all the Monte Bello Islands and their surrounding waters, and south to Barrow Island. The Act was passed quickly in June 1952 – so quickly, in fact, that it was alleged that Australia had accidentally prohibited areas outside the country’s territorial limit, over which it had no jurisdiction. Both the UK Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) believed that it extended at least 32 kilometres outside Australia’s territory. The UK had been burned with disputes in the past over maritime boundaries and wanted the legislation amended to avoid future embarrassment. Despite their concern, it wasn’t.
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