In a memorandum the following year Moroney complained that Pilgrim had never replied to this letter. Eventually, Pearce replied, addressing some of these concerns as plans progressed for the first clean-up operation, known as Hercules, in 1964: ‘This clean-up operation has, of course, precipitated the programme on which we were engaged as a result of your letters of November 1963’. Pearce affirmed that the UK had no intention of repatriating any of the Maralinga plutonium, or ‘radioactive sources’, as he described it, to where it came from, ‘and so [we] have the option of disposing of [the radioactive sources] in Australia or of burying them at Maralinga’.
One well-known eyewitness account of the Vixen B trials came from Avon Hudson. Hudson, a member of the RAAF, came to Maralinga in 1960, at the start of the Vixen B test program. Years later he campaigned for recognition of the suffering of the nuclear veterans. He became the first Maralinga veteran to speak to the media about his knowledge of plutonium waste at the test site, gave evidence at the McClelland Royal Commission and also co-wrote a book with Australian academic Roger Cross on the Maralinga legacy, Beyond Belief. He told a tale of lax health procedures and pressure to carry out dangerous orders while the experiments were underway. Hudson helped to build the feather beds that held the plutonium-filled assemblies: ‘These firing platforms were the ones that could cause so much havoc when it came to spreading radioactive pollution on the range. We knew nothing of what we were doing at the time’.
The minor trials, and particularly Vixen B, were disastrous for Australia. The main substance used, plutonium-239, is among the most toxic materials known, with a radioactive half-life of more than 24 000 years and the capacity to kill people through stochastic radiation effects inside the body. The nature of the experiments themselves, where simulated nuclear warheads were detonated on the open range using conventional explosives that blasted radio-active material high into the air, where it spread out in 150-kilometre plumes, was self-evidently dangerous. The experiments were conducted in the presence of hundreds of service personnel, some of whom ventured into the blast area within 20 minutes of an explosion while wearing only basic protective clothing. The experiments were conducted without the kinds of safeguards and monitoring that would enable analysis of risk and causation. The radioactive residue of the experiments was allowed to remain at the site for decades, without robust safeguards and, for a period, without patrols to keep sightseers or Indigenous people away from the contaminated areas.
When Britain finished its testing activities at Maralinga, at the conclusion of the MEP in April 1963, the highly dangerous aftermath of the minor trials lay openly on the ground or just below the surface. The British Government and test authorities knew the damage they had left behind. The Australian Government allowed this to happen through both omission and commission. They created the AWTSC to oversee Australian interests. But for much of its life, it was run by Professor Ernest Titterton, who, in the words of the Royal Commission, ‘aided and abetted’ British behaviour that was ‘characterised by persistent deception and paranoid secrecy’. So just exactly how did the AWTSC look after Australian interests?
6
The Australian safety committee
We have not consented to any tests being conducted except under the strictest conditions of safety, and we do not propose to do so.
Prime Minister Robert Menzies, 1956.
The Safety Committee’s role was as much concerned with public relations as it was with scientific safeguards.
Tim Sherratt, ‘A political inconvenience: Australian scientists at the British atomic weapons tests, 1952–53’, 1985.
It is inconceivable, especially in the light of Titterton’s cavalier treatment of the truth throughout his testimony … that he did not know that he had been planted on Menzies.
Royal Commission into the British Nuclear Tests in Australia, Report, 1985.
Professor Sir Ernest Titterton’s life came to a tragic end. A car accident not far from his Canberra home in September 1987, when he was 71 years old, made him a quadriplegic. He lived for another three years, longing for euthanasia, until an embolism took his life. The accident came two years after the McClelland Royal Commission report trashed his reputation for his role as the chair of the AWTSC and publicly associated his name with the fictional nuclear maniac Dr Strangelove from the eponymous 1964 film.
The AWTSC is one of the most alarming aspects of the British nuclear tests in Australia. The committee formed to protect Australian interests instead enabled the unfettered ambitions of the British nuclear elite. While it is unlikely that it was set up with this intent, its role evolved to become more of a public relations mechanism than a true overseer of highly dangerous activities. So much of this came down to the personality of Titterton, a compact, trim, crinkle-haired dynamo and divisive figure throughout. Titterton was involved with planning for the tests in Australia almost from the start. When virtually no-one other than Robert Menzies knew that the British planned to test atomic weaponry in Australia, Titterton was edging towards a crucial role – the nexus between the AWRE and everyone else.
Titterton was an English physicist whose career got underway just as the science of nuclear weaponry was progressing dramatically from theory to practice. He joined the wartime British mission to the US and designed the triggering device for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, the epochal test that demonstrated success for the Manhattan Project. He seems to have become a true believer from an early age and carried his convictions of the rightness of atomic weaponry – and of civilian atomic energy – through his life. The AWTSC might have become a well-regarded, conscientious and august body that looked after Australian interests under difficult circumstances had Titterton not commandeered it for more questionable purposes. Now, it looks like a smokescreen.
In an obituary in 1990 the ANU nuclear physicist Trevor Ophel wrote, ‘While he gained fame as having “pushed the button” to initiate the first atom bomb test at Alamogordo, the consequences of his time at Los Alamos were more profound. It made him a member of an old boys’ network of virtually every leading nuclear physicist, both experimental and theoretical, in the Western world’. He came to the nuclear tests in Australia with existing connections that guaranteed insider status rather than disinterested objectivity.
The AWTSC had two distinct phases, between 1955 and 1957 under chief defence scientist Professor (later Sir) Leslie Martin from Melbourne University and from 1957 to 1973 under Ernest Titterton. Titterton was on the original committee with Martin. The other members were Alan Butement, chief scientist employed by the Department of Supply; Dr Cecil Eddy, director of the Melbourne-based Commonwealth X-Ray and Radium Laboratory; and Professor Phillip Baxter, vice-chancellor of the University of New South Wales and deputy chair of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. Baxter had played a role in the Manhattan Project, as a chemical engineer based at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he had worked on the production of fissile uranium. Martin was a reliable and sensible university and defence man. Titterton was another proposition.
When Titterton became AWTSC chair in 1957, the committee was reduced to three members, narrowing its base to accommodate his larger personality. Alongside Titterton were LJ Dwyer, director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology, and Donald Stevens, the new director of the Commonwealth X-Ray and Radium Laboratory (Eddy had died the previous year). Titterton remained AWTSC chair until it was reconstituted as the Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Council (AIRAC) in 1973, at which point he was not invited to continue.
Titterton came to Australia in 1950 after Professor Mark Oliphant invited him to become foundation chair of nuclear physics at the ANU. Oliphant, who had supervised Titterton’s research at the University of Birmingham in the 1930s, planned tempting new research in nuclear and particle physics at the ANU. Oliphant was a scientific insider in the wartime race to create a nuclear weapon, but he later became an opponent of such weapons when he saw the human toll from the bombs dropped on Japan. He fell ou
t with Titterton and was effectively barred from any involvement in the British tests in Australia. Oliphant was actively excluded not just because of his horror at what was unleashed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but because he was outspoken about it. The British explicitly requested that the Australians not allow him to be involved. The Americans, who knew him from Manhattan Project days, also did not consider him to be ‘sound’ – they thought that his views on the open sharing of scientific information made him a security threat. A message to the British High Commission from the British Government, quoted by the Australian journalist Robert Milliken, said in part, ‘Oliphant is unquestionably talkative and would give the impression (whether true or not) that he was in possession of all the secrets. It is therefore in the general interest that he should be “kept away”’. In the early 1950s, the Americans declined to issue him a visa to go to a physics conference in Chicago, a moment of humiliation for him. He had no official voice in the conduct of the tests in Australia. All he would do was speak out about his own disquiet. Oliphant would likely have made an excellent safety committee chair, but he was not allowed anywhere near the safety committee.
Oliphant’s former pupil did not share his qualms about nuclear weaponry. Titterton, described by ARPANSA scientist Geoff William as a ‘creature of the British atomic weapons testing establishment’ had, in addition to his Manhattan Project credentials and expertise in high-speed electronic triggering mechanisms, contributed to the US bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. He had then taken up a position with the UK AERE at Harwell. He did not work directly with William Penney, but the pair operated in the same broad circle. Titterton’s career record shows he was committed to the development of Western nuclear weaponry. According to his ANU colleague Professor John Newton, Titterton,
unlike some of his contemporaries, felt no guilt regarding his part in the development of these weapons … He was of the opinion that it was much better that the Allies first produced them rather than Hitler’s Germany, that their use in Japan had saved many US and Japanese lives, and that fear of their use had kept, and would most probably continue to keep, the peace between the major powers.
In the mid-1980s Titterton strongly defended his role at Maralinga when questioned by the Royal Commission and bristled about accusations that he had denied information to the Australian Government, pointing out he had been subject to US and UK secrecy agreements. He continued defending his actions, even as media stories dissected the British tests in the wake of the Royal Commission and found that his actions had been questionable at best (see chapter 10). The Royal Commission report, a document that displayed uncommon levels of ironic humour and controlled outrage, mentioned Titterton’s ‘special relationship’ with the AWRE in several places. It found Titterton’s role at Maralinga was to be the AWRE man on the ground, and thereby to limit the information provided to the Australian Government. Justice James McClelland later wrote that ‘it would be hard to imagine anyone less suitable than Titterton to be entrusted with a task which called for disinterested concern for the safety of the Australian population from nuclear radiation’.
The report criticised Titterton to such an extent that it led to suspicions that the process was a political witch-hunt. Academic Graeme Turner described the Royal Commission as ‘a spectacle of national revenge’. If this was so, the focus for much of the revenge seemed to be on one of its most prominent participants. An account of Titterton’s career written two years after his death by John Newton told a somewhat more sympathetic story. In disputing the criticism contained in the commission’s report, Newton said, ‘The statement that Titterton was “from first to last, ‘their man’” rejects any other interpretation of his actions. It appears contrary to the attitude that the Commission adopted in other cases’.
ANU colleagues, many of whom knew Titterton well, consistently defended him, while acknowledging his shortcomings. Trevor Ophel observed that ‘rarely has it been more evident that the past is the proper territory of thoughtful historians. Hindsight, conditioned by political and scientific changes evolving over a thirty year period, cannot and should not be used to judge the past’. Ophel noted that Titterton had been ‘accused of near treason’ by the Royal Commission. It is striking to see how far his reputation deteriorated, from respected scientist and confidante of the British nuclear weapons establishment to Australian pariah.
Nevertheless, a certain relish for the battle can be detected in McClelland’s description of Titterton in the witness box ‘as a sort of Dr Strangelove figure. So gung-ho about all things nuclear that he gave me the impression that radiation was nothing to worry about and could almost be considered good for people’. Years after Titterton’s death, McClelland’s assessment of the former head of the safety committee had not softened; he said Titterton was ‘totally obsessed with nuclear physics’.
Robert Milliken noted that at the time of the Royal Commission, Titterton and McClelland ‘were then aged 69, robust, vain and possessors of particularly sharp and competitive minds’. They were bound to clash, he asserted, because they were so similar.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case against Titterton in the Royal Commission, the man certainly made a strong impression on people. Nearly everyone who came into contact with him had a story to tell, not all of them flattering. The overall impression from the many accounts is that Titterton was larger than life, an insensitive and opinionated man with considerable intellectual snobbery who crashed through any barrier. Sometimes he crashed through physically. ARPANSA scientist Peter Burns told of working for the AWTSC in an office next to the front door, ‘and you would know when Titterton had arrived because the front door would rocket back on its hinges and smash against the back wall, and he would stomp up the stairs snivelling and snorting. At the end of the day he would stomp down the stairs and smash the door open to make his exit’. He was well known for his pettiness, refusing to install a light in the nuclear physics laboratory ‘on the grounds that someone might sit there and read the newspaper’, said Newton. Rather than giving away the produce of his home garden, he sold his tomatoes and lettuces to colleagues. This man had once been in charge of the flow of all atomic test information from the British to the Australian Government. As Peter Burns put it, ‘He knew all the British weapons people and they told him what they were doing and he told the Australian Government that it was all right. A lot of information closed off there’.
William Penney maintained later that the safety committee was not denied important information. His statement to the Royal Commission said that, in his experience:
no information pertinent to the possible effects of the explosions on the Australian people was withheld. Design details of the weapons were not given for two reasons. One was simply the expressed policy of the Australian Government not to become a party to such information nor to become a nuclear weapon state. Secondly, the UK then as now, was obligated not to release to a third party certain information entrusted to it by the Americans. This did not preclude the Australians from receiving military and civil defence information about the effects of atomic weapons nor from participating in measurements to that effect.
In some ways, the diffidence shown by the Australians – on the one hand actively seeking to be party to the information yielded by the British tests while on the other kowtowing before the British secrecy agenda in the most abject way – did make for a confusing set of messages. Australia did, for a while at least, want to be a nuclear nation, and it wanted to know what the British discovered. The government hoped that if it supported the trials with money and other resources, the British would share this scientific information. The British never thought the same thing, perhaps because the Australians were not upfront about what they wanted. Perhaps, too, the wall created by Titterton was too high for the Australians to climb over.
The AWTSC was formed on 21 July 1955, during the preliminary surveying and commissioning of the Maralinga test range. It arose from discussions between Prime Minist
er Menzies, Minister for Supply Howard Beale and Minister for Defence Sir Philip McBride. The committee’s role was always ambiguous. The British test authorities did not seek its formation. Rather, the committee was set up because the Australian Government wanted to play a distinct part in the tests, to do more than just provide the venue. Ostensibly, the AWTSC was established to evaluate safety aspects of the tests from 1955 onwards, and to act as a conduit between the UK test authorities and the Australian Government. In reality, at least according to some, it did not play a significant role in advising on safety matters. Instead, it provided reassuring window-dressing. The safety committee sought legitimacy for itself in various ways. In October 1958 it published a journal article stating it ‘was responsible for ensuring that chosen firing conditions could not lead to damage of life or property on the continent’.
Significantly, the AWTSC did not get involved with the minor trials and concerned itself mostly with the big bomb tests. John Moroney, its former secretary, confirmed this during his feisty evidence to the Royal Commission. He said, ‘The minor trials were looked at in the light of the adjective [minor]’. A change occurred later, he asserted, when ‘the minor trials ceased to be minor’, because of the use of plutonium-239 in Vixen B.
The committee reported to the prime minister, through the minister for Supply. Menzies, in a letter to his minister for Civil Aviation (later Defence minister) Athol Townley in May 1955, specifically requested that the new safety committee ‘include members who are sufficiently well-known to command general confidence as guardians of the public interest, and who are not in any way to be identified as having an interest in the defence atomic experiments’.
Atomic Thunder Page 16