Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

  Right from the start, Australian access to the scientific knowledge bonanza arising from the bomb tests was politely but firmly deflected. Before he formed the AWTSC, Leslie Martin, as defence scientific adviser, was granted some access to Hurricane, on strictly limited terms. The British, while on the surface agreeing to share some information, were rather passive aggressive in denying that information. The Australians tiptoed around gingerly, not daring to suggest access to anything more than peripheral facts. They knew that Titterton was on the inside, as a letter from the chief of naval staff to the Defence secretary Sir Frederick Shedden showed: ‘As you know Dr. Titterton is attending apparently by private arrangement’.

  Whether Martin and Butement could also be involved was the subject of considerable discussion, and the British High Commission in Canberra stalled on making a decision. A draft Australian Government letter to be sent to the High Commission to try to clarify the situation pushed for the inclusion of Martin, because of

  the considerable Australian contribution in resources to the Monte Bello tests and their close proximity to Australia; the important programme of Defence Research and Development being undertaken by Australia in conjunction with the United Kingdom; and the need for the Defence Scientific Adviser to acquire the fullest information to assist him in advising, from the Australian viewpoint, on the technical feasibility of the use of the Woomera region for future tests; the Australian Defence Scientific Adviser should be present at the Monte Bello tests in order that he might be fully acquainted with the details of the tests.

  The Australians reassured the Brits that ‘Professor Martin is appropriately covered by the Official Secrets Act, etc … and he is the Defence Scientific Adviser and comes within the provisions of the Crimes Act which corresponds, in part, to the British Official Secrets Act’. The government had to lobby for one of Australia’s most trusted defence scientists to be included in the official party for Hurricane, while Titterton was there ‘by private arrangement’.

  The tone is conveyed in a series of letters between the Prime Minister’s Department and the British High Commission. The secretary AS Brown wrote to Ben Cockram at the High Commission in September 1952:

  My understanding is that the United Kingdom intended by their invitation … that Professor Martin’s attendance at the Monte Bello Test would be in such a capacity as would enable him to acquire the fullest information on the details of the test relating to weapon effects and the layout of the site. It was not intended that he should have access to the weapon itself nor its intimate functioning. The Australian authorities agree that at this stage we are not interested in the weapon itself but only in its effects and the general set-up of the test.

  Cockram replied:

  I have been instructed to inform you that full details of all weapon effects and the layout of the site will be given to Professor Martin. The accommodation position, however, necessitates that all persons attending the test should be allotted definite tasks, and the health physics team was suggested as being related to the one in which Professor Martin is interested. This suggestion was not intended to limit in any way the undertaking that Professor Martin would be given full access to the information mentioned above. I have also been asked to state that Mr. Butement’s attendance is understood by the United Kingdom authorities concerned to be on a similar basis.

  The Australians seemed unsure of what to do about the limited nature of Australian involvement. The uncertainty led to paralysis. Martin was stationed uneasily away from the centre of the action. Only Titterton was admitted to the inner circle.

  Titterton’s involvement was no twist of fate. The British did not wish to leave Australian decision-making to chance. The best way to ensure that Australia was guided to the correct decision was to put a sound man in the middle of the process and make him the obvious choice for the Australian safety committee. The upper echelons of the British establishment felt comfortable with Titterton, who gained access to the tests and, in some cases, the data they produced. This did not extend to others on the Australian side. Martin and Butement did not find favour with the éminence grise of the British tests, Lord Cherwell (chief adviser to Winston Churchill), who actively tried to ensure that they did not receive any significant information. As Milliken stated, ‘Cherwell grudgingly cabled his approval of [Butement’s attendance] only at the last minute, a fortnight before the Hurricane blast, on strict condition that Butement would have no access to vital efficiency data’. Martin’s access to Hurricane was even more disputed and stalled, although in the end he was granted approval largely as a goodwill gesture. Penney wrote to Cherwell, ‘We have not treated the Australians very generously in the way of inviting their scientific help. The invitation of Professor Martin would, I think, give them pleasure and would make them feel that we were not attempting to use their land but at the same time keeping them out’.

  In 1956, just as the Maralinga site was about to become functional, Titterton published a book on nuclear power and weaponry, Facing the Atomic Future, intended for a broad audience. The book named him as professor of nuclear physics at the ANU but did not mention his role on the AWTSC or give any indication that he was involved in the British tests. In the book, Titterton, in views that appear to be at odds with his secretive behaviour, put forwards the need for public information about these issues. ‘Insistence on the desirability of informed public opinion on atomic energy matters follows from the basic belief that democracy functions best when the people understand the issues.’

  Titterton reinforced his image as a disinterested scientific observer watching the tests from a distance when he participated in some stage-managed media activities ahead of the Mosaic tests at Monte Bello and the Buffalo tests planned for Maralinga. On 15 and 16 May 1956, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald simultaneously ran an identical feature in which he answered questions about the test program. In response to the first question, about the purpose of the forthcoming shots, Titterton answered in part, ‘If we should ever again have to call on our armed services to defend our freedom it is obviously of the greatest importance that they be equipped with weapons at least equivalent to, and preferably better than, those of a possible adversary. It would indeed be morally wrong to ask them to answer such a call unless we were prepared to so equip them’.

  He also addressed rising public concerns about the fate of Japanese fishermen whose vessel had ventured too close to an American hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific, resulting in serious illness and the death of one man. Titterton responded:

  The accident to the fishing vessel Fukuryu Maru was most unfortunate but it must be remembered that she had strayed well into the restricted danger area and also the weapon exploded on that occasion was of very large yield – one of the biggest ever likely to be tested. The Minister for Supply (Mr. Beale) has stated that no hydrogen bomb will be fired in Australia and it was recently indicated that the weapons tested would be ‘small’ relative to the American one which led to the accident to Fukuryu Maru.

  The AWTSC met regularly and considered a set range of matters at nearly every meeting. These included air sampling, water sampling, biological samples, meteorological reports and, in the case of the Monte Bello Islands, various kinds of maritime reports. An ASIO operative attended the committee’s third meeting held at the University of Melbourne on 28 November 1955, but on the attendance list, the name was later physically cut out of the document. A handwritten note said, ‘Name of ASIO official deleted in accordance with S92 of ASIO Act’. This particular meeting dealt with the first ever airdrop of a nuclear device as part of Operation Buffalo at Maralinga in September 1956. The meeting approved this important test ‘subject to agreement on location and form of fall out pattern’.

  Even at the time, Titterton’s apparently seamless elevation to the top AWTSC position caused some uneasiness in the prime minister’s office. One member of Menzies’ staff wrote in a memorandum, ‘To my mind Mr. Beale’s proposed committee becomes a one-man band’. Si
nce that one man was known to be a dogmatic pro-nuclear weapons advocate, there was little doubt about the direction of the committee. Nevertheless, Beale signed off on the change. It was a momentous decision.

  As long-time AWTSC secretary Moroney recalled, ‘While the AWTSC had no responsibility on-site, it was often consulted by the Government for advice on operational matters at Maralinga because it was the only Australian agency informed on the scientific aspects of the trials and their likely impact’. Moroney gave evidence to the Royal Commission that ‘Sir Ernest Titterton had greater knowledge than anyone in Australia on the major trials and the minor trials’. Officials from the government departments who dealt with Maralinga came to regret ceding so much control to Titterton and ultimately severely curtailed his power, primarily after the debacle when Titterton concealed the extremely dangerous nature of Vixen B.

  The Royal Commission report damned the AWTSC again and again: ‘The AWTSC failed to carry out many of its tasks in a proper manner. At times it was deceitful and allowed unsafe firing to occur. It deviated from its charter by assuming responsibilities which properly belonged to the Australian Government’. Beale, however, used the AWTSC as armour in the constant battle to prove the tests were safe. He said in a 1956 media release at the time of Operation Buffalo: ‘There is, and always has been, complete unanimity of opinion between the British scientists under Sir William Penney and Australian scientists under Professor Martin as to standards of safety and conditions under which firing should take place’.

  The saga of CSIRO scientist Hedley Marston best exemplified the AWTSC attitude to criticism. Marston was one of the few Australian scientists to raise questions about the British nuclear tests while they were underway. This pitted Titterton and Marston, both strong personalities, against each other. Marston was not a particularly pleasant individual, but his name has gone down honourably as the person who took on the AWTSC. The tale was well told in Roger Cross’ 2001 book Fallout: Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia. In essence, Titterton attempted to stop Marston publishing results that showed alarming levels of radio-active iodine in livestock. Extrapolating (perhaps too enthusiastically) from his findings, Marston asserted that dangerous radioactive fallout from both the Mosaic tests at Monte Bello and the Buffalo tests at Maralinga was blowing through countryside, towns and cities, entering the food chain via animals and from there reaching millions of unsuspecting people.

  Marston was an agricultural scientist whose job was to determine the amount of radioactive iodine in the thyroids of sheep and cattle in the fallout area of the 1956 test programs. In fact, he took samples from way outside the originally agreed test area and showed that fallout was entering the bodies of animals in most parts of Australia, as far away as Townsville on the north Queensland coast. Marston did not test specifically for the more dangerous strontium-90, because in his view (contradicted in more recent years) iodine-131 was a marker for it. Marston argued that the national school milk program then operating in Australia seemingly guaranteed uptake of this deadly radioactive isotope, leaving children with lifelong radioactive material in their bones where it could potentially cause bone marrow cancers. Titterton disagreed vehemently with this interpretation. After Mosaic G2, the AWTSC had reassured Menzies that all contamination measured on the mainland was low and nothing to be concerned about. Marston’s measurements did not support this view.

  The AWTSC tried to shut Marston down, placing pressure on the Australian Journal of Biological Sciences not to publish his article. Dr (later Sir) Frederick White, then chair of CSIRO, Marston’s employer, attended its 19th meeting on 11 June 1957, where an agreement was struck on censoring Marston’s article. This also happened to be the first meeting of the newly constituted AWTSC under Titterton’s leadership. White, effectively the meat in the sandwich, was provided with a string of demands from the AWTSC that included its clearing the final version of the paper and removing ‘personal attacks and unsubstantiated opinions’. The committee also insisted that several graphs containing data on gamma ray fallout be removed altogether, on Penney’s direct orders, although Marston was not to be told that Penney had insisted on this. When an abridged version of the article was published in August 1958, it was scarcely noticed, and Marston faded into the background.

  The two biggest failings of the AWTSC were the huge but undisclosed yield of Mosaic G2 at Monte Bello in 1956 and the devastating plutonium contamination caused by Vixen B. At Hurricane and Totem, the Australian presence had been less than peripheral, and the lax safety at both series had the potential to cause significant political problems. The Australian Government wanted a proper mechanism to ensure a role in the subsequent tests. On 20 June 1955 Menzies agreed in principle to the British going back to Monte Bello for Mosaic, on the understanding that safety of people and animals in the vicinity of the tests would be ensured. The AWTSC was set up within a month, and the committee had precious little time to prepare for the biggest British test in Australia.

  By now, test insiders knew the inadequacies of the safety preparations for Hurricane and Totem. Some of the many safety problems included the inability to predict fallout when the winds were strong, the effect of meteorological conditions generally on radioactive contamination and estimating the height of the mushroom cloud. The British meteorological expert Albert Matthewman prepared a report outlining these uncertainties. In evidence to the Royal Commission, Matthewman acknowledged that in many cases predictions did not match theoretical modelling. Much of the blame for this, he said, was the extreme difficulty in forecasting the wind: ‘Nine tenths of the explanation of the departures [from the modelling] were due to errors in the forecast of low level winds’. Clearly the safety foundations for nuclear testing in Australia were not strong, and it is hard to find evidence that safety was ever a top priority for the AWRE. Catching up with America and the USSR took precedence.

  At its first meeting in July 1955, the AWTSC put on a show of strength. The new members agreed that neither the Mosaic tests scheduled for mid-1956 nor the Buffalo tests at the new permanent range due to take place in September 1956 should be given the go-ahead without proper information to better calculate the hazards. The committee held urgent meetings with AWRE visitors that same month, in an attempt to get on top of problems already evident in Mosaic and Buffalo. Monte Bello was known to be meteorologically difficult. In fact, the Hurricane test had been restricted to October, the only time when the weather was reasonably predictable. Yet Mosaic was to take place in May and June because the British were in a hurry to test the triggering mechanism for their new hydrogen bomb. At this time the prevailing westerly winds at Monte Bello were almost guaranteed to send the radio-active cloud across the mainland. But when the Churchill government decided to develop the hydrogen bomb in 1954, following the lead of both the US and the USSR, there was no time to waste. The British imperative to schedule the Mosaic series threw safety planning into panic mode.

  Reports were prepared and experts consulted. By September 1955, the AWTSC knew that the meteorological conditions for the planned Mosaic firings were not likely to be safe. The problems intensified when a new report indicated that the seas were likely to be rough too. Members of the Seaman’s Union, which opposed the tests, were suspicious when the AWTSC asked its members to wear film badges to detect radiation. (Unfortunately film badges were rarely analysed. They were often worn and then discarded, without proper investigation of what they showed.) On 1 June Martin wrote to Beale to explain the rationale for this precaution:

  The Safety Committee does not expect any dangerous fallout on ships and will in fact take all precautions necessary to ensure that there is none. The film badges are insisted on only because they will provide the best evidence to refute any allegation of the occurrence of high intensity fallout, that might be made either maliciously or from the misinterpretation, improper use or faulty operation of monitoring devices.

  At its third meeting in November 1955, the AWTSC discussed the sa
fe firing of the Mosaic tests, though it still did not have all relevant information. AWTSC members, all due at Monte Bello for the tests, left for the long trip to the northwest intending to meet there once the material was supplied. While these meetings are presumed to have taken place onboard the HMS Narvik, one of the British ships on site, no official minutes were kept.

  A complication arose in the lead-up to Mosaic because the AWRE decided unilaterally to define radioactive contamination using the neutral nomenclature of A and B, rather than the previous descriptive designations of zero risk and slight risk. Charles Adams, the AWRE’s chief of research, said in a memorandum informing the AWTSC about the change, that ‘the new definitions … have received very careful thought here and we advocate the different nomenclature since we believe the term “slight risk” implies a greater possibility of damaging effect than is justified by the definition’. The AWRE wanted the Australian committee to agree to the use of a contamination level halfway between A and B. Adams continued, ‘The adoption of half level B as the criterion would, in our opinion, give only the slightest chance of any physiological effect, which in any case would be temporary and only just observable. We should, of course, hope for forecasts which will show that exposures will be below this level’.

  This change left room for speculation about exactly what level of contamination was acceptable, and whether the same levels were also acceptable for Indigenous people living a traditional lifestyle, whose circumstances were different. For a start, in many cases they were barefoot and semi-clothed or naked. Half of level B accorded with the standards adopted by the US at its Nevada tests. However, the AWTSC objected that the US standard was not necessarily suitable for Australia and said that half level B would be accepted only for the Mosaic tests, not for those at Maralinga, where the concentrations could be expected to build up with each successive test. In the end, and after a struggle, the highest acceptable dosage for Aborigines and others was set at level A.