Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

  It took 15 years for the system itself to become public knowledge. By the time it did, as legal academic Laurence Maher said, ‘the Australian media was becoming more probing and diversified’. D-notices have no further influence over what Australian media publish or broadcast. As an interesting aside, however, the Labor federal government proposed an updated form of D-notices in 2010, in light of rising terrorism concerns and the WikiLeaks disclosure of sensitive diplomatic and military information. The suggestion was quickly abandoned.

  The D-notice system established a formal co-operative relationship that set specific reporting ground rules that, for the most part, the media seemed willing to obey. The notion of media restraint and the prerogative of government to keep certain designated facts out of the media – with the agreement of the media themselves, secured in a committee that included senior media people – affected the way the media reported the tests. This had a cumulative effect. D-notices were not issued for the most dangerous activities at Maralinga, the Vixen B experiments in the early 1960s, but, by then, the media were in the habit of reacting to government-approved media releases. It did not seem to occur to them to investigate stories on their own account.

  The conditions of the time were conducive to secrecy, and government policies strengthened those conditions. The Australian Government, with backing and pressure from the British Government, used D-notices and other information controls to restrict media scrutiny. Compliant media conditioned to receiving government information in, mostly, a controlled and predictable way were reinforced by an official, but not legally binding, system that forbade reporting certain secret activities. When the Geneva moratorium on weapons testing came into effect, the British banished Maralinga from even the weak media spotlight. The ill-equipped media did not pursue the story because they did not understand its complexities and implications. The minor trials continued for several years without media attention. No wonder the British nuclear tests in Australia remained mysterious for decades.

  9

  Clean-ups and cover-ups

  Long-term or permanent habitation of contaminated areas is improbable even in the distant future.

  Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee, 1967.

  Eames: When it came to the clean-up exercise, was the situation this: that the Australians had absolutely no way of knowing what the debris was that would have occurred from these tests apart from what you told them?

  Pearce: That is so.

  Geoff Eames, counsel for the Aboriginal people at the Royal Commission, and Noah Pearce, AWRE scientist, 1985.

  There came a point, when Sir Ernest Titterton was giving evidence, when there was almost no point asking him anything, because we could not get the facts out of him.

  Justice James McClelland, in an aside to John Moroney during Moroney’s testimony about Operation Brumby at the Royal Commission, 1985.

  What do you do with a vast nuclear weapons test site that is now surplus to requirements? The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 made official what the moratorium of 1958 to 1961 had begun – there could be no more legal atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons by nations who signed the agreement. Maralinga was built for atmospheric tests. Between the end of the moratorium in 1961 and the start of the treaty in 1963, there was even some thought that Maralinga might resume a major trials program, especially if the touchy Americans pushed the British away from Nevada again. However, the treaty came in and Britain worked with America in Nevada and the Pacific. Maralinga was history.

  The British did canvass the possibility of taking the tests underground and hinted at a site about 400 kilometres from Maralinga where a hill rose 700 metres above the plain, generally considered to be Mt Lindsay. By now, though, the Australians had had enough. The hill looked like it was in an Aboriginal reserve, and drilling into it would, at the very least, likely cause water flow problems in the area. The final meeting on the subject took place in December 1963 between senior members of the Prime Minister’s Department and their counterparts from the UK weapons establishment and the UK High Commission. The talks came to nothing. The Australian Government was a signatory to the Partial Test Ban Treaty and in no mood to test its limits, or to contend with a restive populace who no longer thought atomic weapons testing desirable. The idea of underground tests quietly died. The Menzies government was relieved.

  No-one really knew what to do about Maralinga though. The British kept their options open for a while and took several years to close it down fully. The original agreement to allow the British to test atomic weapons at Maralinga committed them to clean up what they left behind. Clause 12 made the British liable ‘for such corrective measures as may be practicable in the event of radio-active contamination resulting from tests on the site’.

  The first attempt to put the site right was called simply Operation Clean-Up, a basic name for a basic operation organised by the range commander. Just about all remaining personnel on site pitched in. Every Tuesday afternoon from 25 June 1963 for a number of weeks, they carried out an ‘emu parade’, picking up scraps of various kinds. Site personnel gathered 175 tonnes of contaminated material from the three Naya sites, as well as TM100, TM101 and Wewak. This debris was all placed into a pit at the ‘cemetery’ at TM101. (As a side note, there was no actual cemetery there, or at the airfield. The name was an in-joke about a burial place for inconvenient items.)

  Also in 1963, AWTSC secretary John Moroney reviewed radio-active contamination at the site. He reported on 5 September 1963 that the plutonium used in the minor trials was the most dangerous hazard, particularly that at Taranaki left over from Vixen B. He also found quantities of the bone-seeking radioactive element strontium-90 at the site. However, he was hamstrung by not having detailed information from the British, particularly data to do with the minor trials. The British had shared virtually no information about the minor trials with the Australians, even when the Department of Defence reacted against the Titterton-inspired information bottle-neck. Moroney wrote to the AWRE in November 1963 seeking more information, but, at that stage anyway, it was not forthcoming.

  The biggest problem left behind was plutonium. That word alone should have been enough to ensure a thorough clean-up. Make no mistake; the dangers of plutonium were well known in the 1960s – ignorance does not explain the persistence of the contamination problems at Maralinga. These might not have been so severe, either, if the British had not whitewashed the true state of the range via a nondescript document called the Pearce Report.

  Noah Pearce, the author of the report, looms large in this part of the story. Pearce had an honours degree in physics and had worked during the latter years of World War II on measuring the effects of bomb blasts for the UK Ministry of Supply. He lived a long life, dying in 2009 at the age of 91. He worked for the AWRE in various capacities, particularly in the early days measuring the explosive yield of Hurricane and Totem. In the late 1950s he was responsible for health aspects of the minor trials and, later, for the clean-up operations: Operation Hercules in 1964 and Operation Brumby in 1967. Both these operations made the contamination problem worse, and both seem to have been conducted largely for the sake of appearances, rather than to actually clean up the appalling mess at the site. ‘Operation Brumby’, said the Royal Commission, ‘was based on wrong assumptions. It was planned in haste to meet political deadlines and, in some cases, the tasks undertaken made the ultimate clean-up of the Range more difficult’. Later, a report by the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) on the rehabilitation of the Maralinga site stated that Hercules and Brumby ‘did not rehabilitate the site to the standard later recognised to be necessary for the protection of people and the environment’. How could something so important be so wrong?

  For a number of years, the Pearce Report was held to be the final word on the radioactivity at both Maralinga and Emu. Never has there been a greater example of the bureaucratic convenience of an official report – a report that’s completed, checked, signed off, printed
, filed and then forever taken as true. Well, not actually forever in this case. The Pearce Report is a pivotal document because its contents were the backdrop to the formal agreement to hand the site back to the Australian Government. The British and Australian governments both clung to it as to flotsam from a shipwreck for way too long, even though the evidence suggests that the Australian officials had not read it closely. In fact, the Pearce Report was barely the first word. That it was not forever taken as true came down to a combination of whistleblowing and investigative journalism.

  The first Pearce clean-up, known officially as Hercules 5, arose from the growing conviction that Maralinga would never again be used for atomic weapons testing, and therefore the range was likely to be left unattended and unmaintained indefinitely. Key on site personnel such as the Australian health physics representative Harry Turner had already been relocated (Turner was transferred to the Department of Defence in Canberra). There was no health physics expert on site, no-one to deal with a radiation emergency or keep an eye out for untoward scatterings of cobalt-60 beads.

  The AWRE formed a small decontamination and health physics team in the UK and shipped them to Maralinga to work with range staff on Hercules 5, under the supervision of Pearce, who was on site for the last three weeks of the operation. There was only one Hercules operation. Pearce said the name Hercules 5 was ‘dreamed up by one of the staff because the fifth labour of Hercules was to clear out the Augean stables’. In classical mythology, this labour was, tellingly, considered to be both humiliating and impossible. Counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Peter McClellan, mused aloud that perhaps the AWRE saw this part of Australia as Augean stables. Pearce kept his answer neutral and non-committal. But there was a heaviness in the atmosphere during Pearce’s testimony in London. The Royal Commission was in the UK capital to question the people responsible for radioactive contamination of Australian territory. Pearce’s name was inextricably linked to this dreadful aftermath.

  The Hercules 5 clean-up plan was presented to the AWTSC in 1964 and passed with few amendments. The Royal Commission later dwelt on the fact that the clean-up and survey phases were rushed through, noting how the AWTSC had enthusiastically rubber-stamped the plan and no-one had stopped to think that one day Indigenous people might want to come back to the lands from which they had been so brutally expelled. Also, while approval was given for cleaning up within the boundaries of the range, no plans were drawn up for surveying and clearing up any contamination that had fallen outside the boundaries, other than at Emu.

  During his grilling at the Royal Commission, Pearce constantly put the responsibility back on the AWTSC, minimising his own input in the management of the clean-ups and survey. He made it clear that he had not thought much about the plight of the Aboriginal people, and it had not informed his approach to his task. The problem was that the AWTSC did not want to manage the clean-up either. No-one wanted to own the responsibility for a dying weapons range. Both the AWRE and the AWTSC thought the Maralinga era was over and would soon be forgotten. The AWTSC explicitly stated in its liaison with Pearce, as revealed in testimony to the Royal Commission, that once the range had been tidied up it should be patrolled for about 15 to 20 years. After that time, the public would no longer be interested in it. When the Royal Commission raised this time frame with Pearce, he did not see anything particularly cynical about it, though he pointed out, a little ruefully, that interest had not in fact disappeared after all. On the contrary.

  Hercules 5 was not based on a physical survey of the site but on existing records. That meant making a number of lazy assumptions rather than plotting the real radiation risks on the ground. The task set for the Hercules team had 10 parts to it, encompassing cleaning contaminated buildings and vehicles, burying any contaminated materials that could not be cleaned in pits at Taranaki, carrying out a health physics survey of the area to determine the risk to human health of any contamination, fencing any areas that still had residual contamination and preparing drawings to show where the fences and pits were located.

  Hercules lasted from August to November 1964 and produced two reports, one describing the radiological state of the range at the conclusion of the clean-up and the other prepared especially for the AWTSC describing the residual radioactive and toxic contamination still present. Pearce stated at the end of the operation that the signs and fences would be regularly inspected and maintained, but that the range was now more or less in a holding pattern, pending a decision on its future. He recognised that Hercules was not a final clean-up but thought it would do until longer term decisions were made and personnel departed the site.

  Pearce well knew that plutonium was loose on parts of the range and, with his team, calculated the inhalation hazards from the plutonium mixed with the dust. The inhalation hazards drove much of the clean-ups. He also recommended, based in part on data provided by Harry Turner, that the topsoil could at some point be ploughed to dilute the plutonium by mixing it through the soil to a greater depth than where it currently lay. This proposal was put to the AWTSC, which agreed that diluting the plutonium was wise. Ploughing and grading were duly carried out around Wewak, TM100 and TM101, as part of Hercules. The contents of various contaminated refuse pits around the site were consolidated into a total of 19 huge burial pits at Taranaki. The pit area was enclosed in a high chain-link fence. Ploughing was not, however, such a great idea. As radiation scientist Geoff Williams later said about ploughing the plutonium into the topsoil:

  That might have sounded very nice in the lush fields of southern England but out there [at Maralinga] you have three or four inches of sand on top of very hard limestone, so in many cases the scraper was just bumping along on the limestone. If it had solved the problem, if it had really diluted to a sufficient level, it would have been all right. But it didn’t because the fragments and the concentration were so high, all it did was make a bigger mess.

  No measurements were made of the effectiveness (or, indeed, otherwise) of ploughing the plutonium into the soil. As Pearce said in evidence, ‘We knew the levels of activity on the surface and it was reasoned that if that were distributed uniformly through a thickness you would finish up with a uniformly contaminated layer of soil some inches or 15 cm thick … I cannot recall any experimental evidence for that at the moment’. Hercules was conducted without any form of testing on either side of it. It was mostly guesswork.

  The original 10-year agreement for the British to use Maralinga was due to expire on 7 March 1966. This forced a decision, because maintaining the site was costly and pointless unless it was going to be used for further tests. On 16 February 1966, four weeks after Menzies retired from office, the Australian Government received word from the UK High Commission that Britain would relinquish the site. The Maralinga agreement meant that they needed to clean it up. Remarkably, the AWRE – in possession of so much knowledge about what was left there – proposed four completely inadequate actions to make the site safe, starting with disc-harrowing some open areas of ground ‘with a view to reducing the hazard to a level safe for permanent human habitation’. The other three measures were sealing the pits with concrete and sand, removing from Maralinga village a small amount of radioactive ducting material and sealing drains. Disc-harrowing – churning up the topsoil using a tractor towing large circular blades – could never make the area safe for people to live in. At the Royal Commission many years later, John Moroney gave evidence that even the notoriously lax AWTSC never took this suggestion seriously. He said that the only way that the site could be made habitable was by removing all the plutonium, not by churning it into the sandy topsoil. At this point, Jim McClelland berated Moroney, and the safety committee, for not just recommending that all the plutonium be removed, instead of mucking around with ploughing and disc-harrowing. Moroney replied, ruefully, ‘It would have been a good idea, yes. We would not have had this Royal Commission’.

  Pearce did not spend a lot of time physically at Maralinga, although he visited at cru
cial moments. In early 1966 he arrived at the test range with his AWRE boss Roy Pilgrim to survey the site. At that time they decided to set up RADSUR to survey Emu Field and Maralinga so they could produce the appropriate documentation needed to meet the requirements of British withdrawal. They made no such plans for Monte Bello, which was essentially ignored until much later. RADSUR was a flawed attempt to map radio-active contamination before Operation Brumby.

  Operation Brumby, the next phase of the withdrawal from Maralinga, was the main scheduled clean-up. Unlike Hercules, which had been undertaken using existing data, Brumby needed a more thorough understanding of the radiological properties of both Emu and Maralinga. The AWTSC asked the Australian Government for some direction on how to deal with the derelict range, but it never received a response. At its 133rd meeting on 14 May 1966, the AWTSC accepted the AWRE’s RADSUR proposal. The AWTSC still had no idea what the Australian Government wanted, but the plan proceeded anyway. On 21 December 1966 Moroney wrote rather forlornly to the Department of Supply saying, ‘In the absence of such a decision, the AWTSC will base its decision on complete evacuation of the range’. No-one in authority seemed to be interested in tying up the loose ends. Maralinga was a problem that just about everyone was trying to wish away.

  RADSUR was carried out between October and December 1966 by about a dozen AWRE scientific personnel, assisted by six sappers from the Royal Engineers. The survey involved gamma and beta surveys at each of the major trial sites and the plutonium-contaminated areas around Taranaki, TM100 and TM101. With the exception of Marcoo, where the low-yield ground shot formed a crater, RADSUR noted that the major trial sites at both Emu and Maralinga had glass-like glazing produced because the intense heat from the blast had fused the soil. This strange shiny glazing covered a circular area with a radius of about 180 metres at each major site. The glass was alive with beta radiation, largely from the strontium-90 trapped in it. However, there was not much in the way of gamma radiation, and what little there was fell away sharply as one moved away from ground zero. Most of the radioactivity associated with the big bomb sites was in the upper layer of soil, between 30 and 40 centimetres deep, close to ground zero and approached the surface as the distance from ground zero increased.