Atomic Thunder

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by Elizabeth Tynan


  Defence Department sources have disclosed that about 40 kilograms [almost certainly an over-estimate] of radioactive plutonium was buried in a shallow pit at Maralinga, which was fenced and guarded for a time. Mr Killen ordered the top-level inquiry into tests after the Deputy Opposition Leader, Mr Uren, alleged in Parliament on December 9 last year that nuclear devices were exploded during an international moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.

  The story ended with a throw-away line alluding to the fact that unguarded radioactive waste ‘might be suitable for use in nuclear weapons’. But other media did not pick this up, at least not yet.

  The rumblings continued and a thunderstorm seemed about to break. On 16 February 1977, Whitlam asked Killen if earlier assurances from the British that they had not flown radioactive waste to Australia for burial were still valid. Killen replied that they were. On 31 March, Killen answered a question on notice from Labor MP and later leader Bill Hayden, who had asked on 9 March if he could ‘provide a full list of all nuclear explosions which have taken place in Australia giving the date, the size, location and purpose of each?’ Killen replied with a basic list of the major trials at the three test sites from October 1952 to October 1957. He included Antler but provided no correction to his earlier suggestion that the major trials had ended in 1956, and he gave no indication that he was aware of the minor trials. Killen then ordered his department to take a closer look. The top-secret Pearce Report that had been in government hands for 10 years showed that plutonium was at the site, even if it underestimated how much was above ground. The full report had not been made public (an edited version was published in May 1979 and tabled in the House of Representatives on 7 June), but it was available to senior government ministers. From the content of public statements by Killen, Garland and others, it appears that few people had read it.

  In response to Killen’s request, Defence produced the secret Cabinet submission no. 2605, prepared for the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee and tabled on 11 September 1978. Titled ‘Plutonium Buried near Maralinga Airfield’, it raised an alarming spectre, that ‘a small party of determined men’ could recover plutonium ‘in a single quick operation if they were willing to take large risks to themselves’ and threaten to exploit its ‘extremely toxic properties … against the population of a major city’. In other words, the aftermath of the minor trials at Maralinga could be used for terrorism, a horrifying prospect. Killen wanted permission from Cabinet to seek British co-operation in removing a half-kilogram ‘discrete mass’ of plutonium buried near the Maralinga airfield. He was not seeking remediation of the plutonium at Taranaki, which the submission conceded was ‘practicably irrecoverable’ because it was so dispersed. (The extent of Vixen B contamination had not yet come out.) The airfield plutonium, noted in the Pearce Report, had been used in a Tims minor trial at TM101 in 1961.

  Members of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee accepted the recommendation of the submission that the government should avoid public scrutiny and actively attempt to limit media knowledge. The committee specifically asked Killen to ‘arrange for a reconnaissance to determine what would be entailed in exhuming the discrete mass of recoverable plutonium buried at Maralinga on an assumption that it would then be removed from Australia by the British’. The submission advised against announcing the purpose for the reconnaissance, suggesting, if necessary, that it be described as a ‘review of physical security measures and possible need for maintenance work’. The committee acknowledged the need for a public statement ‘about the exhumation/repatriation operation’, but the ‘timing and text would require discussion with the British’. The long-established method of stonewalling media scrutiny, or diverting attention with a bland and uninformative public statement, still operated, but not for much longer.

  The secret submission also noted that the Maralinga plutonium might compromise Australia’s international obligations. The prevailing international agreement was the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, also known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since ‘some of the nuclear material buried at Maralinga may be safeguardable’, this meant it had to be declared ‘to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Australia’s inventory of materials’. The problem wouldn’t go away by itself: ‘The IAEA is aware of the possible presence of undeclared safeguardable material at Maralinga’.

  The submission put forwards three options for dealing with the plutonium. It favoured asking the British to dig it up and take it home, which was, eventually, enforced. The Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee formally responded to Killen’s submission on 28 September 1978 confirming that it would approach the British. The nuclear affairs division of the Department of Foreign Affairs found that the plutonium in question was buried in six containers in ‘relatively shallow’ pits. Despite the term discrete mass, it was not a single lump but dispersed through salt packed into the containers. The British, after initially refusing, recovered the Tims plutonium in 1979 and took it back to Britain.

  Despite their desire to keep the story out of the public domain, Killen and his department reckoned without the efforts of one of Australia’s leading investigative journalists. Brian Toohey, then 33 years old, had been a political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review since 1973 and later became Washington correspondent and then editor of the National Times. He was well known for his unwillingness to stick to official versions of events. Fellow political correspondent Mungo MacCallum noted in a 1989 feature, ‘As a journalist of unrivalled application and extraordinary contacts, Toohey dedicated himself to opening up things that politicians (and more particularly bureaucrats) wanted to keep secret, irrespective of what they were’. Fatefully, Toohey got his hands on the secret Defence submission. While he had to maintain confidentiality, he identified his source as ‘someone in the government who thought the information should be public, without being motivated by either a strong environmental, or nuclear disarmament, perspective’.

  Finally the ticking time bomb of Maralinga was revealed to a large audience. Toohey used the leaked Cabinet submission as the basis of his story in the Australian Financial Review on 5 October 1978, under the headline ‘Killen warns on plutonium pile’. The sub-heading was even more compelling: ‘Terrorist threat to British atomic waste’. It was a factual account of the contents of the submission, with commentary on the consequences. For example, the second option outlined by the submission for dealing with the plutonium involved Australian authorities extracting and analysing the plutonium at the site, a task described in the submission as potentially beyond the limits of Australia’s capacity to deal with radio-active materials. ‘Although the submission does not make this point, the public is hardly likely to be reassured by the revelation that despite all the money spent on nuclear research within Australia, half a kilogram of plutonium is possibly too hot for the authorities to handle in line with IAEA requirements.’ Toohey noted that the Menzies government in particular had not demanded sufficient safeguards at Maralinga: ‘The submission … makes clear that Australian Governments in the past have taken an extremely lenient attitude towards the existence of the Maralinga plutonium through its nuclear weapons tests in Australia in the 1950s’. He concluded, ‘It is now 20 years since the tests finished. The fall-out, however, is still a very live issue in British–Australian relations however much both Governments want to keep the negotiations entailed in last Thursday’s Cabinet submission a closely guarded secret’.

  Over 30 years later, Toohey viewed the story as part of a continuum that forced government accountability: ‘These articles were worth doing because they gave the public a glimpse of what was being withheld in a democratic society’.

  Toohey’s revelations were quickly picked up. The Sydney Morning Herald assigned reporters to travel to Maralinga and see what was there. Killen had said that, thanks to the Toohey article, he had to urgently upgrade security at the site. ‘When journalists flew in there was no sign of the increased security measures announced
on Thursday night to guard a buried lump of plutonium from terrorists … When told of this yesterday the guards at Maralinga just chuckled’, the Herald reported on 7 October.

  In the same issue a familiar name reappeared. Ernest Titterton wrote a feature-sized spread to answer the growing controversy, his final free kick before the McClelland Royal Commission robbed him of credibility. The feature conveyed an impatient tone that Titterton undoubtedly felt at having the plutonium issue dredged up after all these years. The media coverage since Toohey’s story was ‘near to hysterical’, he claimed, but the buried plutonium didn’t pose any danger. Someone could carry it around in their pocket and no harm would befall them. There was limited truth in this, although Titterton did not explain how dangerous even a tiny particle could be if it was inhaled or ingested. He was on even shakier ground in claiming that terrorists would have no use for half a kilogram of plutonium, since all plutonium could potentially be useful to them. He argued that the British would hardly leave buried a quantity of plutonium, a valuable material that might be worth tens of thousands of dollars, if it were in any sort of usable form. He also made claims, later shown to be wrong, that Brumby, the 1967 clean-up, had taken care of these problems. He insisted, ‘Putting aside politics and emotional grandstanding, it is clear … that the public need have no worries about terrorist activity’.

  The Herald’s political correspondent Peter Bowers examined the mystery of the buried plutonium on the same day. Bowers wrote that Uren was calling for Killen’s resignation in light of the recent revelations about minor trial contamination from William (now Lord) Penney. For the first time, Penney had revealed some information about the minor trials, particularly the Tims trials that had resulted in the infamous ‘discrete mass’ of plutonium. This was the beginning of revelations about the residue of the minor trials: ‘Lord Penney revealed that small-scale nuclear tests, which he described as “little mock explosions”, were conducted apparently long after full-scale bomb testing ceased. The experiments have remained a highly classified secret for the past 17 or 18 years’. Uren suggested that Killen had misled parliament by denying what was left behind at Maralinga.

  Two days earlier, on 10 October, the Herald had reported that Britain had been formally asked to repatriate the plutonium to the UK. The speed of this request appeared to reflect media pressure, with the story noting ‘that the Government had been forced to act quickly’ after the Toohey story’s published details of the Cabinet submission. A supplementary piece reported the official British stance that lasted until the McClelland Royal Commission. A spokes-person for the UK Atomic Energy Authority said that, ‘although his department had no record of what was left at Maralinga … it was unlikely that any plutonium was involved’. He also denied that any atomic waste had been sent from Britain to Australia.

  This was the same official line run back in 1976 in response to the Adelaide stories. By the next day, 11 October 1978, as pressure mounted, the Herald reported that the British were planning to send a team of experts to Maralinga to investigate the remaining plutonium as both governments tried to damp down concern. The British high commissioner Donald Tebbit dismissed the idea that the plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists: ‘Even the [Great Train] robbers would have trouble coping with this situation. They might do better with a toy pistol’, he said. This story also gave more detail about the much-discussed ‘discrete mass’, which had dominated media coverage since 5 October, with Tebbit explaining ‘this material originated in six separate minor experiments’ when a small disc of plutonium was shattered into numerous fragments ‘which were collected into a steel container filled with common salt. No nuclear explosion was involved’.

  Another original Maralinga participant emerged back into the light. On 11 October the Herald quoted Howard Beale, then in retirement, who dismissed as ridiculous any claims that the buried plutonium could be a terrorist target. He reserved a portion of his scorn for the source of the story: ‘What right has an official in the government to play God and leak documents of this nature? I think it was immoral and quite wrong to let this document loose’. Beale lectured reporters on their particular responsibility to assess the national interest before publishing and, perhaps reflecting his own approach, also remarked on the procedures that should have been in place to prevent such a leak: ‘An issue as sensitive as the Maralinga one should have been handled by the smallest number of people possible’.

  Toohey’s follow-up story on 11 October added more fuel. This article, titled ‘Maralinga: the “do nothing” solution’, brought the wrath of Killen down on Toohey’s head. The story questioned the Australian Government’s response in light of a statement issued by the British High Commission on 10 October that nothing needed to be done. The story quoted a radio interview in which the acting Australian Foreign minister Ian Sinclair agreed with this and said that the plutonium was safe where it was buried. The extent of tensions between the Australian and British governments did not come out in the story, however. Behind the scenes, confidential cables were being exchanged between the UK deputy high commissioner in Canberra Henry Dudgeon and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that belied the apparent agreement of the public pronouncements. Dudgeon mentioned the ‘cavalier tone’ of the official Australian request for the removal of the plutonium and declared that ‘the Australians of course fully accept that we no longer have any legal obligation relating to Maralinga’. Toohey was not deterred when Sinclair backed the British stance with a supportive statement that played down the risks, particularly as the Cabinet submission had made strong statements about the terrorist threat posed by the material at Maralinga.

  Toohey’s follow-up story also picked up on Jim Killen’s responses to the original one:

  Mr Killen relied on his verbal dexterity in several answers he gave in Parliament yesterday. For example, he said that no Cabinet submission prepared by himself had said the plutonium at Maralinga was ‘currently’ a terrorist threat. Last Thursday he said in his press statement that the [Australian Financial Review’s] report of his submission and its emphasis on the potential terrorist threat provided sufficient cause for him to substantially increase security at Maralinga on that very day.

  The story reported that Killen had told parliament he found out about the plutonium problem only in early 1977, which seemed to accord with his public statements. In 1976, when Tom Uren and some elements of the media had begun to question what was at Maralinga, the Defence minister had seemed not to know and had asked his department to dig deeper. Toohey concluded his contentious 11 October story by tying it to a then-current political debate: ‘If the Government ends up doing nothing about the Maralinga plutonium it will only have succeeded in raising public doubts about the safety of nuclear materials at the same time as it is trying to convince the world that any Australian uranium exports will be on the strictest possible safety terms’.

  Upon publication of this second story, Killen denounced Toohey in parliament. He accused Toohey and the Financial Review of issuing an open invitation to terrorists to help themselves to the dangerous material at Maralinga, and of reporting falsehoods. He said, ‘It is a day for regret when a journalist and a newspaper, aided by a criminal act, have published a story that is against the interest of the nation and its people’. Killen’s outburst in parliament was reported in the stablemate Fairfax broadsheet the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 October 1978:

  [Killen] said a report in the Financial Review ‘written by one of that paper’s employees’ has stated that he suggested there might be no need to do anything other than upgrade the police guard at Maralinga. ‘I said no such thing and suggested no such thing’, Mr Killen said … ‘This is a pernicious, wicked and odious technique that has long been practised by this man’, Mr Killen said … ‘The person concerned with the report wouldn’t be capable of accurately reporting a minute’s silence’, Mr Killen said.

  Killen claimed that the Defence submission did not make assertions about an immediate
terrorist threat, although one could conceivably exist if no action were taken, and that publicising this threat ‘was an act of irresponsibility’. Toohey took the attack in his stride: ‘I knew that I had accurately reported Killen’s cabinet submission, despite his flamboyant, often incomprehensible, accusations against me. Perhaps his reaction reflected the way he was unaccustomed to media criticism’. When he was interviewed in 1987, Toohey nominated his Maralinga plutonium story as a career highlight:

  Jim Killen went berserk when [the discrete mass of plutonium] was revealed and he banned the paper from any contact whatsoever with the Defence Department. [Malcolm] Fraser ordered him to lift the ban, but what Killen went ape about was the story being a breach of security. My point was that the real security problem lay in leaving unguarded plutonium at Maralinga.

  While the drama around Brian Toohey’s plutonium disclosure was unfolding, the legendary denizen of the Canberra press gallery Mungo MacCallum watched with wry amusement. MacCallum, a colourful satirist and political correspondent, spent 20 years in the federal parliamentary press gallery. His column ‘From the gallery’ of 12 October 1978, titled ‘Killen throws a Maralinga bomb – with fallout’, chronicled Killen’s lambasting of Toohey:

  Mr Killen exploded in the megaton range, and scattered his fallout widely – especially over this paper’s Canberra correspondent, Mr Brian Toohey. Mr Killen never actually named Mr Toohey; however, in a series of answers to questions, and in a ministerial statement designed to clear up the whole issue, he left no doubt as to his primary target.

  MacCallum recounted how Opposition leader Bill Hayden revealed that he had contacted Whitlam, and the two Whitlam government Defence ministers, Lance Barnard and Bill Morrison, who had said they did not recall hearing about plutonium buried at Maralinga. Killen countered this with the fact that the still-classified Pearce Report, which noted the Maralinga plutonium, had been available to them when they were in government. This was possibly a self-defeating point to make, given Killen had also expressed ignorance about the Maralinga plutonium before 1977 when he, too, had access to the report. MacCallum said that Killen, having savaged Toohey, ‘sat down to a big laugh and a round of applause’.

 

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