Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

Every cliché of the mad, obsessed scientist is entangled in that quote from the report presented to the AWTSC on 11 June 1957. This fact about the British tests ignites public sentiment like few others. Where the tests intersect with the tragedies of infant deaths, few Australians are likely to be unmoved. Many of these concerns centre firmly on Titterton. The meeting minutes recorded that ‘Prof. Titterton will ensure that arrangements are made by the Australian Safety Committee for collection of all of the above samples and despatch them to the U.K. along with all relevant information, addressed to Dr. Dawson, A.W.R.E., who will pass them to A.E.R.E.’

  The bones were scattered far and wide, from Australian laboratories in Adelaide and Melbourne to British ones in Aberdeen, Liverpool and London. The parents of the babies never knew. In all, bones from nearly 22 000 bodies – the majority of them babies – from both Australia and Papua New Guinea formed part of the experiments. Collection of samples in Australia was part of a bigger international program perhaps ironically titled Project Sunshine. The bones were tested for strontium-90. John Moroney from the AWTSC said in a letter to the pathologists involved (quoted in an Adelaide Advertiser article many years after the event), ‘You may have perhaps considered it possible that the question of sampling and radiochemical assaying of bones would not be regarded kindly by the general public. Consequently, I would be grateful if … you could treat this matter as either confidential or personal’. While a rational argument can be made that testing bone for traces of radio-activity during the early days of the atomic age has valid scientific justification, no amount of reasoning is likely to reassure the families of the 22 000 babies and others whose bones were tested. Stealing the bones of babies can never be seen in purely scientific terms.

  Then there are the nuclear veterans. These aggrieved men, their wives or widows and their children have never been recognised for what they endured. Service personnel who go to war have well-recognised and justifiable rights. Service personnel who stood with their backs to an atomic mushroom cloud, or who scraped the spoilt soil into pits or washed down the aeroplanes that had flown through a high atomic cloud do not enjoy the same rights. The various veterans’ associations in Australia and the UK have fought against this intrinsic injustice for many years, with little success. John Keane summed it up in The Age in 2003:

  Five decades after entering service, the thousands of British and Australian men who have survived Maralinga (more than a quarter of them are now dead) feel hurt and humiliated. They have no medals to pass on to their grandchildren, no letters of praise or apology from Tony Blair or John Howard, no wartime veterans’ privileges. What they do have are anecdotes about unusual clusters of multiple myelomas. Hip and spine deformities. Teeth that are falling out. Poor eyesight. Bleeding bowels. Post-traumatic anxiety and depression. And perhaps up to a quarter of them, according to preliminary data collected by the New Zealand government, have disabled offspring.

  Despite many court cases and claims for monetary recompense, only a relatively small number of Australians – military and civilian – have been compensated for health problems alleged to have been caused at Maralinga or the other test sites. Documents associated with the Australian Participants in British Nuclear Tests (Treatment) Bill 2006 provided the following statistics:

  Since the conclusion of the British Nuclear Testing Program, at least 79 common law actions against the Commonwealth have been instituted by ex-servicemen, other former Commonwealth employees and employees of Commonwealth contractors. Many of the cases before the courts have either been discontinued or withdrawn. Four cases have been heard by the court.

  In addition, compensation has been paid under an administrative scheme to a number of service personnel, Indigenous people, civilians and some families of diseased people, with an average payout of $126 561. Even fewer of the many British service personnel present at Maralinga have been compensated, owing to British laws that until 1987 limited liability for injury suffered during military service. In 1988, the British Government finally agreed to pay war pensions to service personnel who developed blood cancers after their service at Maralinga.

  Yet even the McClelland Royal Commission into the British atomic tests, motivated as it was by a passionate chair who sought to assign blame to those responsible for the tests, failed to find sufficient evidence of specific harm caused. While there is much anecdotal evidence, some of which has been presented in court, proving causality is extremely difficult. As scholar Paul Brown stated, ‘In a finding that continues to frustrate veterans, the Royal Commission concluded that illness, disease and abnormality cannot be unequivocally associated with radiation exposure well above the dose limit’.

  The Royal Commission noted the fears that the tests had engendered in participants that stayed with them well into the future: ‘Operation of the “need to know” principle and the minimal amount of information given to participants has been a factor contributing to participants’ concerns and fears regarding what might have resulted from their experiences at Maralinga’.

  In 2002, John Clarke QC was appointed by the prime minister John Howard to review veterans’ entitlements, including those of nuclear veterans. Clarke received 160 submissions on the British nuclear tests, and a chapter of the resulting report dealt exclusively with the veterans of the tests. Clarke called the nuclear tests ‘a unique, extraordinary event in Australia’s history’ and found that members of the armed services were exposed to dangers beyond those normally experienced in peacetime. As one of the submissions to the inquiry put it, ‘Australian servicemen were provided on loan to an experimental nuclear weapon test programme under the control of another country without prior scientific examination, independent advice or assessment of the potential dangers that could occur’. The report noted that these veterans were not at that point entitled to benefits under the Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986 because their service occurred during peacetime before 7 December 1972 and recommended that the Act be extended to enable some limited coverage. The Act was amended in 2006 to enable compensation for veterans suffering one kind of cancer, malignant neoplasia. This did not go far enough in the eyes of the veterans, who had reported many other kinds of cancers, as well as issues around fertility, genetic harm to their children and mental health. Finally, in 2010 the Rudd Labor government amended the Act again to broaden the coverage of nuclear veterans. Various nuclear veterans’ associations continue to fight for recognition of the harm caused by the service, and in many cases the children of the service personnel fight too.

  Tens of thousands of service personnel were based at Maralinga, flew aircraft to and from the sites or were present at the other sites during the test series. Their stories have been told in various ways over the years, beginning with a remarkable series of articles in the Adelaide Advertiser in 1980. Later, the academic Roger Cross joined with nuclear veteran Avon Hudson to co-write Beyond Belief: The British Bomb Tests; Australia’s Veterans Speak Out, which revealed shocking tales of what went on. In more recent times the journalist Frank Walker has meticulously documented the stories of veterans as part of his book Maralinga: The Chilling Exposé of our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of our Troops and Country.

  The injury inflicted upon the Indigenous people cannot be properly measured. Robbing people of their ancestral homelands, subjecting them to forced removal and, later, exposure to the plutonium-laden dust and debris is not something that can be forgiven. Maralinga Tours, a successful tourist venture wholly owned by the traditional owners, began in 2014. The venture became possible when unrestricted access to the final part of Maralinga land was finally granted to the Maralinga Tjarutja people. At that point, the traditional owners could come and go freely throughout the site, without permission from the Department of Defence. May this venture thrive and prosper, because of all the people harmed by Maralinga, the Indigenous people were the most powerless.

  The toxic physical legacy of Maralinga can almost be summed up in one word: plutonium. When MARTAC reported in 200
2 on the outcome of the operation to remove contamination from the area, co-funded by the British Government, it said, ‘Plutonium (Pu) was almost entirely the contaminant that determined the scope of the [Maralinga rehabilitation] program. It is acknowledged as a very radiotoxic element if taken into the body, particularly by inhalation’. Plutonium-239 has significant consequences for the environment. According to radiation expert Frank Barnaby, ‘To all intents and purposes, once [plutonium-239] is in the environment, it stays there permanently. Because of its radiotoxicity and long half-life the disposal of plutonium presents particularly difficult problems’. While many of the people associated with Maralinga tried to play down the risks of leaving plutonium on the open range over the years, their assurances ring hollow. This material is deadly, and even back then this was known. Why was leaving it there considered acceptable? None of the answers given over the years seems satisfactory.

  Uncovering secret information is a theme throughout the saga of the British bomb. An interesting side note is provided by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, which revealed the plans drawn up by William Penney for an atomic bomb design that became Blue Danube. It is worth tracking back a little to recall the early history of the saga. In 1947, Penney was asked by the GEN.163 Cabinet committee to head Basic High Explosive Research, which later became the AWRE. This research group was tasked with fulfilling the Attlee political ambition of turning the UK into a nuclear power. Penney drew upon his extensive knowledge of the design of nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project, and particularly the Fat Man plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and started to sketch out a design. This remarkable document, titled simply ‘Plutonium Weapon – General Description’, included a sketch of how the weapon might be constructed, although without great technical or scientific detail. The report was declassified and made publicly available some years ago, but the UK Ministry of Supply suddenly withdrew it from public view in 2002 (along with many other files relating to the British nuclear tests in Australia retained by other government entities, particularly the Ministry of Defence). Wiki-Leaks, however, published the full report, including the drawing, on its website in March 2008, arguing that, even though it had been withdrawn from the UK Public Records Office, the file was in the public domain since no attempt had been made by the UK Government to track down the many copies circulating since it was first made public. The government took an interest in clamping down on its distribution only when WikiLeaks published it.

  There followed a bizarre and archetypically British correspondence between WikiLeaks and the head of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Counter Proliferation Department, Regional Issues. Blue Danube had been superseded decades earlier and was no longer part of the British nuclear armoury. The office head said, ‘I have had an initial assessment from our experts. They are extremely concerned by the drawing you have posted on your website and assess it is of serious proliferation concern, and possibly terrorism concern’. WikiLeaks ‘did not find [the concerns] credible’ and refused to remove the document. It remains there at the time of writing.

  However, the emails between Jay Lim at WikiLeaks and Isabelle McRae at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office showed something of a half-hearted attempt at information control by the British authorities, perhaps in contrast to the era of the nuclear test series in Australia. McRae responded to Lim’s initial refusal to remove the material by saying:

  I will talk to our experts here and do my best to work up a detailed explanation for you (though some of the explanation may be classified!). I am glad to read that you have at least checked this with a number of nuclear physicists before putting it on your website. I would just add that I don’t see that the information furthers your aims – i.e. reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. Therefore, I would be very grateful if you could remove the information while I work up a detailed explanation for you. I will try to do this as quickly as possible – I am away over Easter but if you could give me until 2 April, I’ll send you something then.

  Apparently bomb design–seeking terrorists observe Easter breaks too. Lim replied, ‘After consultations it strikes us as extraordinary that the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] claims the WikiLeaks documents are a proliferation issue worthy of censorship, but, apparently, not worthy of assigning a staff member to address the issue during its Easter break’. WikiLeaks refused to budge, saying that ‘the documents are a substantial piece of world history and have been released, then censored. Implicit in our core mission is preventing censorship of such documents’. The issue of British nuclear weaponry remained controversial, long after the British gave up testing on Australian soil.

  Britain’s nuclear program evolved rapidly from those Australian beginnings. In 1963, Britain purchased Polaris missiles from the US and added its own nuclear warheads, an arrangement that flowed directly from the resumption of nuclear weapons co-operation in the late 1950s. These submarine-based weapons became the basis for the country’s nuclear deterrent between 1968 and 1996. The new co-operative phase did not last, since Harold Macmillan’s successor, Harold Wilson, was less inclined to pursue further nuclear weapons development with the US. Polaris was bolstered by an improved design known as Chevaline, which had been tested in Nevada in the 1970s, and was later superseded by the Underwater Long Range Missile System, better known as Trident, in the early 1990s, all submarine-based weapons. The future of the aging Trident weapon is currently the centre of ongoing political tensions.

  Hardship often brings out the best of creativity in people. Maralinga has sparked beautiful art and beautiful music. A travelling exhibition titled Black Mist Burnt Country, with plans to run for two years from September 2016, honours the output of many artists moved by the legacy of Maralinga. A long-term creative project called Nuclear Futures, which began in Australia but has grown to encompass six countries in all, ‘supports artists working with atomic survivor communities, to bear witness to the legacies of the atomic age through creative arts’. A piano and violin piece titled Maralinga, composed by Matthew Hindson, was performed by the Australian orchestra Ruthless Jabiru in London in October 2013, conducted by Kelly Lovelady, in a program titled Maralinga Lament. Novels have been written about Maralinga, notably Maralinga by Judy Nunn and Maralinga My Love by Dorothy Johnston. A theatre performance produced by arts company Big hArt titled ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji’ premiered at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2004, partly in Pitjantjatjara language. In August 2006, Paul Brown’s ‘Maralinga’, a verbatim play developed with the Maralinga Research Group based on the experiences of nuclear veterans, premiered on the Central Coast of New South Wales, directed by Wesley Enoch.

  Australia was no doubt exploited by its former colonial master, but the country willingly allowed it to happen and even paid to be involved by setting up the Maralinga range and providing various kinds of personnel and logistic support throughout the test series. Why? What does Maralinga tell us about our nationhood? From this distance, the events of the test era speak of a somewhat immature democracy, anxious to please its motherland despite the high cost. Most of the decisions about the atomic tests taken by the Australian Government were not discussed and debated in public. The secrecy put in place at the atomic test sites, shored up by the imposition of information controls such as D-notices that deliberately fostered media self-censorship, enabled experiments of unprecedented risk to be conducted without public consent and their aftermath to be left unaddressed for many years. On the dusty and expansive desert test range, experiments on the destructive capacities of the atom proceeded without complete safeguards, including the safeguards afforded by public scrutiny and accountability.

  Could harm of this kind happen again? The answer must be yes. Without independent scrutiny of their activities, governments are capable of anything. In more recent times, the Edward Snowdon revelations about US and UK government surveillance of citizens and the leaders of other countries gave the world a glimpse into a covert world of go
vernment activity that had, until that moment, been invisible to the majority of people. Snowdon ‘revealed to Americans a history they did not know they had’, as one of the journalists who received the leaked material said; the nuclear veterans, Indigenous people, journalists and politicians who blew the whistle on the British nuclear tests did the same in Australia.

  The hazards posed by the tests were significant and continued for many years. However, these intrinsically dangerous experiments were not available for public assessment largely because the media, in line with official British and Australian government policy, did not report them to the public. The fact that their dangers and damage were not part of Australian public conversation had dire ramifications. A deadly substance was scattered across the Maralinga lands, and an equally toxic legacy of cover-up and deceit was left behind. To this day, we do not know the full extent of the human toll. Australia fulfilled the role its government had volunteered it for 11 years earlier, but the cost was immense. If there is a word that speaks not only of thunder but also of government secrecy, nuclear colonialism, reckless national pride, bigotry towards Indigenous peoples, nuclear era scientific arrogance, human folly and the resilience of victims, surely that word is Maralinga.

  Appendix

  British atomic tests in Australia

  MAJOR TRIALS

  Operation Hurricane

  Monte Bello Islands, Western Australia

  3 October 1952

  Operation Totem

  Emu Field, South Australia

  Totem 1: 15 October 1953

  Totem 2: 27 October 1953

  Operation Mosaic

  Monte Bello Islands, Western Australia

  Mosaic G1: 16 May 1956

  Mosaic G2: 19 June 1956

  Operation Buffalo

  Maralinga, South Australia

  Buffalo 1 (One Tree): 27 September 1956