Clouds of Deceit
Page 14
It is not only the British government which has doubted the aborigines’ claims. The Australian report, AIRAC 9, published in January 1983, says fallout from Totem I ‘may have slightly exceeded’ current recommendations on radiation dose limits for members of the public. It concludes that ‘AIRAC has found no evidence that any Aboriginals were injured by the nuclear tests.’
The evidence presented to the Royal Commission leaves little doubt that the British were guilty of exploding an atom bomb in conditions that caused a thick cloud of fallout to pass over aboriginal encampments to the north-east. Two more pieces of evidence suggest the aborigines’ claims of ill-health may be justified. The Royal Commission was told that, far from fallout at Wallatinna from Totem I being just over the present annual limit for members of the public, it could have been as much as 160 times that limit.
Dr Alice Stewart, the epidemiologist who has studied the Christmas Island tests, told the Commission that the number of aboriginal deaths from thyroid cancer and leukaemia in South Australia after the tests was too high. The South Australia Health Commission found that twenty-one aborigines living in the region of the atom bomb tests - Emu Field and Maralinga – died of cancer between 1973 and 1980. This incidence of cancer deaths was higher than it should have been, according to Stewart.
The aborigines’ claims of a black mist causing sickness and death in the desert in 1953 first came to light in 1980, when an aborigine called Yami Lester recalled an oily black cloud passing over his campsite at Wallatinna Station. He described how sickness and diarrhoea affected most of the aborigines camped there; he thought some of the very young and old might have died. Lester, who was about ten years old at the time, recalled how his eyes became sore and he lost the sight of first one, then the other.
Lester’s claim was met with scorn by both the Australian and British authorities. Five years later, those official denials can be construed as adding insult to injury.
The British and Australian authorities have claimed to know of only one occasion when aborigines were found on a firing range. This incident took place at Maralinga on 14 May 1957, when a family of four was found to have spent the night camped at the bottom of the outer slope of the crater caused by the bomb code-named Marcoo. This bomb had been exploded the previous October as part of the Buffalo series of tests. Although it was a small weapon - only 1.5 kilotons - it was exploded on the ground and caused a good deal of contamination for its size.
The Australian AIRAC 9 report in 1983 says the dose received by the family ‘cannot possibly have led to any identifiable ill effect’. Nevertheless, it clearly caused a panic at the time, according to evidence given to the Royal Commission. Geoff Eames, the barrister representing aborigines at the hearings in London, told Lord Penney that troops had been lined up and warned that they would be court-martialled if they spoke about the family to anyone outside the test site. They were told that the penalty they would get if found guilty was either death or thirty years in prison.
Rudi Marqueur, a captain in the Australian army at Maralinga, saw the male aborigine from the family walking from the contaminated area towards a caravan used for decontamination. Peter McClellan, the barrister assisting the Commission, asked Marqueur whether the incident was ‘of considerable concern’ to those in charge of Maralinga. He replied: ‘It certainly was, very much so, and at the same time we were warned … everybody was warned to keep the whole situation quiet.’
Richard Durance, the Australian commander of the Maralinga range, was questioned about the incident by Geoff Eames during hearings in Australia. It became clear that the incident was so important that the Australian Minister of Supply, Howard Beale, was told about it. Here is the exchange:
EAMES … that was a cause of acute political embarrassment, was it not?
DURANCE I think so.
EAMES And you were aware that political embarrassment was being felt very keenly by Minister Beale?
DURANCE Yes.
EAMES And you were aware that from the government’s point of view, that incident must not leak out to the public?
DURANCE I was aware that he was pleased that it did not leak out.
For the family - a man, a woman, two children and their three dogs - the incident must have been terrifying. Suddenly plucked from their traditional lands by uniformed men, handed over to a security patrol, and moved many miles to the aboriginal reserve at Yalata: the events must have been the equivalent for Europeans of being scooped up by aliens from another planet. They were forced to take showers to get rid of contamination, a procedure that distressed them immensely. Rudi Marqueur was told, he said in evidence, that ‘there was quite a lot of cahooing and screaming going on because the female did not want to have anyone else wash her under a shower, and her husband apparently also objected to the fact that she was going to go under that shower.’ In fact, the family was lucky to arrive at Yalata still in possession of their dogs; the Minister of Supply, Beale, was furious when he heard that the dogs had not been shot.
In view of the stern warnings given to troops about revealing this incident, it is hardly surprising that many servicemen - like Gordon Wilson, the school caretaker from Hull, who regularly met aborigines in the prohibited area at Maralinga - just did not mention sightings to their superiors.
The AIRAC 9 report took an optimistic view of attempts to keep aborigines off the range: ‘It is evident that strenuous attempts were made to prevent the entry of Aboriginals into hazardous areas, and although it would clearly be impossible to affirm that such an intrusion never took place, it seems most unlikely that any Aboriginals were present elsewhere than the fringes of the Prohibited Area at the firing times and in the period following them.’
The Royal Commission, on the other hand, heard a wealth of evidence that aborigines strayed into prohibited areas. Patrol officers charged with keeping them off the range at Maralinga complained that their task was hopeless in view of the huge area of land involved. Durance, the range commander, admitted he was not given specific instructions about keeping aborigines off the range when he took over in June 1956. He was questioned on the subject by Geoff Eames.
EAMES Were there any instructions in writing as to what steps should be taken to ensure that Aboriginal people did not move on to the range?
DURANCE If there were, I was not given them.
In fact, Durance seems to have taken over as commander in distinctly tense circumstances which involved some criticism of how the previous range commander, Colonel Dewar, had been running things. Eames asked Durance if he was given verbal instructions about the policy on the range to do with aborigines.
DURANCE The conversations were rather limited, as I was there to relieve Colonel Dewar and it was very embarrassing and we did not go into a great amount of detail. My function then was to try and find out what had not been done that had to be, and what had been done that should not have been done.
Durance went on to admit that, because a possibility that aborigines could have strayed on to the range had been demonstrated, the tests in 1956 and 1957 at Maralinga should have been cancelled. He told Geoff Eames that ‘I cannot get away or deny the fact … that information that you have presented this morning … implying human beings there in 1956 and 1957 … the tests should not [have taken place].’
Before the commission was set up, a former RAF officer claimed he had found four dead aborigines in a crater after the tests at Maralinga. John Burke died of stomach cancer before he could give evidence at the hearings, but he said he also saw about 200 dead cockatoos and rabbits near the crater. Bill Grigsby, who was in the Royal Navy, told his wife before his own death in 1977 that he found aborigines camped in a bomb crater at Maralinga in 1962. Although the major weapons tests were over, minor trials were still going on. Grigsby said all the people in the small group in the crater were covered in sores. Patrick Connolly, who served in the RAF at Maralinga between 1959 and 1962, said he had seen large numbers of aborigines all over the restricted area.
The Totem I blast which put at risk aborigines at Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill also proved an unexpected radiation hazard for members of the British, Australian and American air forces. Their job was to fly through the radioactive cloud after the blast to take samples. The crew of the single British plane, an RAF Canberra, got high doses of radiation in spite of flying in a plane completely sealed with tape. The six Australian Lincolns, whose crews took no precautions against radiation, on British advice, picked up so much contamination there were fears for the safety of air and ground crews. The American crew of the two USAF B-29s said the radioactivity from the cloud was the most intense they had ever encountered.
The Australian document, AIRAC 9, took a characteristically cheerful view of the contamination problem caused by Totem I. It said that ‘radioactive contamination of the Lincoln aircraft flying from Woomera to track the cloud of the first Totem test was found to be heavier than anticipated’ but concluded that it was ‘most unlikely’ that it had caused any injury to the crews.
The story which has unfolded since the publication of AIRAC 9 is much more worrying. Although the British Canberra which sampled the cloud only six minutes after the explosion had been sealed before take-off, the plane encountered so much radiation that Penney refused to allow it to carry out the same operation at the Totem II test twelve days later.
The Australians fared even worse. Squadron Leader Ray Turner, of the RAAF, told the Royal Commission that his plane flew into a cloud of red dust and could not get out of it. The meter for measuring external radiation - the only piece of monitoring equipment on board the plane - went to its maximum reading on entering the cloud and stayed there throughout the flight. Turner and the rest of the crew ate their rations on the plane and, unlike the Canberra crew who used oxygen, breathed contaminated air.
When the plane landed at Woomera, it was met by scientists who started running Geiger counters over everything. Turner said they went off like machine guns - ‘They were making a hell of a noise, rather loud and rather fast.’ His flying suit was taken away and he was told to take several showers.
One of the Australian planes landed at Williamtown air base, in New South Wales, after the sampling mission. The next day, an American airman walked round the Lincoln carrying a Geiger counter; all he could say was, ‘Oh, shit… oh, shit.’ The American had intended to take a lift on the plane back to its base at Richmond, near Sydney. But he told the crew he had decided to take the train instead. ‘That bloody machine is hot,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere near it.’
It was from the Americans, in fact, that the Australian air force learned just how badly contaminated its planes were. An Australian report on the Totem tests released to the Royal Commission shows how unprepared the Australians were to deal with any hazard - unsurprisingly, since the British had told them there wasn’t one.
‘It was fortunate that the US Air Force element contained personnel very experienced in [decontamination] operations and were thus able to assist the operations commander at Richmond by advising him on the degree of contamination on aircraft and personnel and the safety precautions to be observed,’ it says.
‘It was only through seeking assistance of the US Air Force specialists and equipment that it was at all possible to ascertain that Lincoln aircraft and personnel had obtained any degree of contamination.
‘The precaution to have the Lincoln aircraft which landed at Williamtown inspected proved the importance of this aspect and how ignorance on the part of RAAF personnel on matters of this nature could possibly have proved dangerous.’
Squadron Leader Turner told the Royal Commission that ground staff refused to work on his Lincoln the day after it had landed and been found to be radioactive. Some ground staff did work on the contaminated Lincolns before it was realized how radioactive they were: one man spent three hours on the wing of the hottest of the Lincolns on the day after the cloud sampling operation.
The Australian air force was furious about the incident. A senior officer wrote angrily: ‘We were firmly told this was not a hazard… It does appear there was a hazard… It would seem that this service is not informed of the hazard its own personnel may undergo.’
The Americans, by contrast, knew exactly what they were doing. The British had allowed them to send two B-29s to the test because the British embassy in Washington had made it clear to the UK government that the USAF intended to sample the Totem cloud whether the British gave permission or not.
In fact, an American air force plane had been allowed to take samples at Operation Hurricane. But by the time of the Totem tests, the US had failed to comply with a British request to hand over some of these samples - they were treating the British just as the British were treating the Australians. In the event, the Americans did hand over some of their samples after Totem I, but they sent the bulk to Guam for analysis. The samples were so radioactive that Guam could not handle them, and they were flown to Washington.
Although the risks to air and ground crew were most serious at Totem I, there is no doubt that incidents of planes becoming very radioactive happened at later tests. An RAF plane became ‘substantially contaminated’ during the Mosiac series of tests at Monte Bello in 1956, according to AIRAC 9. The hazard continued to exist during the Christmas Island tests: Christopher Donne, an RAF pilot who flew sampling missions at the hydrogen bomb tests, told the Royal Commission that ‘on the last and largest of them I was subjected to high radiation levels and prevented from doing any more sampling work’. The British and Australian air and ground crews involved in sampling missions probably received some of the highest doses of any servicemen at the tests.
The British government’s claim that it knows what doses individuals received rests on the premise that the system for monitoring personnel was both well administered and accurate. The evidence is that it was nowhere near as good as it is claimed to be.
A prerequisite of a really comprehensive monitoring system is that the procedure laid down is followed in every case. Brian Last, a fitter in the Australian air force, was issued with two film badges during his service at Maralinga in 1956. When he left, he took the second one with him. ‘My daughter still has it today,’ he told the Royal Commission. Last is not the only veteran who left the tests without handing in his film badge for checking. He also gave evidence that other people at Maralinga took their film badges apart out of curiosity - thus exposing the film and destroying the reading - and then put them back together again.
Doug Rickard, an Australian whose job was to issue small, pocket-size dosimeters to men who were going into areas where they might be at risk at Maralinga, has admitted making up the readings he was supposed to record when the dosimeters were returned. This was because each one had to be charged by battery before being handed out - many of the batteries were flat, he says, so the dosimeters didn’t work. He would ask an individual where he had spent the day, and make up a dose accordingly.
Even when dosimeters and film badges did work, and were collected in for checking, the readings they gave were not always reliable. One of the many British documents released to the Royal Commission was an AWRE report which examined the reliability of film badges and small dosimeters.
It recorded an experiment during the Operation Buffalo trials at Maralinga in 1956. A mahogany model of a man was placed in a contaminated area, wearing both film badges and dosimeters. The report concluded that the film badge tended to under-record the dose received by the lower half of the body - including the genital organs - by 40 per cent. It also noted it was quite common for film badges and dosimeters worn simultaneously by the same person to show different readings
.
When this evidence was raised with Penney, his response suggested that much of the measuring done at the tests was carried out with primitive equipment. In 1957, he said, there was ‘a tremendous upheaval in health physics’, the branch of science concerned with people’s exposure to radiation. The reason was the catastrophic fire in a plutonium-producing pile at the Windscale bomb factory, which sent a plume of radiation south-east across the UK.
Penney was appointed to run the inquiry into the incident. ‘What it taught me was that the instrumentation of the pile needed improving,’ he told the Royal Commission. ‘That although we thought we had got a lot of instruments, we weren’t sure they were all running correctly.’
In other words, the instruments used for monitoring general levels of radioactivity in nuclear establishments and at the bomb tests were liable to error, on top of the doubts about the accuracy of equipment used to check the exposure of individuals. The knowledge came too late to improve matters at the bomb tests in Australia: the Windscale fire started the day after the last British atom bomb test took place on Australian territory.
Much time and effort went into working out the safest time to explode each weapon, the idea being to carry out the test at a time when the wind would carry the atomic cloud well away from populated areas, or at such a height that it would pose no threat. A lot of this effort seems to have been wasted; in fact, it looks suspiciously like a public relations exercise.
Thomas Brindley, an Australian soldier responsible for monitoring fallout at Maralinga, told the Royal Commission about a curious experience he had. After the very first test at the site, a blast code-named One Tree, Brindley was out to the east of the range. ‘We heard on the radio … [that the] Minister for Supply had said that the fallout had gone harmlessly away to the north-west. And we were sitting below Coober Pedy in the fallout area, which is directly east.’ Australians would obviously be much happier if fallout was drifting north-west across the desert towards mountainous Western Australia, instead of heading east towards populated New South Wales.