In 1950, about to take up a chair at the Australian National University, established by legislation introduced by the Chifley government, Oliphant suggested to the Labor government the possibility of building an atomic reactor in Australia to pursue atomic nuclear energy for domestic power. The government agreed, but also saw the proposal in somewhat broader terms, as possibly being used to produce plutonium for some future Commonwealth defence program. The idea was taken up by the Menzies Liberal government, with the proposed Australian atomic reactor to be fuelled by Australian uranium. By early 1951, uranium deposits had been discovered at Radium Hill in South Australia and at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory.
In August 1949, the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb, and fear, urgency and abomination gripped Australians. Attlee asked Menzies if Australia would agree in principle to a British test being held in the Montebello Islands, 80 kilometres off the north-west coast of Australia. The British had originally wanted to use Nevada, but by now the United States was sharing less and less with the British. The Americans did not want the British in the nuclear club, and had frozen British scientists out of collaboration on atomic weapons. The British, however, believed they were entitled to nuclear power status because of, among other things, their key role in the bomb’s invention. The Australians were excited at the prospect of this atomic collaboration, and hoped they would get the nuclear recipe from the British in return for their acting as host to the tests. In the end, though, Australia’s chief contribution was to provide the testing ground.
Meanwhile, the Americans themselves were interested in the uranium deposits at Rum Jungle, south of Darwin. They preferred to deal with the Australians than buy in the general uranium market from places such as Congo. The US government put pressure on Menzies in June 1952 in the hope that Rum Jungle would be developed quickly and all its output made available to the Combined Development Agency, the British and American governments’ Nuclear Weapons Development group, a shopfront that implied the United States and Britain were still working together.
It was not even certain that Australia owned the islands named Montebello, since no one had ever laid direct claim to them. Attlee asked for Australian help in preparing the site and with logistics, but he warned that the area around the islands was likely to be contaminated with radioactivity for at least three years afterwards, during which it could not even be visited by pearl fishermen. In early 1951, Menzies said that because of an impending election he could not give a final decision, but in May, once his government was safely returned, he cabled the agreement.
The announcement of the test was made in Britain and Australia in February 1952, but the site was not mentioned and the Australian press was not invited to attend the test. The weapon to be detonated was a plutonium bomb, in which two masses of plutonium would be imploded to detonate the device. Ordinary high explosives would bring the two masses of plutonium together. This triggering method had been developed by the British during the development of the American bombs at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
The British scientist in charge of the test on Montebello, William Penney, son of a sergeant-major in the Royal Ordnance Corps, was anxious to simulate the effects of a weapon carried up the Thames on a ship and detonated in the city. This first test, named Hurricane, occurred in October 1952 in a Montebello lagoon, with the plutonium bomb (slightly stronger than each of the bombs that had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) located inside the hull of an expendable frigate, HMS Plym. The ship was vaporised. Seven RAAF Lincoln bombers, stationed at Broome, took off to take samples of airborne radioactivity. Contamination did drift over the Australian mainland in areas occupied by the Aborigines, but the bomb cloud was not properly monitored. The Australian air and ground crews of the Lincolns involved in tracking the bomb cloud were also given no dosimeters to record contamination inside their aircraft.
After the explosion, Penney got news that he was knighted, and Australians heard a broadcast in which he assured them that he backed Mr Churchill’s opinion that ‘the results of our atomic weapons program should be beneficial to public safety’. Now Penney wanted to examine a range of detonations at various heights above the ground, at ground level, and beneath the ground. As chief scientist, he was under great pressure from Whitehall to advance such tests, and like other scientists (whether under government urgings or out of their own powers of denial), he was willing to expose the bodies of young servicemen and others to irradiation. He took an optimistic attitude towards issues such as where the wind would spread radiation. None of the generals involved in the tests were scientists, but they were under pressure too—the pressure of their conviction that nuclear war would occur, and relatively soon. This conviction was shared by the Australian nuclear scientists appointed by Menzies to work with Penney. In his mind and in those of his colleagues was an urgency to get on with the task. For these were virtually war times, a war with a long fuse that had already been lit. Penney had been asked by the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, how many nuclear bombs Russia would need to destroy Britain. He had answered, ‘Five, I would say, Prime Minister. Just to be on the safe side, let’s say eight.’ Such a sense of the flimsiness of British defences drove Penney. ‘I thought we were going to have a nuclear war,’ he would later tell an Australian inquiry into the tests in Australia. ‘The only hope I saw was that there should be a balance between East and West.’
After the first explosion at Montebello in October 1952, arguments were made for nuclear tests on the Australian mainland. Menzies declared that no ‘conceivable injury to life, limb or property could emerge’. When asked by a backbencher about the spread of radioactivity, Menzies replied, ‘I should like to say that it would be unfortunate if we in Australia began to display some unreal nervousness at this point. The tests are conducted in the vast spaces in the centre of Australia, and if it is said, however groundlessly, that there are risks, what will be said in other countries?’ He meant, of course, countries of more restricted geography.
For the first two mainland plutonium tests (Operation Totem), in October 1953, Emu Field in the Great Victoria Desert of South Australia had been used, chiefly for its remoteness. Allowed to participate in the American explosion at Bikini Atoll in 1946, Penney had placed petrol drums full of water around the island to register the impact of the bomb at various distances from the point where it fell. He used a variation on that for the tests at Emu Field, setting up in special frames thousands of empty toothpaste tubes which had been flown out from England.
During the search for yet another site, even Somalia was assessed, but it was decided that the winds were not right, and the nomadic population was far denser than the population of Central Australia. Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait was suggested by Churchill’s aide, the intractable Lord Cherwell, an alleged model for Dr Strangelove (Cherwell was a German-born scientist who was, if anything, even more determined and ruthless). Cherwell flew to Australia to offer a technological-knowledge-in-return-for-uranium agreement by which he wanted Australia to give Britain an option for up to thirty years over two-thirds of the Australian uranium not already committed to the marketing body set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Britain would use the Australian uranium for its atomic energy industrial program. The remaining third was for Australia to keep for any domestic atomic program of its own. In return Britain would seek an arrangement with the Americans by which Britain could give Australia classified technical information without needing US consent.
Although Cherwell was able to observe the firings at Emu Field, Menzies and his ministers rejected his proposition. They were willing to treat the United Kingdom as a preferred customer to whom they would give first offer of any surplus of uranium at current prices. The collapse of his plans made Cherwell very vengeful. The Daily Mirror newspaper in Sydney reported: ‘This newspaper and most Australian people are satisfied that His Lordship left this country in a huff after having failed to pull what the Americans would call a “very fast d
eal”.’ Cherwell would claim that before the Emu Field test Menzies and his ministers did not want any technological information because they knew Australia could not find the finance to build its own bomb. Even Cherwell doubted this claim, advising Churchill that surely the Australians would seek some technical detail.
One thing the British did not tell Menzies was that the Australians at Montebello would not in any case be allowed close enough to the actual trial to be able to draw any scientific conclusions from it. The British explained that given that certain weapons information was almost totally of American origin they were under a very strict promise not to let others get too close to it. Doubts the Americans had on Australian security were also a brake on Britain’s willingness to share the nuclear experience.
Len Beadell, famous bushman and surveyor of the Gunbarrel, a dirt track running 1400 kilometres from south of Alice Springs, skirting the Gibson Desert, and ending at another road near Carnegie Station in Western Australia, was sent out to reconnoitre the country south of Emu Field and find a place closer to the Transcontinental Railway than Emu Field for new tests. Beadell’s party came upon sites where native totems were stored, an indication that Aborigines considered this country unlikely to be visited by whites. But, ‘I am given to understand that this area is no longer used by Aborigines,’ wrote the scientist Alan Butement of the Australian safety committee. Having decided that the plains around Maralinga were suitable, Beadell and his men built a runway for Penney, who was flown in in a Bristol air freighter.
Looking at the apparent desolation around him, Penney said when he landed at Maralinga, ‘It’s the cat’s whiskers.’ The local Aborigines would use a different metaphor. They would call Maralinga ‘Field of Thunder’. Over the next three years, from 1953 to 1956, a township grew up in Maralinga to accommodate thousands of troops and other personnel. Water was pumped up from the ground and desalinated, or else brought in by train.
Menzies had an intense relationship with Ernest Titterton, an eminent English nuclear physicist, a student and disciple of Mark Oliphant, and the first professor of nuclear physics at the Australian National University. Together, Titterton and Oliphant were respected—Oliphant could have received a chair from any university he chose and yet had chosen to work in Australia—and were seen as heroes and authoritative figures by the public, as well as Menzies. Oliphant saw atomic energy as a chance for Australia to become an industrial powerhouse. He also hoped atomic power would address the ‘dead heart’ problem by driving desalination plants in the Australian interior. The relationship and debates between Titterton and Menzies, meanwhile, were important determinants of the Australian part in the tests.
There was no opposition to the tests from the Labor Party. Evatt was interested in atomic energy. He had been appointed first chairman of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 as part of the United Nations’ plan to try to control the spread of atomic weapons, and would not utter any criticism of British nuclear testing for some time. Menzies’ Minister for Supply and Development Howard Beale, nicknamed ‘Paddles’, son of a clergyman, and himself a Sydney barrister, would be involved enthusiastically in Australia’s role in the British atomic tests over the entire period they ran. He had a calm air of self-possession and inspired confidence in people. Menzies, who had the same magisterial demeanour, did not like him and so kept important information from him. (Thus Beale had been betrayed into assuring Parliament in June 1951 that reports that Britain was to use Australia as a testing ground for atomic weapons were ‘utterly without foundation’.)
Much later it would be judged that the Australian scientists at the original Hurricane trial at Montebello lacked sufficient information to advise the Australian government whether there would be any fallout on the Australian mainland from the tets. The Australian government, whether at Montebello or elsewhere, was forced to accept the United Kingdom’s assurances on the safety aspects of the trial. It was enough guarantee of safety for all parties that Montebello and Emu Field were very remote.
Yet there was enough pressure on the matter for the government to create the Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee, commonly called the Australian Safety Committee, which was designed to give the Australian government the opportunity to obtain independent scientific advice on the tests’ safety. This committee was set up in July 1955, and was made up of Ernest Titterton, New Zealand-born Alan Butement and Leslie Martin, all respected enthusiastic advocates of the nuclear proposition. A British scientist named Ronald Siddons later declared that the interaction was one of a rather formal briefing: ‘The meteorologists stood up and said, “This is the meteorological information”, and I stood up and said, “These are our fallout predictions”.’
A much later royal commission into British nuclear tests in Australia, sitting in the 1980s, would decide that sometimes the safety committee was deceitful, and failed in its own protocols and allowed unsafe firing to occur. Professor Titterton was accused by the royal commission of being prepared to conceal information from the Australian government and his fellow committee members if he believed that to do so would suit the interests of the British government and the testing schedule. In his sincere worldview, however, Australian interests were best served by British interests, so that if he were at fault it was for the sake of both countries. If he lied, it was as children are lied to for their own good.
In fact, the protection of military and civilian people against exposure would be found to be inadequate, since the limits of safe radiation would be more strictly drawn, on good evidence, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The Royal Commission of the 1980s would assert, ‘By reasons of the detonation of the major trials and the deposition of fallout across Australia, it is probable that cancers which would not otherwise have occurred have been caused in the Australian population.’
The impact of the Montebello tests in 1952 on Aborigines on the Western Australian mainland is hard to estimate, since no radiation tests occurred at the time. Fallout reached the mainland thirty hours after the burst. At Emu Field in 1953 Totem One was fired in the teeth of a wind that would have spread fallout eastwards and north-eastwards. Measured fallout from Totem One on inhabited regions exceeded the levels proposed in the official British report on the tests, High Explosives Report A32.
The firing of Totem One also failed to notice the existence of Aboriginal people at Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill Station downwind of the test site. The later royal commission would decide that there was no reason to disbelieve Aboriginal accounts that the Black Mist occurred and that it made some people sick. An outbreak of vomiting amongst the Aborigines at Wallatinna may have resulted from radiation, or it could have been a physical reaction to an overwhelming and a towering explosion they saw and felt. James Yami Lester was an Aborigine of that area who believed that the Black Mist had caused or contributed to his blindness. In one affidavit to the royal commission he described how Aborigines drank milk from the goats at Wallatinna which had been rendered unsafe by the dust cloud on the prevailing wind from the direction of Emu Field.
When that notorious first atomic test at Emu Field was held, a couple named the Landers were living in a caravan at a place named Never Never, about 200 kilometres to the north-east of the detonation site, near Welbourn Hill Station. The Landers had a job building a windmill and a yard in this desert country. The Landers looked up to see a cloud coming towards them from the south-west, the direction of Emu Field. Mrs Almerta Lander remembered that although ‘it was the colour of a rain cloud, darkish, it did not have the compact, rolling look that a rain cloud would have. It was just a sort of mass . . . there were not any other clouds in the sky. None whatsoever.’ As it got closer to the Landers, it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon and down to the top of the low mulga trees. It passed directly over the caravan, and by lunchtime it was gone. Dark trails of dust trickled down from the cloud. The dust was very fine and sticky, said Almerta. It deposited itself in the pots and billies on the outside stove. The Giles family
at Welbourn Hill Station said they had experienced the same cloud, the same dust.
Yami Lester said he had heard an explosion away to the south, and everyone in the camp began talking about it. He saw the cloud later in the day. Lester remembered the old people in the camp being frightened: ‘They reckoned it was Mamu—something that could be a bad spirit or evil spirit. Some people brandished their woomeras to try to make the cloud change direction. Others dug a hole for people to climb into.’ Lester’s mother heard two noises and believed the cloud was the work of Wanambi, the water serpent, making a noise as it created waterholes. She would say that one thousand people died after the Black Mist, although an interpreter at the ultimate royal commission declared that the word ‘thousand’ was not to be taken literally but as meaning ‘many people’.
The camp was moved twice, Lester remembered, as always happened after a death. Soon after the event he became blind. Later in his life, Lester and his wife travelled to London on behalf of the Pitjantjatjara Council to campaign for a hearing into the results of the Black Mist.
Robert Dash, a young Australian leading aircraftsman, declared in later evidence that he had serviced at the Woomera airfield the Lincoln aircraft and their equipment after they had fulfilled a mission chasing and flying through the atomic cloud. One of the tasks was to remove the radioactive-dust-collector containers on the planes, but no protective clothing was provided to him, not even gloves. Dash noticed that the scientists who then picked up the dust collectors wore protective clothing, since they knew they were radioactive. According to Dash’s evidence, when the aircraftsmen were given a Geiger counter test, the device flew at once to the maximum scale. They were told to burn their overalls, and were given new white ones, and white gloves. They were never given the film badges which were issued to British crews and which changed colour to indicate radiation danger.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 65