Secret

by Brian Toohey

  Nicholson said that in June 1948, Burnet wrote that the strategic value of biological warfare was that ‘it has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy’s industrial potential which can then be taken over intact’.18 After Burnet visited Britain in 1950, he told the subcommittee that this type of biological warfare might succeed ‘in a country of low sanitation [where] the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination’.19

  Burnet wasn’t reflecting the prevailing norms. After World War II, the public still supported the 1925 Geneva Protocol’s ban on the aggressive use of chemical and biological weapons. Nor was Burnet arguing that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if it is a nerve agent or a bullet that quickly kills a soldier on the battlefield. Instead, he advocated a policy of deliberately creating mass starvation in Asia by using biological agents to destroy crops and spread diseases that would kill civilians as well as crops. Either way, the Nobel-laureate-to-be was advocating that Australia commit repugnant war crimes. Nevertheless, the Defence subcommittee in 1951 recommended that a panel report on the ‘offensive potential of biological agents likely to be effective against the local food supplies of South-East Asia and Indonesia’.20

  However, Defence took little further interest in crop destruction until the 1960s Vietnam War, when Australia participated in the US chemical warfare program, spraying crop-destroying toxic herbicides, such as Agent Orange, in an effort to deny food to the Vietcong. Non-combatants also suffered because they lived in the sprayed areas. These herbicides were also used to destroy jungle foliage in an attempt to deny cover to the ultimately successful Vietcong.21 The terrible multi-generational human harm continues.

  The Defence Research and Development Policy Committee at its June 1959 meeting noted that big changes had occurred in CBW since 1952, especially the discovery of the ‘V series’ of agents, which were extremely toxic and entered the body through the skin or inhalation.22 Melbourne University’s dean of medicine, Professor Sydney Sunderland, was an enthusiastic member of the Defence R&D Policy Committee in the late 1950s. After Defence commissioned him to visit highly secret facilities in the US and UK in the 1960s, he produced top-secret reports on CBW in September 1960 and April 1961. The archives show that Defence Minister Athol Townley acknowledged using these reports as the basis for a 1963 Cabinet submission supporting US chemical weapons tests in Australia. In the reports, Sunderland welcomed new developments in CBW and strongly supported testing in Australia. He said there was a growing feeling abroad (i.e. in the US and the UK) that CBW was just as effective as nuclear weapons for killing people, but had the ‘decided advantage’ of producing short-lived contamination of the environment ‘without destroying the capital assets and industrial resources of the defeated’.23

  Sunderland noted that ‘an active [American] program on crop diseases continues’ and the Americans were also interested in studying Indigenous Australian toxins and poisons and would be prepared to support such projects financially.24 He did not elaborate. However, the US Church Committee on Intelligence revealed in 1975 that the CIA wanted shellfish toxins and cobra venom for assassinations and suicide pills, and to use as ammunition for a gun (called a ‘microbioinoculator’) that could fire poison darts about 100 metres.25 In 1960, the CIA had planned to poison the elected Congo prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, with a venom that would appear local to the area. Instead US-backed local forces tortured and killed Lumumba in January 1961. The CIA also proposed assassinating Cuba’s Fidel Castro with shellfish toxin.26 In the end, Castro lived to the age of ninety. Gary Powers, the American pilot of a U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, was supposed to commit suicide using shellfish toxin; sensibly, he refused and was later exchanged for a Russian prisoner. The Defence Standards Laboratories (DSL) at Maribyrnong held stocks of the shellfish toxin in Melbourne where the research, at least in one case, appeared to be for public health purposes.27

  The first public disclosure that Australia was involved in CBW research was on 9 March 1967, when the Sydney Morning Herald’s science writer, Noel Limblom, reported that DSL was doing so in collaboration with the US, the UK and Canada.28 Answering a question from Gough Whitlam in parliament on 15 March 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt gave what was to become the standard comment: a small group of scientists was keeping up to date with the technology for ‘defence against chemical warfare’. This distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is meaningless. Once produced, chemical and biological weapons can be used for either purpose. Shortly after the SMH’s revelation, two anti-war researchers, Humphrey McQueen and Ian Morgan, wrote that the principal research scientist at DSL, Dr Archie Gillis, had published five papers on nerve gases and two on stonefish since 1958.29

  The head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney, Professor Charles Birch, was one of the strongest opponents of using scientific knowledge for making chemical and biological weapons. He told the ABC radio program The World Tomorrow on 27 July 1968 that there was no excuse for scientists to keep their work secret.30 An ABC journalist, Michael Daley, noted that DSL’s annual report for 1967 referred to research it was doing into the movement of chemical and biological aerosols through foliage, the action of drugs on the nervous control of muscles, and the reaction impact of bacterial endotoxins in rabbits’ blood—all were of particular relevance to CBW.31

  It is almost certain that no Australian dean of medicine would advocate testing such agents today. Nor should doctors in the 1960s have done so—they were ethically required to do no harm, and the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawed the offensive use of chemical and biological weapons. It’s unclear if Melbourne University knew about Sunderland’s work for Defence. The 150th-anniversary biographical sketches of Melbourne University’s medical-school staff in 2012 mention a minor role undertaken with the Defence Department by wartime Faculty of Medicine dean Peter MacCallum, but make no reference to Sunderland’s extensive work with Defence on CBW.32 Nor is this important aspect of his work mentioned in a prominent biographical dictionary.33

  8

  THE BEST PLACE TO TEST THE DEADLIEST NERVE AGENTS

  ‘The scale and type of trials now necessary are such that these cannot be conducted inside the US due to the dangers involved and the lack of suitably spacious sites.’

  US General Lloyd Fellenz1

  Defence Department scientists in 1961 were keen to test the most potent nerve agent known, VX, in Australia and produce highly toxic biological weapons locally. The NAA shows that the official report of the Defence R&D Policy Committee’s July 1961 meeting said it regarded the VX nerve agents as of ‘great potential importance to Australia and consideration should be given to conducting trials in tropical areas here’.2 The committee also said there were important developments in biological warfare, including the ability to produce pathogens cheaply and in bulk. It concluded: ‘The possibility of attacks with biological agents must be taken seriously.’ However, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) said in a top-secret report in March 1962: ‘The possibility of mass attack with chemical and biological warfare agents against the civilian population of Australia is extremely remote … The clandestine use of CBW agents for sabotage or against base facilities or key installations is technically feasible but, in our view, unlikely.’ JIC also concluded that any other form of military attack by the Soviet Union or Communist China was unlikely because of Australia’s ‘relative insignificance in Communist strategy’.3

  JIC’s assessments were in sharp contrast to the Menzies Government’s alarming references to the communist threat. Secrecy ensured that the public was not allowed to hear the contrary view from the civilian and military specialists in the government’s peak intelligence committee. The main reason JIC’s relaxed conclusions remained highly classified seemingly had little to do with national security and everything to do with preventing public exposure of the Menzies Government’s politically motivated fearmongering.


  The pressure for increased Australian involvement in US CBW programs gathered momentum after the US defence secretary, Robert McNamara, wrote to Defence Minister Townley in October 1962 saying that Australian Defence scientists had proposed US testing of chemical weapons in Australia. The archives show that Cabinet had not endorsed the actions of the Australian scientists, but McNamara used their suggestions to propose sending a US survey team to Australia to pursue the idea. He did not disclose that his main interest was in VX. Although Townley did not have Cabinet approval at the time, he agreed to tropical tests provided their existence was classified. As well as trials in north Queensland, obliging Australian officials suggested that the US should look at Maralinga and Emu Field in the South Australian desert for the tests, which would include spraying VX from planes or dropping it as bombs. They didn’t mention how dust storms could distribute the toxin, as had happened when the wind scattered dangerous levels of plutonium from British nuclear tests in the 1950s (see Chapter 13).

  The US already had a publicly known site for testing CBW, at Dugway in the Utah desert outside Salt Lake City. This program sometimes relied on sick humour to describe tests that spread deadly diseases and bacteria—for example, Operation Big Itch tested ways to spread diseases via fleas, and Operation Big Buzz tested spreading using mosquitoes.4 Big Itch was a particularly sensitive operation. After it was revealed to widespread condemnation that the Japanese had used fleas to spread disease during their occupation of China, the US denied accusations that it had spread diseases using the same insects during the Korean War.

  A new centre in Utah trialled the more toxic agents, including VX. General Lloyd Fellenz, who had overall responsibility for the US testing program, headed the survey team that arrived in Australia for a secret visit in January–February 1963. The record of a meeting Fellenz held with senior officials shortly after arriving says he warned them that the subject of CBW was ‘political dynamite’, so it might be best not to mention his name. Professor Sydney Sunderland, who was a secret CBW consultant to Defence, attended the meetings.

  Fellenz candidly revealed to the Australians that the US program involved both offensive and defensive CBW trials—contrary to the Australian government’s subsequent spurious claims that everything was defensive. Fellenz also explained why the trials of VX had to be held in Australia: he said it was because the scale and type of trials necessary ‘cannot be conducted inside the US due to the dangers involved and the lack of suitably spacious sites’. This was the main appeal of a new site at Iron Range, on the east coast of the Cape York Peninsula. British officials had earlier given a similar explanation for why their misnamed ‘minor’ Maralinga plutonium trials had to be held in Australia rather than the UK.

  The survey team visited Iron Range, Innisfail, Emu Field and Maralinga. Iron Range was used for Operation Blowdown in July 1963, in which 50 tonnes of TNT was exploded on the top of a 40-metre steel tower. The blast allowed a US, British, Canadian and Australian technical group to collect extensive data about the explosion’s impact on the forest. The real purpose of the explosion was not officially explained, but journalists reported that it was intended to see if nuclear weapons would be an effective way to clear jungle that was concealing insurgents in South Vietnam.

  The purpose remained an official secret for almost forty years until Defence Minister Robert Hill answered a 25 June 2002 parliamentary question on notice by saying Operation Blowdown used conventional high explosives ‘to simulate, on a very small scale, the blast effects of a nuclear explosion in a jungle environment’. He told parliament: ‘The data collected allowed scientists to extrapolate what would be the effects on social mobility and patrol activity if a 10-kiloton tactical nuclear weapon had been used in the jungle.’ The eventual assessment was that nuclear weapons were not suitable, so the US instead sprayed huge quantities of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971.

  A key objective of the proposed US chemical weapons tests in north Queensland was to overcome the main difficulty with VX. Although it is often described as a gas, VX is a viscous liquid with a tendency to stay as small droplets when sprayed, thus reducing its chances of killing soldiers by inhalation. Small quantities in contact with the skin are fatal.5 Without mentioning that Vietnam was the intended target, Townley said in a Cabinet submission on 9 October 1963 that Fellenz had explained that ‘one important objective would be to prove the effectiveness of weapons systems using operational CW agents and means of distribution under conditions as near as possible to those of actual operations. The trials would include the dispersal of real CW agents from [low-flying] jet aircraft at night.’

  On 16 August 1963, the US Army asked for a second survey team to have a look at the Iron Range proposal. Townley sought permission in October 1963, but Cabinet did not make a decision and would continue to procrastinate, mainly because it didn’t like the idea. Townley’s Cabinet submission said safety would be a prime consideration and suggested that the involvement of an organisation along the lines of the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee ‘would appear to be appropriate’. It is hard to think of a less appropriate body—the 1984–85 McClelland Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia found the safety committee was a disgrace. Townley said safety had ‘not yet been determined for tropical forest conditions’. He also noted that safety considerations would need to include the possible contamination of streams and how long the toxic agents would persist after the trials—but he was willing to let the US undertake large-scale tests without credible information about safety.

  In another echo of the Maralinga debacle, Townley’s Cabinet submission said the possibility of ‘disturbance’ to the Aboriginal population would need to be examined, without mentioning that the Lockhart Aboriginal township was within the Iron Range precinct. The experience at Maralinga showed it wasn’t easy to warn all Aboriginal people in the general vicinity and that some wandered into prohibited areas (see Chapter 10). Cape York Aboriginal people could do likewise. Townley said the initial trials were expected to take two to three years, during which jet planes would spray toxic agents over an area 20 × 3 miles (32 × 5 km) at night, within a public exclusion area of 30 × 40 miles (48 × 64 km). The Cabinet submission noted that Britain, Australia, the USSR and China—unlike the US and Japan—were parties to the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in war.

  After Townley’s submission said that the existence of trials was likely to become public knowledge, External Affairs advised that an official statement might say they were ‘not being conducted with a view to producing offensive weapons’. This would have been an outright lie—the submission acknowledged that the US was developing ‘both offensive and defensive’ weapons. An External Affairs cable from Australia’s UN mission in New York on 10 October 1963 wanted to delete a suggested reference to tests of ‘bacteriological and chemical weapons’ and say only that the tests would use ‘conventional means’. This was an even more palpable lie. A more realistic External Affairs draft note later cautioned that when the US’s use of non-lethal agents in Vietnam was revealed in 1965, ‘there was a worldwide reaction of condemnation and hostility. In Asia, the reaction reflected, among other things, a feeling that a weapon of warfare that would not be used in Europe was being directed against Asians.’ The US Defense Department sought to put a positive spin on the use of chemical agents in 1966 when it argued that their use in Vietnam ‘is not only militarily useful, but more humane than bullets or explosives’.6

  Rigid secrecy ensured that in the 1960s the public was given no inkling of the proposals for the US to test VX in tropical north Queensland. It was not revealed until May 1988, when I wrote an article describing how VX could cause a horrible death, with a victim’s body ‘twitching in a pool of vomit and diarrhoea’.7 With the benefit of background details from a diplomat, my article said that after ‘much hesitation and embarrassment’ the Menzies Government informed the US in June
1965 that it had decided against a visit by the survey team. The US accepted Australia’s reservations.8

  The archives show that the defence attaché in Australia’s Washington embassy sent a cable in 1967 giving some indication of the likely sensitivities if the US tested biological weapons in Australia. It summarised revelations in the Washington Post on 13 January 1967 that universities and private firms were helping the government to develop weapons, including dysentery, plague, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever and botulism.

  A resourceful television journalist, Ross Coulthart, cited recently declassified documents to report on the Nine Network’s Sunday program on 8 July 2008 that in the 1960s the US had been ‘strongly pushing the government for tests on Australian soil of two of the most deadly chemical weapons ever developed, VX and sarin nerve agents. The plans called for 200 mainly Australian combat troops to be aerially bombed and sprayed with chemical weapons—with all but a handful of the soldiers to be kept in the dark about the full details of the tests.’9

  Exposing unwitting soldiers to the inherent dangers would have been an unconscionable repeat of what had happened at Maralinga (see Chapter 10). This time Menzies said no to the Americans—which is not something recent Australian governments have done when faced with a supposed national security requirement.