by Brian Toohey
9
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT AGAINST CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
‘It remains a matter of some mystery to me why [the US refusal to ratify the Biological Weapons Convention] … has not registered a little more visibly on the international rage-meter.’
Gareth Evans1
Shirley Freeman was a leading medical scientist who made a significant contribution to Australia’s support for a complete ban on chemical and biological weapons. Freeman’s work was in contrast to some high-profile medical scientists who championed these weapons. In 1966 Freeman became acting head of the Pharmacology Department at Melbourne University while the dean of medicine, Professor Sydney Sunderland, supported CBW in his secret role as an influential consultant to the Defence Department. Freeman shifted to the Defence Science Laboratories, where her work included trying to develop treatments for victims of chemical and biological weapons and better detection technologies. She then joined the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, where she had a key role in advising departments on negotiations for a complete ban on chemical weapons.
After retiring in 1989, Freeman became a forceful public critic of CBW. Shortly after she retired she told me that, contrary to the hopes of the fervent advocates of CBW in the 1950s and 60s, the US eventually lost interest in deploying these weapons because it couldn’t make them as effective on the battlefield as conventional weapons. She remained one of many scientists concerned that CBW could still be used destroy crops and create mass starvation—as Macfarlane Burnet had passionately recommended.
Because they are hard to disperse, most existing chemical and biological weapons are not suitable for causing mass casualties other than through crop destruction. Anthrax bacteria can be spread widely as a fine aerosol and might kill unvaccinated people. In 2001, 2 grams of finely milled anthrax spores were sent in a letter to US senator Tom Daschle. When the letter was opened no one in the room was killed, but five US postal workers who had handled the envelope died.2 The anthrax had been produced and stored at the Fort Detrick chemical and biological weapons laboratory despite the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). It took the US government over eight years to establish that the source was one of its own laboratories. The FBI announced in 2010 that the culprit was Bruce Ivins, a scientist at the laboratory, who suicided before he could be arrested.3 The BWC is still crucial to stopping production of contagious bacteria that can spread quickly, such as smallpox and new genetically engineered toxins that are immune to existing antibiotics.
Because nerve agents deteriorate quickly unless stabilisers are added, they are usually of little battlefield value to developing countries. For example, unlike the US, the UK and the Russians, whose bombs and artillery shells can keep the components of the nerve agents separate until shortly before they reach their target, Iraq couldn’t stabilise its VX and sarin. Difficulties in dispersing the liquid nerve agents remained. One drop of VX can kill an individual, but one million drops in a bomb won’t kill one million people—unlike a high-yield nuclear weapon used on a large city.
Modern protective suits, masks and antidotes render chemical weapons almost useless for the opponents of major military powers on the battle-field. Poorly protected troops are more vulnerable to chemical weapons, but these weapons are still far less effective than conventional ones. During Iraq’s 1980–88 war against Iran, it killed an estimated 10,000 people with traditional chemical weapons such as mustard gas, compared to a total of about one million killed on both sides by conventional bombs, artillery shells and bullets.4 In 1995, the religious sect Aum Shinrikyo attacked five trains on the Tokyo subway with sarin and small quantities of anthrax and botulism, but dispersal problems meant they killed only twelve people rather than the thousands theoretically possible.
Australia can be proud of its role in the 1980s and 90s in trying to bring about effective bans on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. After the Hawke Government’s first foreign minister, Bill Hayden, instructed his department to do more about disarmament, John Gee, a diplomat with an Oxford PhD in chemistry, was instrumental in establishing what became known as the Australia Group. This informal group promoted strict export licensing and inspection regimes to prevent the proliferation of precursor materials and dual-use equipment for CBW programs. The group now has over forty members.
Gee’s contribution helped ensure that the Chemical Weapons Convention was much more comprehensive than the 1925 Geneva Protocol. It banned the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, and established rules for the destruction of existing stocks and for substantive verification processes. Most stocks have now been destroyed, particularly by the US and Russia, each of which had staggering amounts of VX, and nearly all countries have ratified the convention. Reports from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) say that Syria has destroyed chemical weapons. Israel has signed, but not ratified, and Egypt has done neither.
Although the BWC was signed in 1972, fewer countries have ratified it, leaving the 1925 Geneva Protocol as an inadequate backup. The 1972 convention suffers from the US’s continued refusal to support a verification regime with onsite inspections, even though one of its ostensible reasons for invading Iraq in 2003 was that it was not cooperating sufficiently with the UN weapons inspectors there.
In 2007, Hayden’s successor as foreign minister, Gareth Evans, paid tribute to Gee’s achievements in a memorial lecture at the Australian National University. Evans said that Gee, working closely with Freeman and another Defence scientist, Bob Mathews, crafted the critical path to accelerate long-stalled negotiations for a chemical weapons convention that ultimately bore fruit with the signing of the treaty in 1993.5 He was much gloomier about progress on biological weapons, saying that part of the practical problem was that biological weapons don’t need large industrial plants or huge sums of money to manufacture. He said, ‘Very significantly, [the BWC] contains no requirements whatever for national declarations of existing biological weapons programs, and no verification or inspection regimes whatever governing research facilities and the destruction of biological weapons stockpiles.’6 He said that negotiation of a detailed protocol for the BWC to cover these gaps began in 1995 but was broken off in 2001 when the US withdrew from the drafting group. The US was supposedly concerned that the inspection regime would compromise the commercial integrity of its pharmaceutical industries. Evans was particularly caustic about the obstacles the US had created by refusing to accept onsite inspections to verify compliance with the treaty. He said it remained a matter of some mystery to him why the behaviour of the US ‘has not registered a little more visibly on the international rage-meter: maybe it’s because the Bush administration was at the time walking away from so many multilateral treaty commitments and negotiating obligations that it was simply lost in the crowd.’7
Although arms-control agreements have been good at preventing most states from stockpiling huge quantities of chemical weapons, only tiny quantities are needed for assassination purposes, and they can be produced as needed. Since Evans spoke at ANU, nerve agents have been used to murder individual people, or to attempt to do so. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un apparently used VX to kill his brother at Kuala Lumpur Airport in February 2017, and a nerve agent called Novichok was used in the attempted murder of former Soviet double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury in the UK on 4 March 2018. A Soviet chemist, Vil Mirzayanov, said he had worked on Novichok before moving to the US in 1995, where he published a book containing the Novichok formula.8 As a result, other countries could have produced it, including his American hosts. In January 2017, Iranian researchers synthesised Novichok nerve agents and added the spectral data to the OPCW’s database.9 Novichok produced by the Soviet Union could also have been destroyed or stolen in the chaos following the disintegration of the communist regime. Leonid Rink, a scientist who worked at a Soviet nerve agent facility, was convicted after he admitted to Russian investigators in 19
95 that he had sold a capsule of Novichok to gangsters who killed a Russian banker.10
One puzzling aspect of the Salisbury incident is that the UK government initially said the agent used was much more powerful than VX. Ten milligrams of VX is enough to kill if the contact is with the skin; less than 1 milligram is needed if inhaled.11 The Skripals survived, although another woman later died after coming in contact with a discarded container. The UK government identified two Russians as responsible, and an investigative news site gave supporting evidence that they worked for a Russian military intelligence organisation known as GRU.12 While he may well have done so, it’s hard to see why President Vladimir Putin would directly order the attempted murders in Salisbury: he is keen to reduce, not increase, sanctions that might harm Russian economic growth, which he sees as one of his successes. If he had wanted to murder Skripal, it would have been cheaper and safer to shoot him with an untraceable gun. Russian authorities also had ample time to kill Skripal after they arrested and jailed him in 2004 before swapping him five years later for a Russian spy caught by the West.
This incident and the earlier one, cited above, involving anthrax produced at the Fort Detrick chemical and biological weapons laboratory provide good reasons to try to enforce bans on the production of chemical and biological weapons—let alone nuclear weapons, which are vastly more destructive.
10
MENZIES’ GIFT
‘No conceivable injury to life, men or property could emerge from the tests.’
Prime Minister Robert Menzies1
In 1950, Bob Menzies indulged a fading power’s demand for a level of extreme secrecy whose malign consequences remain today.2 It was a generous gift from Menzies to a country that many Australians felt had abandoned them during World War II. Although he had only been elected as the Liberal/Country Party’s coalition PM in 1949, Menzies had confidence in his own judgement. Without consulting any other Australians, he agreed to let Britain explode prototype nuclear bombs in Australia and conduct even more dangerous trials of highly toxic bomb components from 1952 until 1963. The British also wanted to examine the impact of the explosions on soldiers and equipment for future military use. Menzies was not told initially that another key British objective was to help it develop much more destructive thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs. Given the growing public revulsion at the H-bomb’s power, Britain was keen to keep this activity secret.
The biggest secret was that there was almost no justification for secrecy on national security grounds. Edward Teller, US physicist and passionate advocate of the H-bomb, opposed classifying any scientific research and only wanted weapons to be classified for a couple of years after their development.3 Australian scientists and public servants couldn’t give informed advice on the wisdom of agreeing to the tests because none were briefed by the British. This mix of secrecy and ignorance resulted in the unnecessary deaths of some Australians and left others to suffer from debilitating health effects for decades afterwards.
The only thing Menzies told the public about the atmospheric weapons tests was that they were occurring—he could hardly do otherwise when they produced telltale mushroom clouds. The 20,000 British and 15,000 Australian soldiers and other personnel involved in the tests were given scant information about the potential risks when they were ordered, for example, to fly through radioactive clouds immediately after an explosion, or handle contaminated vehicles or test equipment.
The wider Australian public was exposed to fallout from radioactive clouds blown thousands of kilometres across the mainland from the test sites. Because the bomb tests were at or near ground level, they sucked up much more radioactive dust than if they had been higher up or underground. Menzies did not reveal that other less obvious, but riskier, trials were also occurring. However, in answering a question in parliament on 21 October 1953, he said it had been ‘stated most authoritatively that no conceivable injury to life, men or property could emerge from the tests’. He did not name these ‘authorities’.
Some ministers were told just before the first explosion that the tests would occur, but the supply minister, Howard Beale, was basically kept in the dark even though his department was in charge of facilitating the tests. Beale later revealed that he had only found out that the British decided he shouldn’t be told after his department head, Sir George Stevens, told him. Beale said, ‘I boiled and fumed at what I regarded as an insult.’4 It was an insult Menzies was prepared to ignore.
A subsequent royal commission in the mid-1980s chaired by former judge Jim McClelland, who had been one of the Whitlam Government’s more effective ministers, broke through much of the secrecy to let Australians know more about what had happened. Dr Bill Yonas, a geographer, and Jill Fitch, a health physicist, were the other two members of the commission.
The British exploded twelve nuclear bombs in Australia between 1952 and 1957: three on the Monte Bello Islands off the Western Australian coast, and nine in the South Australian desert—two at Emu Field and seven at Maralinga. In addition, they conducted almost 600 trials that were misleadingly described as ‘minor’. These trials were less obvious, but some were potentially much deadlier. Total secrecy about them prevailed until a few details were leaked in 1973.
One of the atomic bombs tested had an explosive power four to six times larger than those the US had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.5 The fact that many of the Japanese victims of those bombs suffered from radiation sickness was already known: senior UK scientists, military personnel and politicians, unlike the public, knew that a Medical Research Council study in 1947 had found that ‘Even the smallest doses of radiation present a genetic affect, there being no threshold dose below which no genetic effect is induced.’6 It is now known that genetic damage can be passed on to subsequent generations.
The head of the British nuclear weapons program, Sir William Penney, asked Sir Ernest Titterton to be the technical director of the first British test at Monte Bello. Titterton worked on the program and effectively kept doing so after taking a job as a nuclear physics professor at ANU in 1951. Mark Oliphant, an Australian who had worked on the US Manhattan nuclear weapons project, was a more distinguished physicist than Titterton, but he criticised unnecessary secrecy and the British warned Menzies that he was not acceptable to the Americans.7 Following the Monte Bello tests, the Menzies Government appointed Titterton to the committee charged with the safety of the atomic tests. He went on to head this body despite remaining a British citizen for the rest of his life.
Titterton was not an objective observer. McClelland said Titterton ‘regarded himself as a member of the British team rather than the custodian of the safety of Australian citizens’8 and cited numerous examples of Titterton taking unilateral decisions to endorse high-risk options, mislead Australian governments and repeatedly act as the de facto representative of British nuclear interests. If ASIO had done its job, it would have discovered that Titterton was a British agent who deceived the Australian government he supposedly served.
One example of Titterton’s disregard for safety is what happened when Australian health physicists discovered unexpectedly high levels of radiation while they were conducting a routine survey of the site shortly after one of the 1957 Maralinga tests. It turned out the source was cobalt-60, scattered in small pellets across the site after being part of the test. Cobalt-60 has a radioactive half-life of five-and-a-half years and is potentially deadly, but no one told the members of the health physics team that it was present before they were sent into the area. McClelland concluded that Titterton was the only member of the safety committee who knew the cobalt was there and his failure to inform others ‘contributed to an unnecessary radiation hazard’.9 Tittterton was removed from various official Defence advisory bodies only after the 1972 election of the Whitlam Government.
In 1957, three tests codenamed Antler were held at Maralinga to evaluate thermonuclear (H-bomb) components and their triggers to help Britain develop these bombs, nine of which were subsequently tested i
n the Pacific on what is now Kiribati. Thermonuclear bombs generate far more power from their fusion reaction than the fission reaction in the kind of atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. The fusion reaction itself creates little radiation, but weapons designers now use the fusion explosion to create a second fission reaction that then creates a much bigger explosion and a lot more radioactivity.10
In 1955 the British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, told Menzies two new tests codenamed Mosaic would be held at Monte Bello in 1956 and would be boosted by light elements, such as tritium, used in thermonuclear bombs. He reassured Menzies the bombs would remain atomic bombs, but well-regarded author Liz Tynan says many scholars now accept that the last Mosaic test at Monte Bello had a yield of 98 kilotons—over six times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.11
The media failed to inform the Australian public about the dangers of the tests. Despite this failure, a gallup opinion poll in 1957 showed only 39 per cent of the public favoured the tests and 49 per cent opposed them.12 The media muzzled itself by voluntarily accepting government ‘D-notices’ that even prevented it from reporting information that had been previously published in the UK. Journalists failed to reveal that the dangerous ‘minor trials’ were occurring.13
There was no need for confidential contacts when a scientific report revealed the alarming levels of radiation caused by the nuclear tests. In 1956 a CSIRO scientist, Hedley Marston, conducted a biological survey of the fallout from the tests and found that thyroid iodine levels in animals were 4000 times higher than expected in central Queensland—far from Maralinga and Monte Bello.14 After a small test in 1956, Marsden measured radiation levels on the roof of his Adelaide laboratory and found thyroid results almost 5000 times higher than normal.15 Journalist Frank Walker gave a disturbing account of attempts to cover up Marsden’s findings. Several scientists denigrated the politically conservative Marsden as a communist, and Titterton stopped his findings being published in the Australian Journal of Biological Sciences until a censored version eventually appeared in 1958.16 Apart from the small-circulation rural publication Stock & Land, a compliant media ignored the article.
