Secret

by Brian Toohey

  Robert Milliken, a journalist who covered the McClelland hearings, says, ‘For more than 30 years after the tests the British and Australian governments maintained the fiction that no Aborigine strayed into the vast zone, and that no Aborigine suffered from the tests.’17 Defence Department documents uncovered by Canberra Times journalists Paul Malone and Howard Conkey show that Aboriginal people were not kept out of the Maralinga prohibited areas. Before the first test at Maralinga in September 1956, the Supply Department chief scientist, W.A.S. Butement, wrote that if Aboriginal people should ‘wander very far to the south outside the reserve, some harm might result’.18 Native patrol officers W.B. MacDougall and R. Macaulay were given the impossible task of ensuring that Aboriginal people were kept out of danger. Butement took issue with MacDougall’s efforts to protect the locals, but MacDougall’s boss, the controller of the Weapons Research Establishment, H. J. Brown, wrote to Butement about his officer’s concerns.19 Butement replied on 16 March saying, ‘Your memorandum discloses a lamentable lack of balance in Mr MacDougall’s outlook in that he is apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations.’20

  At Monte Bello, despite the clear public danger, security was nonexistent following the tests. Scavengers removed steel and other material left at the bomb sites to sell on mainland Australia, while others salvaged equipment including contaminated copper wire, trailers and hydraulic jacks from the South Australian sites—a souvenired Land Rover was even driven to Melbourne.21

  Apart from the inherent dangers for military and civilian personnel during the tests, the deliberate exposure of troops who were tasked with gathering data on the impact of radiation increased the risks for military and civilian personnel. After academic researcher Sue Rabbitt Roff discovered archives showing that twenty-four Australian personnel were ordered to walk across contaminated craters after atomic blasts to test protective clothing, she said, ‘[this] puts the lie to the British government’s claim that they never used humans for guinea pig type experiments in weapons trials in Australia’.22

  Following the main atmospheric tests in 1957, the British conducted research to extend their knowledge of the damage nuclear weapons can inflict in wartime, rather than advancing public understanding of the dangers. Walker says 22,000 bones, mostly of babies and young children, were removed from corpses in morgues as part of a classified program to examine the effects of the radiation that spread across large parts of Australia.23 With few exceptions, the grieving parents were not asked if the remains of their children could be used for scientific studies relating to the development of nuclear weapons. The existence of the program, which ran from 1957 to 1978, was kept secret until 2001.24

  Some sites of the mushroom-cloud explosions might have been relatively safe to enter after several years—unless all the plutonium used in the tests wasn’t consumed in the fission reactions. Alan Parkinson, an experienced nuclear engineer who worked on later clean-up attempts, says that perhaps only 25–30 per cent of the plutonium was ‘fissioned’.25 In these cases, he says, some of the non-fissioned plutonium particles would have been left at ground zero and the remainder sucked up in the air and deposited as fallout further away.

  It was not feasible to protect people against fallout that reached distant parts of the mainland, which helps explain why the Menzies Government was so insistent that the fallout was not a problem. Although estimates vary, it is now accepted that atmospheric testing in the 1950s and 60s caused a serious increase in deaths and illness. A 2008 study using the US Environmental Protection Agency cancer risk coefficients estimated that the number of deaths worldwide from fallout will total 200,000 to over 500,000 by the end of the twenty-first century.26

  Proving that an individual cancer was caused decades earlier by UK tests in Australia is extraordinarily difficult. For this reason, McClelland recommended that governments reverse the onus of proof to make it easier for plaintiffs to succeed. However, the Australian and UK governments refused this recommendation and continued vigorously defending cases for compensation. Belatedly, they have paid compensation in cases involving two types of cancer.27

  Australian governments have not produced figures for the number of deaths or the number of disabled children resulting from the tests that Menzies assured parliament posed ‘no conceivable injury’. Although some British troops also suffered, the biggest toll will be in Australia, because that’s where the radiation fell and where plutonium remains in the shifting winds and dust.

  11

  THE DECEPTIVELY NAMED MINOR TRIALS

  ‘I doubt if the people owning the estates in Scotland would look on that with very great favour. They are interested in pheasants and deer in Scotland.’

  Noah Pearce1

  Almost 600 trials falsely described as ‘minor’ were held at Maralinga and five at Emu Field between 1953 and 1963, not counting the full-scale nuclear weapons tests that finished in 1957.

  If the trials were minor, why not hold them in Britain in a remote part of Scotland? The barrister assisting the McClelland Royal Commission on the tests put this question to a British official, Noah Pearce, during the hearings. Pearce replied with the words quoted above.

  The consequences of the trials were far from minor—most of the radioactive and other contamination remaining at Maralinga is due to them.2 McClelland said secrecy was so tight that no Australian scientists or other officials were allowed to observe any of the trials. He said they were ‘characterised by persistent deception and paranoid secrecy. In their desire to avoid international repercussions, the British authorities embarked on a course of determined concealment of information from the Australian Government aided and abetted by [Sir Ernest] Titterton’.3 If the existence of the trials were to have been publicly announced, the international repercussions could have meant that they were covered by the proposed nuclear test ban that had already begun on a voluntary basis in 1958.

  The main purpose of the most important of the trials was to improve Britain’s nuclear weapons and help design nuclear triggers for H-bombs. These trials resulted in the extensive dispersal of radioactive material and toxic chemicals, particularly beryllium, uranium and plutonium, and over 800 tonnes of debris from destroyed equipment. Beryllium was used as a reflector to enhance the nuclear reaction in some H-bomb designs. Plutonium 239, with a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years, was by far the most toxic material used: minute particles can enter the body via inhalation, ingestion, cuts or wounds and cause lung, blood, bone and liver cancers. One kilogram of plutonium contains over 16 billion times the international standard for the maximum permissible body burden in humans.4 Officially, a total of 24.4 kg of plutonium was used in the trials, although we have to take the word of British nuclear officials that there wasn’t more.5

  Powerful explosions caused much of the 22.2 kg used in the last of the ‘minor tests’ to be dispersed as fine plumes. Most initially fell on nearby areas, but unknown quantities were blown further away in the dust storms common to the area. Some was later found to be attached to small fragments of metal debris distributed well beyond the presumed areas of contamination. This represented a particular danger to Aboriginal people who wandered around the test sites.6

  The McClelland Royal Commission agreed with the analysis of John Symonds, who had written an official study of the British tests in which he said the PM’s Department advised Menzies that Australia had ‘very little information concerning these particular trials at a time when delicately balanced discussions were proceeding in Geneva towards a complete cessation of nuclear weapon testing. Although government officials viewed these tests as involving matters of deep political significance beyond safety and public health, they considered Australia should not agree to the tests without an informative statement from the UK authorities about their nature.’7

  Given the diplomatic issues arising from the trials, including the test-ban negotiations and the proposed nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the Forei
gn Affairs Department would normally have been deeply involved in advising the government. But Menzies preferred Titterton’s unswerving advice that there were no problems.

  McClelland said the biggest question mark about the exact purpose of the trials and the degree of British frankness about them hung over the series held between 1959 and 1963 called Vixen A and B. Although plutonium had been used in all the trials since 1959, Symonds said it was not specifically mentioned in any safety reports until 1962, when concealing its presence on the range would have become impossible.8 The fate of the massive steel structures called ‘featherbeds’ on which the twelve Vixen B trials occurred gives an idea of the power of the explosions that spread the plutonium. McClelland said the damage to each featherbed and concrete pad was so extensive that a new featherbed had to be used for each new trial. In destroying the featherbeds and other equipment and buildings, the explosions created three million plutonium-contaminated fragments in the area of the Vixen B trials.9

  Asked by the British authorities to help gain political support in Australia for the Vixen B tests, Titterton argued that no new approval was needed as they were simply an extension of the recent Vixen A tests. In reality they were very different, as senior scientists with Britain’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) told the commission. One explained that the Vixen A tests were safety trials to find out what happened if plutonium caught fire, whereas the Vixen B trials involved detonating ‘something which looks like the heart of a nuclear weapon and involved a much bigger dispersal of plutonium’.10 Another AWRE witness admitted that a Vixen B test could fairly be described as a ‘very small atomic explosion’.11 Yet McClelland quoted Titterton as telling the AWRE, ‘It would perhaps be wise to make it quite clear that the fission yield in all cases is zero.’12

  Had the AWRE done so, it would have been lying to the Australian government. Nor was this what the AWRE told Titterton: what it actually said was that the quantities of materials ‘are such as to ensure a low limit on any fissile reaction’.13 That’s not zero. But Titterton told the government that the AWRE had satisfactorily ‘answered everything we asked’,14 and the government went ahead on that basis.

  In his formal finding, McClelland said, ‘In view of the known long half-life of plutonium (24,000 years), the Vixen series should never have been conducted at Maralinga.’ Or Scotland!

  12

  BRITISH PERFIDY, AUSTRALIAN TIMIDITY

  ‘Secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is, and what it is for … It is not good to be a scientist … unless you think that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge … and believe that … [it] is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity.’

  Robert Oppenheimer1

  The 1967 British attempt to clean up Maralinga, called Operation Brumby, was a demonstrable failure. Nonetheless, British nuclear weapons physicist Noah Pearce wrote an official report that concluded the operation was a success. The Pearce Report formed the basis of the Gorton Coalition government’s decision to sign an agreement backdated to December 1967 stating that the UK government was ‘released from all liabilities and responsibilities’ relating to Maralinga.2 Never mind that Operation Brumby involved using graders and ploughs that made it easier for the dust storms common to the area to distribute soil contaminated with plutonium.

  The safety issues were revived when I revealed extensive details of the still-secret sections of the Pearce Report in May 1984.3 My article noted that some of the tables in the report showed that the plutonium contamination was as much as 100 times higher than Pearce’s own benchmark for what was permissible. It also said that the ‘minor trials’ were usually described as ‘point safety’ tests, when the reality was that some of them were extremely unsafe operations that left plutonium scattered across the countryside after the heavy loss of topsoil at some of the trial sites. On 25 May 1984, Deborah Smith and I reported in the National Times that Labor’s energy minister at the time, Peter Walsh, who was responsible for the site, doubted the reliability of Pearce’s claim that 18 kg out of the 20 kg of plutonium used had been buried in pits at Maralinga. Walsh was told that Pearce had admitted to some Australian officials in late 1968 that as much as 18 kg was left on the surface and only 2 kg was buried.4 The official figure given to Justice McClelland at the royal commission was that 24.4 kg had been used—excluding the plutonium that settled on the ground as part of the ‘mushroom cloud’ bomb tests.

  On 8 June 1984, Smith and I explained in the National Times that the discovery of pieces of plutonium weighing up to 2 grams at Maralinga meant the public could have little faith in the assurances given by the Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Council (AIRAC) about safety, although AIRAC included some of the nation’s most prestigious scientists.5 Our article said a 2-gram piece of plutonium was about 300,000 times bigger than what the council’s reports said was there. Perhaps more disturbingly, we said that the latest AIRAC report on safety at Maralinga accepted that neither ‘the detail nor purpose’ of the British tests and trials using plutonium should be of concern. Australian scientists let secrecy ensure they remained ignorant of crucial facts about the nature of the trials, at great cost to the accuracy of their findings—and to public safety. To do their job properly they should have heeded the warning quoted above from the head of the US nuclear weapons project, Robert Oppenheimer: ‘Secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is for.’ Robert Milliken noted in his book No Conceivable Injury in 1986 that AIRAC stated in its 1983 report that none of the explosions in Australia had a bigger yield than 20 kilotons,6 but the biggest had been officially stated publicly to be 60 kilotons7 and was later estimated to be 98 kilotons.8

  In contrast, the Australian Radiation Laboratory began a survey in 1984 to find what was still on the ground at Maralinga. The ARL’s report, released in 1985, found that the contaminated areas and radioactivity measurements were much larger than Pearce had concluded and that Pearce had entirely missed huge numbers of test fragments contaminated with plutonium. The ARL scientists later estimated that there were as many as three million fragments, many of which were outside the supposedly safe areas. That posed a serious danger to visitors who might pick one up. Small amounts of highly toxic beryllium were also found.

  Some of the scientists involved told Melbourne-based journalist Ian Anderson that the plutonium contamination was ten times as much as the British had claimed and sometimes extended 150 kilometres from the site instead of the 2.2 kilometres Pearce had reported. Anderson quoted one scientist, Geoff Williams, as saying, ‘For a nation to conduct such a technically sophisticated program and then get contamination levels wrong by a factor of 10—it’s just unbelievable.’9 What is more believable is that the UK cared far more about developing bombs than about the contamination they caused. Anderson reported that the ARL study also found that Pearce misunderstood how plutonium particles in the soil were suspended in the air if disturbed, so the amount that could be inhaled by Aboriginal children playing in the sand was six to twenty times higher than he had suggested.

  The US Department of Energy gave the ARL scientists a large amount of data from Operation Roller Coaster, the joint US-British trials carried out in the early 1960s that were similar to the Vixen B trials at Maralinga. In her chapter on the US-UK trials in her book Atomic Thunder, Liz Tynan sets out how senior ARL scientist John Moroney’s analysis of the Roller Coaster data found the plutonium contamination at Maralinga would have spread much further than the British claimed.10 Although the British had the Roller Coaster documents well before Pearce wrote his report, they never told the Australians about them.

  The 1985 ARL report led to the establishment of a joint American, Australian and British technical assessment group (TAG) to develop a new clean-up plan that eventually got underway in 1996. Nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson was appointed as a government representative to oversee the project but was removed in 1977. In a 2002 article, he said a huge amount of plutonium-contaminated debris was found outside the concr
ete burial pits—one loose concrete cap was several metres away from a pit and another was one-fifth of the required size.11

  Journalist and author Robert Milliken records that South Australian scientists collected nineteen rabbits and a dingo near the radioactive burial pits at Maralinga and elsewhere in the area and discovered that plutonium, caesium and strontium had been taken up on the fur and in the gut and the respiratory systems of all the animals. One of the industrious rabbits had been picked up from a warren next to the burial pit, making it ‘almost certain’ the animals would burrow their way into the pits that were supposed to remain intact for 24,000 years.12

  Parkinson explained in his 2014 book that heavy equipment was initially used to try to shift contaminated soil, in much the same way as in the failed 1967 effort that allowed plutonium to blow away in dust clouds. He said on at least fifteen occasions the airborne dust was so thick that the heavy machinery had to stop work, and on one occasion health physicists evacuated facilities.13 Yet he records how a departmental official told a Senate inquiry in May 2000 that no measurements were kept of how much plutonium blew away during the operation. Better dust-control measures were later introduced and a more thorough attempt was made to remediate the site. How effective this will prove over the longer term remains contentious.

  The many years of negligence towards the severe failure to safely contain Maralinga’s highly toxic plutonium contrasts with the effort to safely contain low and medium radioactive waste from industrial and medical uses. Nothing contained the radioactive fallout across much of Australia during the British bomb tests—which is why they should never have been held.