Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

  So the inexorable process of turning Australia into a central player in the accelerating international nuclear weapons proliferation began with a combination of speed and a small but telling element of ineptness. The test location was an unassuming group of islands in a remote part of the nation, unknown to most Australians. Monte Bello is an archipelago of 174 small islands about 130 kilometres from the strikingly beautiful Pilbara coast, where the mining town of Karratha was established in the 1960s. The total land area of the islands is only 22 square kilometres, and they lie 20 kilometres north of Western Australia’s second largest island, Barrow Island, best known for its high conservation value and fossil fuel reserves. The limestone and sand Monte Bello Islands are mostly low in the water and covered with scrubby vegetation. The British chose Trimouille Island for the first test in 1952, then Alpha and Trimouille for the two Mosaic tests in 1956. Three atomic devices were tested at Monte Bello, one of which was so big that it sent a radioactive cloud over the entire Australian continent and created a cloud of suspicion about its true nature that took many years to clear.

  Penney was happy enough with Monte Bello, under the circumstances. It was no better than third choice (after America and Canada), but it would do, and time was getting away. He selected the UK rocket scientist Dr LC Tyte as planning director for Hurricane, with the ballistics expert Charles Adams as his deputy. It was essentially a maritime operation, and Rear Admiral Arthur Torlesse from the Royal Navy was appointed to command the ships, while the Royal Australian Navy supplied patrol ships. Australia contributed extensively to the preparations. When the British scientific staff arrived at Monte Bello, they were amazed by the systems of roads on both Trimouille Island and nearby Hermite Island, where the field laboratories were built, as well as the network of buildings and laboratories.

  Operation Hurricane was specifically designed to detonate a nuclear device from 2.7 metres below the waterline in the hold of a ship. Britain was a maritime nation with many ports. The British authorities were keen to find out what would happen if an atomic bomb was detonated in a port, a scenario that would radioactively contaminate a large volume of water. Not even the Americans had done this sort of test before. Highly contaminated water would rise up in a column upon detonation, and it would have to come down again. The British readied themselves to measure and analyse when, where and how this would happen. HMS Plym, a relatively new 1390-tonne frigate that was surplus to requirements after the war, steamed all the way from the UK carrying in its belly the framework for an atomic device. Plym was part of a Royal Navy flotilla that included four other vessels. She came the long way, around the Cape of Good Hope, because the narrow Suez Canal was deemed too risky. The plutonium heart of the device came separately, by seaplane, via the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Asia. At the end of her long voyage, the doomed Plym was anchored in 12 metres of water about a kilometre off the west coast of Trimouille Island.

  The atomic device was detonated at 8 am on 3 October on Penney’s orders. Hurricane was a plutonium-based implosion weapon, using 7 kilograms of plutonium manufactured at Wind-scale in the UK. Penney had started to design it in 1947, when he joined the GEN.163 committee. The device was expected to have an explosive yield of 30 kilotonnes, although in the event its yield was 25 kilotonnes. Penney and Torlesse watched anxiously from the Operation Hurricane command ship aircraft carrier HMS Campania, anchored about 5 nautical miles to the southwest. The other ships were Narvik, Zeebrugge and Tracker. The Australian party was watching from Narvik.

  What Penney saw through his binoculars must have filled him with a mixture of relief and awe. His atomic device worked. Observations showed that an atomic fireball emerged 23 microseconds after detonation, almost obliterating the frigate. A vast column of water, approximately 1100 metres across and 170 metres high, rose up alongside the atomic cloud. Twenty-four hours after the explosion radioactivity was detected at an altitude of 3000 metres between Port Hedland and Broome. The mushroom cloud was a kind of deformed ‘S’ shape, notably different from the normal symmetrical shape.

  Aside from the atomic weapon test itself, a huge variety of experiments was conducted to examine the effects of an atomic blast on equipment and infrastructure. These were known under the collective term target response studies and were of both military and civilian interest. For example, the authorities sought to test how well protected humans might be if they sheltered in various kinds of trenches and bunkers. Tests were also conducted on the personnel who entered the contaminated areas after the blast. As the director’s report on Operation Hurricane stated, ‘Some men needed 5 showers to pass the (very low) tolerance at final monitoring’. Guinea pigs and rabbits were placed in the blast zone for zoological testing. These tests clearly showed that the biggest danger came from ‘invisible’ fallout rather than ‘black’ fallout, pointing to an insidious risk.

  The Hurricane test showed that Penney’s design worked when delivered in the hold of a ship in port, but this was a long way from being dropped from an aircraft, the most likely delivery system at the time. Many more tests were needed. After further tests during Operation Buffalo at Maralinga in 1956, the weapon acquired the name Blue Danube, and it subsequently became Britain’s first operationally deployed nuclear weapon. Hurricane was an important step. It enabled Penney and colleagues to refine the design and also provided tangible evidence of the UK’s (somewhat belated) return to strength and prestige after the depredations of the war. And, of course, most significantly Operation Hurricane raised the UK into the nuclear-armed club, where it remains to this day.

  Howard Beale, the Australian minister for Supply, who soon became the public face of the tests in Australia, found out about the first test only a short time before it was scheduled. In the lead-up to the test program, Menzies acted unilaterally, and Beale was kept in the dark. Beale twice, unknowingly, misled parliament by saying that there were no plans for British tests in Australia, in June and October 1951. As Menzies’ biographer AW Martin put it, ‘Menzies’ unquestioning acceptance of the British insistence on secrecy, while fitting with his current Cold War fears and appreciation of American attitudes, created some strange situations. One of the strangest was his refusal for many months to admit his Minister of Supply, Howard Beale, into the secret’.

  Beale later admitted how he ‘boiled and fumed at what I regarded as an insult’, but he quickly became a strong public voice for the test program. Beale and his department provided the material for much of the media coverage of the tests until 1957. The scientists’ task, including that of Australian scientists, he wrote, was ‘to make sure that the tests were safely conducted, and it was my department’s task to give all required assistance and to keep the public informed. When it was announced that the test would take place, there was little public anxiety; indeed there was some pride that Australia was to participate in this historic event’.

  Media coverage of Operation Hurricane in October 1952 was the first opportunity for the test authorities to interact with the Australian media, and they showed inherent caution in all their dealings. At a conference in 2006, counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the British Nuclear Tests, Peter McClellan (not to be confused with commission chair, James McClelland), told a story about the media releases connected with Operation Hurricane. He claimed that before Hurricane ‘three press releases were prepared. If the test was successful the announcement was straightforward – a glorious success. However, if it failed or partially failed an excuse had to be found. That excuse and the cables publishing it had been drafted long before Lord Penney gave the command to explode the bomb – and it would not have mattered if it reflected the real truth’.

  Robust requests from media organisations for journalists to join the official party that witnessed the test were, after initial consideration, denied. Some media chose to circumvent the restrictions and set up their cameras at Mt Potter, 88 kilometres from the test site, from where they captured images of the explosion. These ran prominently in
a number of newspapers – a clear sign that keeping the huge mushroom clouds out of the media was going to be impossible.

  An editorial in the West Australian of 4 October 1952 was typical of the newspapers’ response at the time: ‘The real significance of the Monte Bello explosion lies at this moment … in the simple fact that it occurred. It gives the world the indisputable proof that Britain has the material, the skill and the installations for the independent production of atomic weapons and that she will yield the initiative to none’. It concluded that ‘the Monte Bello explosion reverberates with a vastly increased assurance of British Commonwealth power and defensive security’.

  Hurricane was both a scientific and a propaganda success. Penney, suave and self-effacing, became a national hero and was knighted immediately. He was also given the green light to continue his test program in Australia. After Hurricane, Penney and his men departed the maritime environment for a place with even more challenges and difficulties – a remote South Australian desert site labelled Emu Field. This dot on the map was in the far northwestern reaches of the Woomera Prohibited Area that took up one-eighth of South Australia. The codename was Operation Totem. The main aim was to prepare a British atomic device for deployment aboard RAF V-bombers and to see if mass production using cheaper production methods was possible. The British had gathered a lot of data from Hurricane but did not yet have a compact and cost-effective bomb that could be dropped from a plane. Totem set out to fill the knowledge gaps.

  The search for a mainland Australian site had begun before Hurricane. The Australian bushman and surveyor Len Beadell, who found the Emu Field site, was a noted raconteur and he loved to tell the story. He was way outback early in 1952 when he got an urgent call on his radio, a rare event. He was to return to Salisbury without delay; something big was afoot. Just getting to the Stuart Highway took him a week.

  When I finally got back to Adelaide they locked me up in a little tiny office. And six people were glaring at me; they drew the blinds and soldered the keyholes over. The chief security officer started off the conversation in the most friendly way I had heard in a long time, merely because I hadn’t heard anyone for a long time. He said ‘what we are going to tell you now is known to these six people and nobody else, and if it gets outside this room it will be one of us and we will find you and it will be a nine year jail sentence’. And I thought to myself ‘I might even keep it to myself’. The chief scientist for the whole project [probably Alan Butement] carried on then and said ‘what we are going to tell you is that we are going to explode an atomic bomb in Australia and we want you to pick out a site.

  Beadell was a natural choice. He had initially been employed by the Australian Government’s Long Range Weapons Establishment (LRWE) at Salisbury near Adelaide in 1946 and had spent a number of years out bush, surveying the enormous Woomera rocket range. As part of that project, he had established the ‘centreline’ – a 3900-kilometre corridor across the Great Victoria, Gibson and Sandy deserts that did not contain any cities or towns. It did, of course, cut right across Aboriginal lands, but shamefully that was not a priority to governments at the time, and it did not seem to ruffle Beadell’s laconic bushman persona either. Rockets were fired along the centreline for many hundreds of kilometres. Beadell said during a talk to a Rotary convention in 1991, ‘That centreline, although I didn’t know it at the time, was going to govern the whole of the future of Central Australia forever’.

  It certainly governed the way both Emu Field and Maralinga were established. Both sites were to the southwest of the centreline, but Emu was much closer to it than Maralinga. Emu’s extreme remoteness meant that all supplies were brought in by air, and its closeness to the centreline interfered with Woomera guided missile tests. This meant that Emu was never suitable in the long term for atomic weapons tests. However, Beadell fulfilled his brief to find a remote location within the Woomera Prohibited Area with terrain suitable for both an airstrip and a weapons test area. The site was remote all right; it ended up being too remote for the long haul. Still, for the first mainland tests in Australia the AWRE wanted to be well out bush.

  The dramatic announcement inside the claustrophobic room when Beadell was told about the bomb started a five-month search across 48 000 square kilometres of harsh territory.

  I finally found, purely by accident, a clay pan, on the other side of a sandhill. I went over the sandhill and there was this clay pan, a mile long, half a mile wide. One glance told me that you could land any weight aircraft we had at the time without any preparation – a perfect natural runway in the wilderness. I called this my base and I searched out in all directions in a radius of about 100 miles from this trying to find an area free of sandhills and mulga scrub, an atomic bomb site … would be some place where you could move about without having to climb up over sandhills and push through thick scrub. You’d need plenty of room for instrumentation to record the results from the bomb itself, a place where you would put a tent camp for people to live in, and you certainly wouldn’t want solid mulga and sandhills. So one of the directions 40 miles away I did find somewhere where the sandhills diminished and disappeared, the mulga scrub thinned out to open saltbush paddocks and in-between were little clumps of mulga and I thought ‘this is a perfect site for a bomb’.

  The site chosen by Beadell was given the surveyors’ designation of X200. It had to be approved by Penney, who saw it in September 1952, on his way to Operation Hurricane. Beadell was slightly awestruck by Penney, while still pulling his leg at every opportunity:

  This man had a genius of a mathematical brain on a level with Albert Einstein. He was the director of the whole concern, director of the atomic weapons research establishment in the UK, and he was going to come to my camp, stop with me for two weeks while I entertained him and showed him my bomb site for Australia.

  Beadell had organised the delivery of eight Land Rovers to the site under the most trying circumstances. When the two large aircraft carrying Penney, his associates and the chief scientist for the Australian Department of Supply Alan Butement were due to land on the claypan, Beadell lined up the cars with their headlights on to guide them in.

  Only the smallest number of people knew about plans for a mainland site. The pilots of the two aircraft had reluctantly been let in on the secret, but at this stage Beadell was one of the few people in the world who knew what X200 would become. Penney was a recognisable figure, so his trip to the centre of Australia was a highly secretive affair. After a ‘beautiful landing’ and an ice-breaking joke shared between Beadell and the British scientist over the state of Beadell’s socks, the party had to make the arduous trip from the makeshift airstrip to the proposed testing site about 80 kilometres away. Beadell observed that it was not easy since none of the party had ‘driven anywhere rougher than Piccadilly Circus’. The bushman had to edge them along painstakingly, over sandhill and through thick scrub.

  Before we left the edge of the clay pan we stopped to let them see the little pebbles around the edge of the clay pan, the formations, and one of them said ‘what made the footprint in the wet sand, in the once-wet clay?’ And I said ‘oh, that’s an emu’s foot. When a bit of a shower came here once, an emu put his foot on the soft mud and it left an imprint. That’s an emu’s foot’. So we started to call this clay pan, ‘the clay pan with the emu’s foot mark on it’. Gradually that just became ‘the emu clay pan’, and the following year when the bombs did go off, it went around the world on the front page of every newspaper, ‘Emu Field atomic test successful’, and that’s where the name Emu came from.

  A safety assessment of the site was sent to the Australian scientist and defence scientific adviser Professor Leslie Martin (soon to be appointed head of the AWTSC) and also to Ernest Titterton in May 1953. Emu was a diabolical site. Apart from being remote, it was a hardship post where everything was difficult. There was little water and no infrastructure. Everything had to be landed on the claypan and driven through the scrub, including a Centurion tank.
Beadell had to lay out the instrumentation and set it all up. It took him a year to lay out thousands of instruments arrayed around the Emu bomb site to record data from the tests.

  Again the arrangements proceeded rather too speedily given their complexity and logistical difficulty. Totem was a comparative trial, and its two devices contained differing proportions in plutonium-240. Both devices were detonated from 30-metre steel towers. They were much smaller in yield than Hurricane’s 25 kilotonnes: Totem 1 was 9 kilotonnes and Totem 2 was 7 kilotonnes.

  Penney kept Totem under tight control, with little Australian input. The only exception was Ernest Titterton, now working in Australia, but always seen as essentially on the British side, with his Manhattan Project and Harwell credentials. Titterton was given access to documents that set out the firing conditions and predicted contamination for the Totem series, and generally drawn into aspects of planning for the series. He had been party to insider information on Hurricane, too, to a much greater extent than his Australian colleagues. Titterton was given the chance to revive some of his post-war Harwell research at Emu Field when he conducted some field experiments during the Totem series.

  Beadell had a front-row seat for the first Emu Field test, Totem 1, on 15 October 1953.

  I was standing alongside Sir William Penney on a little rocky outcrop which I had shown him before when I first took him down. I was only joking, but I said to him ‘it would be a nice place to watch the bomb go off’ … but that’s where we were. The countdown got to minus 10, nine, and I said to him ‘we’re only 4 miles away from this’ and he said ‘oh, it will probably be all right’. And I said ‘I’d planned on being 400 miles away’. He said, ‘we’ll go together anyway’. We had our backs to it, and when it got to zero the whole of the world that we could see lit up in the most blinding orange flash that you couldn’t describe on such a scale. It lit up the whole sky, obliterated the sun completely and disappeared over an 80 mile skyline in the distance – the whole of the sky. I could feel the heat of it on the back of my neck. We turned around to see what we had done. Sir William and I got into an aeroplane and flew over it to see what it looked like from the air. If I had had the advantage of reading about what atomic radiation does to people after a long period, I might not have been so keen on going on that flight … When we flew over it, all we could see was a half a mile diameter sheet of melted sand, and nothing else.