The story also quoted the deputy prime minister Arthur Fadden, who defended Beale and the scientists over the incident in the face of attacks from the leader of the Opposition Doc Evatt. In federal parliament Evatt indicated that the ‘dogmatic statements and assurances given over and over again by the Minister for Supply’ were insufficient to meet public concern. Fadden assured parliament there would be a full inquiry into the incident. In the end, there was not.
The Age in Melbourne applauded Beale, saying he ‘acted promptly to allay misgivings about the cloud drift. Within a few minutes of the Marble Bar reports of heavy radioactive fall-out he readily stated all he knew, and made contact with scientists, whose assurances were soon forthcoming’. The Melbourne Herald had some advice for Beale and his colleagues after the Mosaic incident:
There is a simple way in which the authorities controlling atomic weapon tests can keep the public informed and reassured about their checks on the risk in radio-activity after an explosion. Publication of regular reports by the safety committee, giving the measure of fall-out and the position of the atomic cloud, would prevent needless worry.
As Maralinga was about to begin operations, and people throughout mainland Australia were likely to be affected, this was reasonable advice. However, it was not heeded to the degree warranted by the danger of the tests.
After G2, the British were finished with Monte Bello and departed, leaving an unholy mess in a place that was effectively out of sight, out of mind. While the islands were still subject to the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act, no-one policed its exclusionary provisions. Many ‘salvagers’ on boats defied the warning signs and visited Trimouille and Alpha islands, intent on taking away the huge quantity of scrap metal and other waste that was left lying around the sand dunes. They did so at their own risk.
Both Monte Bello and Emu Field have faded into the background. Certainly they did not experience the same levels of plutonium contamination as Maralinga, which has become shorthand for all British nuclear tests in Australia. This obscures the fact that the nuclear weapons tested at Monte Bello and Emu showed that the British could play the nuclear arms game with the superpowers, even though they were a few years behind.
Both pre-Maralinga sites were important in the history of the British nuclear tests. The British gained much knowledge and established their atomic club credentials, at a high cost to the local people and the environment. The British, still hostage to the McMahon Act, used Monte Bello and Emu Field as staging posts. Now they had a new site, negotiated as an indefinite arrangement. The AWRE was Maralinga-bound, with high hopes that their bomb would pass its final tests and fulfil Penney’s aspirations when he designed it. Soon Britain would have an operational atomic weapon that rivalled those of the US and the USSR.
4
Mushroom clouds at Maralinga
It will be the Los Alamos of the British Commonwealth.
Howard Beale, Australian minister for Supply, 1955.
It is marvellous how fickle the public mind is in these matters and, no matter what the project is, provided it can be pushed ahead without anything untoward happening, the people’s minds soon become inured, and they accept it as one of the ordinary happenings of life.
Frank O’Connor, secretary of the Australian Department of Supply, after the first major atomic bomb tests at Maralinga, 1956.
I had thought Woomera to be rather desolate – it was Piccadilly Circus compared to Maralinga.
Major Dan Buckley, British Army, statement to the Royal Commission, 1984.
In the mid-1950s, as the Cold War intensified, nuclear bombs became the weapons of choice. Britain, committed to building its atomic arsenal, had already established its credentials in Australia. Australia at that time was preoccupied with preparing for the Melbourne Olympic Games in November 1956, a moment of great national pride and considerable distraction for a sporting nation. Meanwhile, in secret but with the confidence that came from the success of their Australian test program to date, the British were full of plans. A ‘permanent’ site was the next logical step, but the significant logistical difficulties ruled Emu out. Supply Minister Howard Beale told Menzies, ‘Emu Field seems to be out of the question, mainly through shortage of water and difficulty of access’. A search had begun even before the Totem series in October 1953. William Penney wanted a remote location that would be suitable for both airburst tests, of atomic devices dropped from an aircraft, and ground tests, of devices detonated on or near the ground.
Again, Len Beadell played a central role. His amazing bush skills, surveying expertise and seemingly instinctive knowledge of the requirements made him best placed to look out over the land and say ‘here’. He had found Emu. Now Penney turned to him once more. Beadell later recalled they wanted somewhere closer to the Nullarbor so they could use the train line, ‘so I went on a 500 mile expedition, discovered a new site altogether which we called Maralinga. That was the same thing all over again – the village site, the connecting roads, the weapons area and the airstrip’. Maralinga was the final destination for the British nuclear tests in Australia. Beadell described the moment when he found the site with his small team of bush bashers: ‘We all knew immediately that this was going to be the place. The saltbush undulations rolled away as far as we could see, even through our binoculars … We solemnly wrung each other’s hands and just gazed about us in all directions for half an hour’.
The site was within the Great Victoria Desert, to the north of the Nullarbor Plain. The Beadell expedition also found remarkable evidence of Aboriginal civilisation – what Chief Scientist Alan Butement, with Beadell at the time, described as the ‘Aboriginal Stone Henge’. This arrangement of numerous piles of large and smaller stones and slivers of shale seemed to form an enormous arrowhead, positioned on a vast claypan between Emu and Maralinga. But, noted Butement, ‘there was not time to make a detailed study of the area’, and that was the end of that. The commissioning of the Maralinga site proceeded without any concern for this priceless relic of an ancient civilisation. The process included erecting survey beacons by December 1954 and choosing the locations for a permanent 3000-metre bitumen airstrip, and a road to Watson, a small railway siding settlement to the southwest. The Australian Services Task Force and the Kwinana Construction Company set out the engineering works. Kwinana was an Australian-based company wholly owned by UK firms that had not long before built an oil refinery in Western Australia. In no time, the preparations for a nuclear test site began, including building quarters for the thousands of men who would live there. Bristol freighter aircraft arrived from Britain, bringing with them the means to build a weapons testing range from scratch.
Although remote, the site, originally known as X300, was more amenable than Emu Field, with better access, more reliable water supplies and enough flat land to construct an airstrip, a railway siding and a village, built in a pleasant, heavily wooded area. Penney was overjoyed. He consulted with Butement, but Penney was the one to be convinced. And he was. Maralinga soon became one of the few places in the world where nuclear bombs were detonated.
The red desert site was officially named Maralinga in November 1953, a month after Operation Totem, and preparations began immediately to test the local meteorological conditions for their potential effect on fallout. A formal agreement to carry out atomic tests at Maralinga was signed by the two governments on 7 March 1956, following talks in London in 1955 between Menzies and Churchill’s successor as prime minister, Anthony Eden. The Memorandum of Arrangements indicated that Maralinga would be available to the British ‘for a period of 10 years which may be extended by mutual agreement’, and the area would be rent-free. The agreement specified that no hydrogen (thermonuclear, fusion) weapons would be tested there, and that each test to be carried out would be separately agreed by the Australian Government, under the veto of its AWTSC. The document also provided for data from the tests to be shared with the Australians. The British did not often do this, however, which increasingly beca
me a point of contention for the Australian Government.
A top-secret Cabinet minute from a meeting of the Prime Minister’s Committee dated 16 August 1954 recorded the acceptance of the British request to commandeer the new site. The minutes noted that the committee agreed ‘in principle to the establishment of a permanent testing ground and to co-operate with the United Kingdom in the proposed new series of tests’. The meeting also agreed to direct officials from the Treasury, Defence, Supply and Prime Minister’s departments to report on the nature of the Australian contribution to, and participation in, the tests. ‘These officials would need to consider in particular the ability of the Service Departments [navy, army and air force] to provide servicemen for construction and other purposes associated with the tests.’ The meeting decided against sending an Australian technical team to the UK for a briefing on the series, preferring instead that the UK send a team to Australia, presumably for reasons of cost. They agreed to co-operate with the UK on initiator tests known as Kittens, scheduled for early 1955 as the first tests at Maralinga. These followed the original Kittens tests at Emu Field in 1953.
Ten days after the meeting of the Prime Minister’s Committee, an interdepartmental committee meeting considered what the government had agreed. It was chaired by Frank O’Connor, secretary of the Department of Supply, and attended by high-level officials including Professor Leslie Martin, the academic physicist and defence adviser soon to head up the AWTSC. A report from the armed services departments on their respective levels of commitment to the project did not make encouraging reading. The report estimated the construction would need a workforce of between 225 and 250 personnel. The navy was unable to make any personnel available, and the army would commit personnel only if the government determined Maralinga to be a higher priority than any other ‘cold war task’. Only the air force was prepared to put boots on the ground, offering a token 50 personnel for the construction task.
All three services were under multiple pressures. The Korean War in the early 1950s had sapped their resources, and these were further drained by an ongoing commitment to the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation. The interdepartmental committee referred the matter of diverting defence resources to the Maralinga project back to the Defence Department, since this ‘was a task beyond the competency of the committee’.
The British were briefed on these concerns. A secret letter from RR Powell in the British Ministry of Defence to JM Wilson in the British Ministry of Supply indicated that Frederick Shedden, the secretary of the Australian Department of Defence, had ‘strongly advised’ them not to push Menzies too hard on this: ‘Any suggestion that we regarded Maralinga as more important than Malaya might upset the Australian agreement to accept commitments in South East Asia’. Australia was somewhat torn, wanting to co-operate as a good former colony while attempting to deal with existing postwar imperatives.
This document also recorded the reluctance of the Department of Works to divert resources to Maralinga to carry out construction using civilian labour. ‘It was suggested that such means of carrying out the task should be attempted only in the event of its being found impracticable to devise a plan for the utilisation of Service labour.’ No-one in the services really wanted a bar of the huge work involved in establishing a massive new military facility in the Australian desert. The meeting noted that the financial contribution to the cost of building Maralinga would have to come out of the Defence budget: ‘As there was no margin within the Department of Supply’s allotment to provide funds for this project, the committee proposes to advise that it is unable to make any proposal to Cabinet as to what financial contribution, if any, Australia should make’.
This committee discussed the need for Australia to get some scientific and technological benefit out of the Maralinga project. It tentatively suggested that ‘consideration be given to offering the services of a small scientific unit to assist in a defined operation, e.g. measurements, which would in consequence involve full indoctrination in atomic science for those Australian scientists taking part’. At this time, Australia was considering setting up the technology to create plutonium out of its uranium. If this development occurred (it never did), ‘we would then be in a much stronger position to claim a right for Australian scientists to participate in the work’. Australia had not been party to the results of operations Hurricane and Totem, and some frustration came through in the minutes’ suggestion that, ‘as atomic weapons would be vital to Australia’s defence, a firm request should be made to the United Kingdom for information on the results of future tests for strategic planning purposes’. Read in their context, these remarks seem forlorn at the very least, if not outright deluded.
The Australian Government assigned Howard Beale and his Department of Supply to oversee the development of the site by Kwinana Constructions, and the many administrative tasks associated with Maralinga. Beale was an enthusiastic servant of the project who exuded positivity from the start. ‘The country itself may be described as desert, but it is deserted rather than desert and is far from being a dreary waste of baking sand’, said his first memorandum on the project. This document described an Arcadian experience for the new workforce: ‘The prospect is tree-studded, park-like. New buildings will be shaded by the native timber, which will not be cut except in case of absolute necessity’. The experience of living there would be similar to conditions at the larger and more established British weapons testing base at Woomera to the east. Certainly the facilities were more luxurious than many military grunts might have experienced, although the hot desert conditions were destined to defeat many a Pom.
Creating Maralinga from nothing was a huge task. A village, airstrip, roads and other facilities rapidly appeared in the red desert landscape. The strange men-only village was in the southern part of the site, while the test area stretched northwards in a funnel shape. All the operational areas were well to the north, a series of ‘forward areas’ centred on colourfully named test sites. These names are evocative, if mostly inexplicable: Kuli, Biak, Tadje, Wewak, Dobo, Naya, Breakaway, Marcoo, One Tree, Kite and the most infamous, Taranaki. The 3.5-kilometre-long airstrip was a few kilometres to the east of the village. The roads to the north took on a Big Apple hue with Second Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Tenth Avenue, East Street and West Street, and they created a large grid across the massive swathes of Maralinga test site land. The village street names reminded many occupants of home: London Road, Durham Crescent, Belfast Street.
The site was managed by the Maralinga Board of Management, a joint UK–Australian organisation chaired by Frank O’Connor, with a senior British public servant from the UK Ministry of Supply Staff Australia as his deputy. The range commander, Australian Army lieutenant-colonel Richard (Dick) Durance, was directly responsible through the Maralinga Board of Management to a huge array of interested parties, including the joint chiefs of staff of the Australian military and the heads of both the Australian Department of Supply and the UK Ministry of Supply. He was also responsible to Penney, or his delegate. Radiological safety was the specific responsibility of the AWRE, which based a senior health physics officer on site. Australia placed its own health physics representative on site too, namely Harry Turner, seconded from the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. Turner was required to collect data about the radiological safety of the site and oversee safety matters at the range, although in the early 1960s he was specifically excluded from the Vixen B tests, the most dangerous experiments undertaken. Access to Vixen B was granted only to British personnel.
During the years the Maralinga site was active, a total of about 35 000 military personnel spent time there. Most (about 25 000) were from the UK, bolstered by a smaller contingent of Australians and occasional attachments of military personnel from Canada, the US and New Zealand. All were male and physically fit and most were young. A significant number of the British and Australian personnel were doing National Service. The village built to accommodate people working at the site included a number of facil
ities intended to encourage camaraderie, such as a swimming pool, playing fields and a theatre. By the range commander’s account, it was a place of high morale: ‘Considering the isolation of the area, the very trying climatic conditions for part of the year, and the diversity of the groups that make up the population, morale has been, and continues to be, remarkably high. Much of this is due to the good ration scale, basic amenities provided, and the financial gain made by the majority serving in the area’.
Maralinga had been used for the 1955 Kittens tests and other non-nuclear tests, but the first major trial was Operation Buffalo, the longest series of major trials held in Australia. By this time, Penney had handed over day-to-day control of the Australian test program to his deputy William Cook, but for Buffalo he took the helm again himself. The series, held in September and October 1956, consisted of four atomic bombs, detonated in three different ways. Buffalo 1 and 4 were detonated from towers on the ground, while Buffalo 3 was dropped from an aircraft. Buffalo 2 was exploded at ground level, the only ground-level detonation in Australia, with its concomitant risks. The other major trial at Maralinga was Operation Antler in September and October 1957 which involved three bomb firings (two on towers and one from tethered balloons). After that an international moratorium on tests, and a revived relationship between the UK and the US, put an end to mushroom clouds tests in Australia.
Atomic Thunder Page 11
