Atomic Thunder

by Elizabeth Tynan

  When the first Buffalo shot was delayed for a couple of weeks, Beale had to deal with media speculation and hostile parliamentary questioning that suggested Maralinga might not be the ideal place for a permanent test site. The lead-up to the Buffalo series was uncomfortable for Beale, the most recognisable face of the tests in Australia, because Maralinga was a new, expensive, untried venue. A huge front page banner headline in the Sydney Sun on 25 September 1956, ‘Latest on the bomb!’, had directly beneath it in large type an actual cable from the reporter, saying, ‘Hope to be back by Xmas. In meantime could you [send] further £15. Have done 6/700 word special on whether £6-million Maralinga is a white elephant’.

  The story went on to explain that the Sun special reporter who composed the telegram had been ‘waiting for a fortnight for scientists to set off an atom bomb in the first of several tests’. It quoted the reporter asking, ‘Have the British and Australian governments blundered in picking Maralinga as their test site?’ More people were asking this question, including the Opposition. The government, with Beale leading the charge, consistently defended Maralinga.

  Beale was in the public eye throughout the Buffalo program, dealing with both media and political pressure. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader Doc Evatt attempted a censure motion in parliament to condemn the government’s support of British atomic tests. The Sydney Sun reported that Beale had taken the opportunity to reiterate that the test program would continue. ‘Beale said that the Governments of Australia, Britain and the US were doing their best to achieve a working agreement, which would allow abandonment of atomic tests and the nuclear arms race. “But we have no intention of stopping until we get some form of safeguard that the Free World will not be overwhelmed by an avalanche of Russian atomic arms”, he said’.

  A remarkable two-page memorandum showed that 1956 was a watershed year in media and public perception of the British tests. A departmental briefing document titled ‘Press Reaction to Atomic Trials’ set out in terse numbered points an overview of the attitude of the media to date. It noted the favourable early media treatment after Totem in October 1953, before public opinion began to turn in 1954, ‘partly due to the death of a Japanese fisherman injured by radio-active fall-out from an American H-bomb explosion in the Pacific’. The memorandum also pointed to other factors changing community attitudes, including the ‘apparent Soviet policy trend towards peaceful co-existence’ and the international Peace Campaign ‘fostered during 1954 and 1955 by people of many shades of thought’. It described how the press, ‘chameleon-like, began to offset any articles showing pride in British technical advances with far more attention to the dangers, both political and physical, implicit in atomic trials’, and in particular how ‘the Truth/Mirror chain of papers, began definitely to oppose any further tests in Australia’.

  The memorandum specifically noted the impact of Mosaic G2. A Gallup poll in March 1956 showed a majority of Australians ‘apparently against’ tests, although Western Australia and South Australia, the two states where they were held, came out in favour. So while the announcement of the permanent test site at Maralinga ‘was soberly and well presented by the major national newspapers’, newspapers felt compelled ‘to be critical of atomic tests because of the whipped up, if unthinking, public outcry against them. The near-hysteria built of flimsy misconceptions following the second Mosaic explosion is indicative of the difficulties now to be faced from a volatile Press, public opinion and political situation’. The writer concluded by arguing for a concerted campaign ‘to refute the major false issues’ concerning trials and for public education through newspaper and magazine articles ‘to restore the confidence and pride which only three years ago marked the ordinary Australian’s attitude towards co-operation with the U.K. in this vital defence matter’. But the Australian public never again evinced the patriotic fervour that had greeted Hurricane and Totem. If Mosaic had turned the tide, Maralinga increasingly made them uneasy. The public relations machine could not fix this entirely. After Operation Antler the media were shut out, and the dangerous Vixen B minor trials that followed Antler were not reported.

  By 1957, then, public opinion had hardened towards the tests generally, and the world was moving towards new treaties that would limit atomic testing. Bipartisan political support for the tests had collapsed in the wake of the second Mosaic test, and the Opposition began to ask questions in parliament about their continuation. In June 1956, after Mosaic G2, the ALP caucus voted to oppose future atomic tests in Australia. The Australian media reported that political pressure was escalating as the ALP moved to an anti–nuclear weapons policy stance.

  The next Federal Labour [sic] Government would vote no money for tests of nuclear weapons or the development of means of waging nuclear warfare, the Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition, Mr Calwell, said today. Mr Calwell said that developments after the Monte Bello atomic explosion last week showed that if nuclear weapons tests were permitted to continue there, radio active dust, despite all precautions, might be carried across Australia.

  Pressures were bearing down on the government from growing anti-nuclear sentiment in the community and increasing questions in parliament. Mosaic G2 had been a huge political issue for Menzies, and he did not want it repeated at the new test site. Also, Australia had by now grown rather tired of being kept in the dark about the details. The proposal for Antler was typically vague, with the main point being the plan to test five bombs (later amended to six, although in the event only three were tested) in tower-mounted trials. As Operation Grapple was gearing up to test a British H-bomb in the Pacific, the government wondered if the British planned to defy the terms of the Maralinga agreement and test a thermonuclear weapon. In some ways this seemed likely, since thermonuclear weapons were now the main game and Maralinga was the permanent British test site. The terms of the Maralinga agreement had not exactly proved an insurmountable obstacle to the British before.

  Consequently, approval was slower than usual in coming. The Australians first received a request for the Antler series on 20 September 1956 but took until 16 May 1957 to grant approval. Despite this uncharacteristic delay, Antler took place as scheduled in September 1957. Initially the British named this series Operation Sapphire. However, in early 1957, without warning or explanation, they changed the codename to Operation Volcano. The horrified Australians rejected it outright. The name suggested violence and destruction. Antler was chosen after the Australians voiced their concerns.

  Antler was connected to the H-bomb trials in the Pacific and designed to test certain components necessary for thermonuclear weaponry. Penney was not the director this time around. Instead, it was led by Charles Adams, who had been second in command at the Mosaic tests. The tests began at Tadje on 12 September 1957 with a small 1-kilotonne device (known as Pixie) detonated from a 30-metre tower. Round 2 (Indigo Hammer) was held on 21 September at Biak, again detonated from a tower. This device had a yield of 6 kilotonnes. The final weapons test in the Antler series was held on 9 October at Taranaki. The device, a trigger for a thermonuclear weapon, was suspended 300 metres aloft in the desert sky by balloons. With a yield of 25 kilotonnes, the same as Hurricane, this was the biggest device tested at Maralinga. The balloon tests could hoist atomic devices far higher than towers. This was of great interest to the AWRE, and development work had started at Aldermaston about 18 months before the test. Ernest Titterton observed the progress of the balloon systems when he visited the UK in March 1957.

  The second Antler shot was observed by a grab bag of about 70 international visitors, including representatives from the Central African Federation, the Federation of Malaya (now Malaysia), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Baghdad Pact (Iraq and Iran) and two South-East Asia Treaty Organisation partners, Thailand and the Philippines. The third and final shot was observed by representatives of the international and Australian media and a range of Australian parliamentarians.

  By the end of 1957, Howard Beale, the Australian face
of the test program, had apparently fallen out with Menzies, and early the following year he shipped out to a post as ambassador to the US (the posting of choice for fallen Australian Cabinet ministers).

  As it turned out, Antler was the last major series. The international situation had changed markedly. Britain was now a signatory to an international moratorium on atomic weapons struck in Geneva. Operation Lighthouse, scheduled for 1958 at Maralinga, never happened. No doubt this was a good thing, since Lighthouse involved more extensive human exposure experiments along the lines of the Indoctrinee Force – hundreds of men wrapped in special blankets were to huddle close to a major explosion.

  There were no more major atmospheric tests at Maralinga. The seven nuclear devices tested there had sent radioactive clouds over a large portion of the Australian continent, joining the contamination already contributed by the non-Maralinga tests, particularly Mosaic G2. To this day no-one can say for sure whether this contamination caused harm to the broad Australian population. Almost certainly, though, the people closest to the bomb blasts, the military and scientific personnel at Maralinga and the Indigenous people in the vicinity, were physically affected to varying degrees.

  This is not the end of the story. If the British nuclear tests had involved only the mushroom cloud tests, most of the radioactivity would be undetectable now. But there was still much to find out about the innumerable intricate details of nuclear weapons design. Despite the moratorium, the British were not to be denied the knowledge that minor trials could provide. Maralinga continued to help the British understand what the atomic age had unleashed. The minor trials that burgeoned at Maralinga after the major trials ended sometimes strayed into murky legal waters. And while much of what happened at Maralinga beyond the big, showy mushroom clouds was considerably more damaging to Australian territory, it was not uncovered for decades.

  5

  Vixen B and other ‘minor trials’

  I’m sure in 1985 plutonium is in every corner drug store, but in 1955, it’s a little hard to come by!

  ‘Dr Emmett Brown’, Back to the Future, 1985.

  In view of the known long half-life of plutonium (24 000 years), the Vixen series of minor trials should never have been conducted at Maralinga.

  Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, Conclusions and Recommendations, 1985.

  And the more questions we asked, and the deeper we got into the issue, the more it looked like a Pandora’s box.

  Tom Uren, Straight Left, 1995.

  In the red dust of Central Australia, sweating men in cotton shorts are erecting a scaffold. The 2-metre-high structure is crude but strong – narrow triangles that stand on four legs and reach a point at the apex, where there is room to place some lead bricks. The whole structure weighs about 60 tonnes. It has a hole at the top to accommodate a simulated warhead. The Australian military men work quickly, craning and bolting the prefabricated structure into place, brushing away the flies and drops of sweat from their eyes as they work. Close by, the decontamination team has set up a station. It includes a cattle grid that is used for washing down the vehicles. There is also a steam cleaner and pumps, with associated water storage tanks. The ground is well covered with low scrub and some grass, with the exception of the area inside the perimeter of the Taranaki test site. That area is mainly bare sand. The temperature climbs above 40 degrees Celsius. The red sand swirls endlessly, irritating their eyes. The horizon shimmers far in the distance.

  Soon the British Royal Engineers will arrive with the simulated warhead. Inside the warhead, a sphere of silvery metal is held in position by a simple bracket and metallic rods of the same substance. Placed around the silvery metal, like a suicide-bomber’s explosive girdle, is a ring of TNT rods, each with an outer case of distinctive red cardboard. The silvery metal is plutonium, one of the most deadly materials known. This strange and sinister device will be exploded from the top of the metal scaffold. The scaffold is called a feather bed, for reasons that have been forgotten. The delicate mock warhead is placed in position at the apex of the steel structure and tightly secured. All is ready for the experiment.

  British scientists and military personnel are in the forward area. The Australian personnel have gone well back from the Taranaki test site, mostly south to Maralinga village. Only the British can be close to the main action. Not far away, eight hydrogen-filled balloons are bobbing around at two different elevations in a circle, around the forward area as well as upwind. Each balloon bristles with measuring equipment. Six form a ring around the forward area and carry instruments to measure the outpouring of radiation from the simulated warhead when it is exploded; these are positioned at a height of just over 100 metres. Two upwind balloons, positioned at just over 300 metres, will measure weather conditions at the time of the tests. The weather determines where the contamination spreads from atmospheric tests, whether radiological or nuclear. The balloons add a surreal feeling to the outback range as they silently wait for data from the coming blast and the wind.

  An array of measuring instruments designed to catch the falling radioactive debris is set out at intervals of 1600 metres around the boundary of the forward area, along East Street, 25th Avenue and West Street. A balloon team and a photographic team support the six-man scientific staff, headed by Major JT McLean. Two Holden cars, six Land Rovers and a bus are parked just outside the forward area. The forward area is generally taken to be anywhere north of Roadside, a command post at the point where the road north from Maralinga village branches into two roads. Several Land Rovers inside the forward area will be sacrificed to contamination, one of the costs associated with radioactive testing. One day they will be buried here.

  It is September 1960, and the first Vixen B trial is about to begin.

  Kittens, Tims, Rats, Vixen. These strange, incongruous words, no doubt small in-jokes among the nuclear insiders, labelled some of the most secret and, in the end, most damaging activities from the 11 years of British nuclear testing in Australia. Hundreds of tests fell under the heading ‘minor trials’, a constant since Emu Field, culminating in Vixen B. While mushroom clouds announced the major trials, the minor trials were more shadowy. And much more deadly.

  Were the minor trials the most dangerous scientific experiments in Australia’s history? In the case of Vixen B, the evidence is strong. These experiments were covered in unprecedented secrecy, far more so than the major trials. In part this reflected the growing unpopularity of the weapons program at Maralinga and the growing international constraints on testing. Indeed it’s likely that secrecy surrounded Vixen B more for political than for military or national security reasons, and these tests may not have been possible without it. Had the general public been aware of the danger of Vixen B, the political backlash might even have swept the Menzies government from power, given its shaky standing at that time in the polls. (At the December 1961 federal elections, just over a year after Vixen B got underway, the government suffered a significant electoral downturn and was returned with a majority of just one seat.)

  History has judged the minor trials harshly. They left by far the biggest portion of the radioactive contamination in Australia and were the subject of an active cover-up by the British, as New Scientist journalist Ian Anderson later revealed (see chapter 11). Lorna Arnold said, ‘The minor trials had left more trouble behind them than the big explosions’. They could have been carried out in the UK but for politics. Noah Pearce was in the team conducting the trials. When Counsel Assisting Peter McClellan suggested to him at the Royal Commission that ‘the planning foundation for your work was that radioactive contamination of Australia may be politically acceptable but not for the UK’, Pearce’s answer was a simple ‘Yes’. This was not disclosed to the Australian people at any time during the experiments.

  Might the experiments have been conducted more safely if they had been held in the UK? Probably, given the more rigid regulations and more intrusive and active media there. The experience was different, too
, when the UK did similar experiments with the US in Nevada under the name Roller Coaster. Radiation scientist Peter Burns later observed, ‘The Americans had a much more intensive assessment of the fallout by taking many samples. They had labs on site at Nevada so they could take soil samples and do their measurements … they were determined to find every bit of plutonium on the ground so they did a very detailed study of what was there’. Greater rigour, far more extensive documentation and monitoring, and a proper clean-up afterwards: so different from Maralinga, where large quantities of plutonium were left lying around in the open.

  The aftermath of the minor trials dominated the media stories that emerged in the late 1970s. In the mid-1980s, the McClelland Royal Commission condemned them, which boosted the momentum of criticism. ALP deputy leader Tom Uren, who remained angry about the trials for many years, and outspoken nuclear veterans such as Avon Hudson, also raised their profile. The courts heard multiple claims from nuclear veterans, some seeking compensation for health problems caused by alleged contamination from Vixen B.

  Nearly all the minor trials tested how radioactive and other toxic substances would react when burned or exploded. Different substances were used in each series, including beryllium, uranium and several isotopes of plutonium, as well as short-lived radio-nuclides such as polonium-210, lead-212 and scandium-46, which the Royal Commission found had decayed ‘to insignificant amounts’ since the time of the tests.