Penney continued to work with his old Manhattan confreres, including Titterton and (fatefully) Fuchs. The project name was soon changed to High Explosive Research (HER), continuing the British tradition of choosing banal names to deter interest. The quest to build a British A-bomb was first announced to the public on 12 May 1948. HER researchers initially worked at various laboratories and test facilities in Kent, Essex and Suffolk, until they moved to a former airfield in Berkshire called Aldermaston. The atomic weapons development and testing activities in Australia were managed from Alder-maston. Some work was also carried out at Fort Halstead and at the Woolwich Arsenal, where Penney was based in those early days. HER was renamed the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) in 1950.
One of Penney’s many lasting contributions was Blue Danube, Britain’s first tactical nuclear weapon. The design of the weapon was solid, sound and (according to many, including official historian Margaret Gowing) better than comparable American bombs at the time. A fission weapon powered by plutonium, it was similar in many ways to the Fat Man device detonated over Nagasaki. However, its unique design features made it more efficient and easier to assemble, control, aim and store.
Penney brought an excellent problem-solving mind to the task and oversaw four secret research and development groups that worked on key aspects of the bomb’s design. The team also worked with a wide range of commercial engineering contractors and manufacturers throughout England and Wales. They managed to maintain a secret operation despite the many people involved. As Jonathan Aylen put it:
Blue Danube’s practical development was a product of a wider ‘warfare state’ of Cold War Britain, not just the product of a few boffins. In truth, the first atomic bomb was designed in suburban centres and built in ordinary factories down prosaic back streets by regular workers – men and women – in towns across industrial Britain.
There is something ineffably British in this process, just as when the Maud Committee used laboratory word games to come up with the most impenetrable codenames for work done in plain sight.
So Blue Danube was created in the dingy factories and hastily built research and development laboratories of postwar Britain. It came into being in a roundabout way, untested, during extraordinary and tumultuous times. The leaders of the project to create it, including the brilliant mathematical physicist Penney, were confident that it would work. But confidence is not enough. Weapons must always be tested. As the HER project proceeded, and the scientists conveyed their reports to their political masters, the next step was clear. Blue Danube would have to be exploded. Since the nuclear spies and the McMahon Act had put Nevada and New Mexico off limits, the question arose: where could the fledgling British nuclear deterrent be tested?
3
Monte Bello and Emu Field
We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs…
We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.
I saw this ominous black atom bomb sitting on the top of the tower, bolted in place, winched up to the top on guiderails that I’d laid in. And I saw a crow sitting on it. I said to the crow, ‘if I were you, I’d shift’.
Australia in the 1950s was not a country casting a critical eye at the development of, or consequences arising from, nuclear testing. There is little evidence of the doubts and fears which American scientists who pioneered the nuclear project expressed.
The McMahon Act was a terrible blow to William Penney and his team at Aldermaston. They had designed a technologically advanced atomic weapon, but they couldn’t test it at the American sites. As Penney said later in his statement to the Royal Commission, ‘I consistently took the view that I would prefer to use the existing American facilities, either in Nevada or the Pacific’. He was most at home in Nevada, where he had earned his nuclear weapons stripes in the inner circle of the Manhattan Project, and where he could work among trusted colleagues.
The decision to bar outsiders looked permanent in 1946, and the British had no time to lose. Some behind-the-scenes negotiation for ongoing low-key co-operation had taken place, albeit with some onerous conditions applied by the Americans, but all hope collapsed in 1950 when Klaus Fuchs was exposed as an atomic spy. The US could not afford to dice any further with disaffected scientists looking to make a high-minded ideological point. The decision was final. The Americans amended the Act in 1958, well after the first British atomic device had been tested, and invited them back. But until then Britain was on her own.
Penney assumed the next option would be Canada, which had been directly involved in the Manhattan Project. He was familiar with its expertise and infrastructure and conducted a feasibility study there in the late 1940s. In addition to a test site, he was looking for a long-term collaboration. The aim was to conduct the first British test in the northern summer of 1952. The location needed to be quite particular, because Penney was keen to test the effects of detonating a weapon based on his Blue Danube design aboard a ship. He wanted to analyse the minutiae of a phenomenon known as base surge, which involved a large upward movement of radioactive water into the air, when the products of a nuclear explosion mixed with fine droplets of water. Disappointingly, none of the seven ports he examined was suitable for a shipboard detonation. Nevertheless, Canada remained on the drawing board.
According to official British historian Margaret Gowing, Penney envisaged one or two annual trials for several years, at a site generously staffed and equipped with instruments. He recommended 200 scientists, 50 technicians and 100 industrial workers, at huge potential cost, for the first trial. ‘Most of the scientists would be provided by Britain, with help from the Canadians in chemical analysis and radiological safety, and most of the industrial workers by Canada; Canada would undertake the construction work; costs would be shared on an agreed basis.’ Canada’s wartime experience in contributing to the Manhattan Project provided a strong platform for a Canadian test program.
Penney had a variety of criteria he applied to the seven potential Canadian sites, mostly to do with climatic conditions, infrastructure and isolation. Churchill, Manitoba, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, seemed ideal, even though the shallowness of its port made base surge observations difficult or unlikely. Churchill is about 1600 kilometres north of the provincial capital of Winnipeg and extremely remote, not to mention unspeakably cold during a substantial part of the year. Today it is best known as a tourist destination to view polar bears in the wild. In his report, Penney acknowledged that the area would be contaminated by the proposed tests but described the land near Churchill as ‘valueless’.
History shows that the British never did test a nuclear weapon in Canada. In fact, as scholars John Clearwater and David O’Brien noted, there is no evidence ‘to show that the elaborate proposal, which included detailed plans for roads, barracks and other infrastructure, ever went to the ministerial level’. When the extent of the proposed contamination of the Churchill site became clear, the Canadians quietly shelved the idea. Again, Britain was on her own.
Meanwhile, Australia came up on the radar. This peaceful backwater of a country seemed a natural choice in many ways: developed, Western, a member of the Commonwealth and a former colony. It possessed huge potential sources of uranium, uninhabited islands and swathes of desert. At that moment in history, a noted Anglo-phile, Robert Menzies, headed its government.