ARPANSA — Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency
ASIO — Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
AWRE — Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (UK)
AWTSC — Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee
CRO — Commonwealth Relations Office
CSIR — Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
CSIRO — Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
HER — High Explosive Research (UK)
IAEA — International Atomic Energy Agency
LRWE — Long Range Weapons Establishment
MARTAC — Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee
MAUD — Military Application of Uranium Detonation (UK)
MEP — Maralinga Experimental Programme (UK)
RAAF — Royal Australian Air Force
RADSUR — Radiation Survey (UK)
RAF — Royal Air Force (UK)
TAG — Technical Assessment Group
TNT — trinitrotoluene
UK — United Kingdom
US — United States
USSR — Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Measurements
During the period of the British nuclear tests, Australia used imperial measurements, and many of the quotes in the book reflect this.
1 inch = 2.5 centimetres
1 mile = 1.6 kilometres
1 pound = 0.45 kilograms
1 ton = 0.907 tonnes
Also, until February 1966, Australian currency was pounds, shillings and pence. At the time of the changeover, one Australian pound equalled two Australian dollars.
Map
Prologue
Maralinga. The name rolls easily off the tongue. It is a rather beautiful name, an Aboriginal word, but fittingly, given the colonialism at the heart of the Maralinga story, one not anchored in the place itself. The Indigenous people who lived in this part of South Australia for tens of thousands of years never spoke this word until it was transplanted there by white men. The name, from an extinct Aboriginal language called Garik, was officially adopted at a meeting of six Australian public servants and senior military personnel, the Research and Development Branch of the Commonwealth Department of Supply. At 10 am sharp on Wednesday 25 November 1953, long-time chief scientist for the department, the New Zealand–born Alan Butement, tabled it as the first order of business. He almost certainly got the name from anthropologists working in the Northern Territory, although the meeting minutes do not record that detail.
The new name met with the approval of the British ‘nuclear elite’, the top nuclear scientists from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston in southeast England. Charged with finding the right place to test British nuclear weapons, these men appropriated thousands of square kilometres of South Australian desert known to surveyors simply as X300. They turned a pristine Australian wilderness into one of the most contaminated places on earth in the pursuit of technological and geopolitical might for the United Kingdom (UK).
The nuclear tests started in October 1952 at Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia and moved briefly to a remote South Australian site called Emu Field in 1953. Even before they went to Emu, though, the scientists knew that it was not suitable for the expansive permanent location they wanted. Instead, Maralinga, not far to the south of Emu, was destined to be the final choice. A formal agreement to carry out atomic tests at Maralinga was signed by the British and Australian governments on 7 March 1956. The first major bomb tests got underway there six months later.
The word Maralinga means ‘thunder’ in Garik, a language once spoken by the people who lived around Port Essington. This short-lived British settlement, established in the early nineteenth century on the Cobourg Peninsula across from Darwin, today lies in ruins. Maralinga was one of a handful of Garik words recorded by anthropologists working in the territory; there are no known speakers today. Those who bound the word forever to the wildly beautiful red dust land in South Australia knew that it was exactly the right name. The thunder that rolled across the plains was an ominous sound that heralded a new leading player in a nuclear-armed and infinitely more dangerous world.
The British nuclear tests in Australia had their direct beginnings in the Manhattan Project. This secret wartime project created the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, effectively ending the war in the Pacific. The project harboured atomic physicist spies, and their uncovering cleaved the alliance between Britain and the United States (US) that had produced the bombs. The British then turned their eyes towards the vast open spaces of Australia.
Indirectly, historical forces had long been conspiring to lead British scientists to the Australian outback. The British colonisation of Australia in the eighteenth century may well be the true starting point for this saga. The English explorer James Cook first planted the Union Jack on Australian soil in April 1770, during his epic scientific expedition. Soon after, the entire continent was absorbed into the British Empire, where it remained until 1901. This created a power differential in the relationship between the two lands. Even after Australia became a sovereign nation, strong echoes of its colonial past rang down through the generations, including the years when the British conducted nuclear tests on Australian territory between 1952 and 1963.
A subspecies of the colonialism that first claimed this island continent pervades this story. After World War II, as Britain’s remaining colonies achieved independence one by one, its days as the world’s biggest imperial power petered out. Colonialism as a broader force receded, but a new form emerged: nuclear colonialism. The term was coined recently – in 1992 – by the US anti–nuclear weapons testing activist Jennifer Viereck, who described it as ‘the taking (or destruction) of other peoples’ natural resources, lands, and well-being for one’s own, in the furtherance of nuclear development’. The term – with its connotations of dominance and imperial superiority – fits the experience in Australia. When the call came from ‘home’, Robert Menzies, prime minister at the time, did not hesitate: Australian territory was immediately put at the disposal of the British, initially without any democratic niceties. In effect, the democratically elected prime minister of Australia decided to ‘lend Australia to the United Kingdom’ without the consent of its people. This, pointedly, was the first of the 201 conclusions of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, chaired by James McClelland, in the mid-1980s.
A phone call was all it took. The UK prime minister Clement Attlee rang Menzies in September 1950 after the British high commissioner in Canberra had passed on a top-secret message on 16 September. The message, from Attlee to Menzies, said in part, ‘I am telegraphing to you now to ask first whether the Australian Government would be prepared in principle to agree that the first United Kingdom atomic weapon should be tested in Australian territory and secondly, if so, whether they would agree to our experts making a detailed reconnaissance of the Monte Bello Islands so that a firm decision can be taken on their suitability’. Menzies agreed without hesitation. The matter was not presented to Cabinet. The test date was to be sometime in 1952, as British scientists were scrambling to finalise construction of a workable nuclear device at Aldermaston. The British surveyed the remote Monte Bello Islands under the codename Epicure, the first of many codenames, to ensure that the area would be suitable to test Britain’s first ever atomic weapon. The agreement stitched up during that phone call still resonates.