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’.