It certainly governed the way both Emu Field and Maralinga were established. Both sites were to the southwest of the centreline, but Emu was much closer to it than Maralinga. Emu’s extreme remoteness meant that all supplies were brought in by air, and its closeness to the centreline interfered with Woomera guided missile tests. This meant that Emu was never suitable in the long term for atomic weapons tests. However, Beadell fulfilled his brief to find a remote location within the Woomera Prohibited Area with terrain suitable for both an airstrip and a weapons test area. The site was remote all right; it ended up being too remote for the long haul. Still, for the first mainland tests in Australia the AWRE wanted to be well out bush.
The dramatic announcement inside the claustrophobic room when Beadell was told about the bomb started a five-month search across 48 000 square kilometres of harsh territory.
I finally found, purely by accident, a clay pan, on the other side of a sandhill. I went over the sandhill and there was this clay pan, a mile long, half a mile wide. One glance told me that you could land any weight aircraft we had at the time without any preparation – a perfect natural runway in the wilderness. I called this my base and I searched out in all directions in a radius of about 100 miles from this trying to find an area free of sandhills and mulga scrub, an atomic bomb site… would be some place where you could move about without having to climb up over sandhills and push through thick scrub. You’d need plenty of room for instrumentation to record the results from the bomb itself, a place where you would put a tent camp for people to live in, and you certainly wouldn’t want solid mulga and sandhills. So one of the directions 40 miles away I did find somewhere where the sandhills diminished and disappeared, the mulga scrub thinned out to open saltbush paddocks and in-between were little clumps of mulga and I thought ‘this is a perfect site for a bomb’.
The site chosen by Beadell was given the surveyors’ designation of X200. It had to be approved by Penney, who saw it in September 1952, on his way to Operation Hurricane. Beadell was slightly awestruck by Penney, while still pulling his leg at every opportunity:
This man had a genius of a mathematical brain on a level with Albert Einstein. He was the director of the whole concern, director of the atomic weapons research establishment in the UK, and he was going to come to my camp, stop with me for two weeks while I entertained him and showed him my bomb site for Australia.
Beadell had organised the delivery of eight Land Rovers to the site under the most trying circumstances. When the two large aircraft carrying Penney, his associates and the chief scientist for the Australian Department of Supply Alan Butement were due to land on the claypan, Beadell lined up the cars with their headlights on to guide them in.
Only the smallest number of people knew about plans for a mainland site. The pilots of the two aircraft had reluctantly been let in on the secret, but at this stage Beadell was one of the few people in the world who knew what X200 would become. Penney was a recognisable figure, so his trip to the centre of Australia was a highly secretive affair. After a ‘beautiful landing’ and an ice-breaking joke shared between Beadell and the British scientist over the state of Beadell’s socks, the party had to make the arduous trip from the makeshift airstrip to the proposed testing site about 80 kilometres away. Beadell observed that it was not easy since none of the party had ‘driven anywhere rougher than Piccadilly Circus’. The bushman had to edge them along painstakingly, over sandhill and through thick scrub.
Before we left the edge of the clay pan we stopped to let them see the little pebbles around the edge of the clay pan, the formations, and one of them said ‘what made the footprint in the wet sand, in the once-wet clay?’ And I said ‘oh, that’s an emu’s foot. When a bit of a shower came here once, an emu put his foot on the soft mud and it left an imprint. That’s an emu’s foot’. So we started to call this clay pan, ‘the clay pan with the emu’s foot mark on it’. Gradually that just became ‘the emu clay pan’, and the following year when the bombs did go off, it went around the world on the front page of every newspaper, ‘Emu Field atomic test successful’, and that’s where the name Emu came from.
A safety assessment of the site was sent to the Australian scientist and defence scientific adviser Professor Leslie Martin (soon to be appointed head of the AWTSC) and also to Ernest Titterton in May 1953. Emu was a diabolical site. Apart from being remote, it was a hardship post where everything was difficult. There was little water and no infrastructure. Everything had to be landed on the claypan and driven through the scrub, including a Centurion tank. Beadell had to lay out the instrumentation and set it all up. It took him a year to lay out thousands of instruments arrayed around the Emu bomb site to record data from the tests.
Again the arrangements proceeded rather too speedily given their complexity and logistical difficulty. Totem was a comparative trial, and its two devices contained differing proportions in plutonium-240. Both devices were detonated from 30-metre steel towers. They were much smaller in yield than Hurricane’s 25 kilotonnes: Totem 1 was 9 kilotonnes and Totem 2 was 7 kilotonnes.
Penney kept Totem under tight control, with little Australian input. The only exception was Ernest Titterton, now working in Australia, but always seen as essentially on the British side, with his Manhattan Project and Harwell credentials. Titterton was given access to documents that set out the firing conditions and predicted contamination for the Totem series, and generally drawn into aspects of planning for the series. He had been party to insider information on Hurricane, too, to a much greater extent than his Australian colleagues. Titterton was given the chance to revive some of his post-war Harwell research at Emu Field when he conducted some field experiments during the Totem series.
Beadell had a front-row seat for the first Emu Field test, Totem 1, on 15 October 1953.
I was standing alongside Sir William Penney on a little rocky outcrop which I had shown him before when I first took him down. I was only joking, but I said to him ‘it would be a nice place to watch the bomb go off’… but that’s where we were. The countdown got to minus 10, nine, and I said to him ‘we’re only 4 miles away from this’ and he said ‘oh, it will probably be all right’. And I said ‘I’d planned on being 400 miles away’. He said, ‘we’ll go together anyway’. We had our backs to it, and when it got to zero the whole of the world that we could see lit up in the most blinding orange flash that you couldn’t describe on such a scale. It lit up the whole sky, obliterated the sun completely and disappeared over an 80 mile skyline in the distance – the whole of the sky. I could feel the heat of it on the back of my neck. We turned around to see what we had done. Sir William and I got into an aeroplane and flew over it to see what it looked like from the air. If I had had the advantage of reading about what atomic radiation does to people after a long period, I might not have been so keen on going on that flight… When we flew over it, all we could see was a half a mile diameter sheet of melted sand, and nothing else.