Beale said that Australia should aim to be more than a mere ‘hewer of wood and drawer of water’ for the British at the new Maralinga site. He recommended extensive financial, material and manpower contributions so Australia would be considered a true partner, after canvassing four other less costly scenarios. Beale’s preferred option was projected to cost a huge £200 000 per year.
This alternative will ensure the best return to Australia for any expenditure provided and comes more adequately than any of the other [cheaper] alternatives within the definition of a joint project because it means that we would have a definite responsibility in the scientific trials and would share in the knowledge gained therefrom.
In the end, despite the massive expenditure, Australia was never more than the wood hewer and water drawer. In fact, that description could not be more apt, with its connotation of lowly hard labour and exclusion from decision-making.
Harder negotiators on the Australian side might have made a difference, since Australia was not without bargaining chips, but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Australia just worked out how to pay the exorbitant costs associated with its menial role. After some discussion back and forth between senior government officials, they decided Australia’s initial contribution should be £400 000 to £500 000, continuing at an annual rate of £150 000. Beale recommended a special government appropriation to cover the cost, rather than raid the Defence budget. The means of raising such a significant amount of money was up to Treasury – it would not come out of existing departmental or service budgets.
After Totem, the British test program in Australia stopped for two and a half years. The decision to create a permanent nuclear test site in Australia at Maralinga took a lot of planning, expense and time. While the Australian Government was preoccupied with the logistical matters associated with building a new desert township and associated bomb testing range, the British were getting impatient with the fact that the permanent site would not be ready until the second half of 1956.
During that time, AWRE scientists shifted their focus to the prospect of a British H-bomb. This fusion weapon, already in the arsenals of both the US and the USSR, had a much larger yield – in the megatonne rather than the kilotonne range, a megatonne being 1000 kilotonnes. The prospect of an international treaty to limit nuclear weapons testing gave British plans for a thermonuclear bomb greater urgency. They needed to test a megatonne weapon before a test ban took effect. Penney made the running on the British H-bomb test, in the Pacific Ocean at Christmas Island. It was given the codename Operation Grapple.
When negotiating the Maralinga agreement, the Australians had explicitly forbidden testing an H-bomb on Australian soil. The political ramifications of the much bigger H-bomb were beyond what even a compliant government felt able to deal with. However, while they were forbidden from testing the H-bomb itself, the British needed to test a highly efficient and more advanced device that could operate as a trigger for it. In a top-secret telegram prepared by the Ministry of Defence, the British made their intentions clear to the Menzies government:
You know well the importance we attach to the speediest development of efficient nuclear weapons. You know also… how much we appreciate the immense help given to us by Australia in having our previous nuclear trials take place on Australian territory and in agreeing to the establishment of a permanent proving ground at Maralinga. We have however still one more request to make of you. Maralinga will not be ready until September 1956. Our scientists on the other hand will be ready to make tests in April 1956 which are very urgently needed in the course of our development of more efficient weapons by the inclusion of light elements as a boost. We are most anxious not to lose the six months that would be involved in waiting for the Maralinga range to be ready.
And so, for Operation Mosaic (originally named Operation Giraffe), the British returned to the remote Monte Bello Islands for two tests, one of which became particularly infamous.
Unlike Hurricane, which was a maritime operation to test base surge caused by an atomic weapon, the Mosaic bombs at Monte Bello were detonated from land-based steel towers. The fallout was expected to be much less than from the radioactive water spout of Hurricane – Menzies was told that it be would less than one-fifth of the first British test’s fallout. That was another of the false predictions that riddled the British nuclear weapons test program.
HMAS Warrego and Karangi were pressed back into service to set up the firing sites during October and November 1955. In addition, HMAS Fremantle and Junee assisted by providing transport and logistics during the first Mosaic test. The RAAF pitched in with a variety of support services, such as security, transportation and signalling. These aircraft deployed from RAAF base Pearce in Western Australia later travelled across the continent to RAAF base Amberley, near Brisbane, for decontamination. RAF aircraft also performed a multitude of tasks an atomic weapons test requires, such as surveys of ground contamination and cloud tracking.
Although there were no nuclear tests in Australia during 1954 and 1955, Mosaic was still a rush job. The experience of the 1952 Hurricane test gave the British a good idea of the challenges of the site, but the Monte Bellos were damnably remote, and the two Mosaic tests were entirely different propositions from Hurricane. From conception to first test, the British had only about 15 months to plan. For such a step-up in technology, this was recklessly fast. A lot of equipment, and of course the nuclear devices themselves, had to make the trip from the UK. On this occasion, to save time, the British took the risk of travelling via the Suez Canal, chopping weeks off the journey.
Mosaic G1 was detonated on Trimouille Island just before midday on 16 May 1956. It was controlled from a Royal Navy ship anchored in a lagoon about 25 kilometres away. It had an approximate yield of 15 kilotonnes, 10 kilotonnes less than Hurricane. The mushroom cloud rose higher than predicted, up to 6400 metres instead of 5200 metres.
The main event came a few weeks later. Mosaic G2 remains the biggest atomic device ever exploded on Australian soil. This device was also tower-mounted, this time on Alpha Island. Its yield was disputed for years and was noted by the Royal Commission as being 60 kilotonnes. Many commentators and scholars now accept it was 98 kilotonnes (although some continue to maintain that it did not exceed 60 kilotonnes, and the British have not publicly released yield data). Its cloud rose 14 000 metres, instead of the predicted 11 000 metres, and proceeded to spread east across the entire continent, causing considerable consternation in the media and among the public. Between G1 and G2, Howard Beale, who had apparently misinterpreted information from the British authorities, claimed publicly that the second Mosaic test would be smaller than the first. This assertion was so far from the truth that the statement contributed to public panic when G2 was detonated. Many people believed that something had gone terribly wrong and the massive explosion was some kind of nuclear accident. As the minister responsible, Beale had to scramble to dispel public fears.