The Indoctrinees are frustrated by the delays to the first blast at One Tree. After the lectures, they take the time to prepare equipment that will be subjected to the atomic blast. They are officers, and this hard physical labour is not normally the sort of thing they do, but they are bored enough to welcome the activity. Lowe helps dig in 25-pounder guns, erect radio antennae and set out field telephones. Buckley has a particular responsibility for guns and is asked to ensure a range of damage from none at all to complete annihilation. He spaces his guns out from ground zero to achieve an even coverage. He has been told that this work will have implications for British Army equipment purchasing policies – guns that seem to survive an atomic blast will require fewer spares than those that are quickly destroyed.
When the day finally arrives, after a number of false starts, the Indoctrinees are stationed at Forward Control on a hillside only 8 kilometres away from the first explosion – far closer than the main party. They are all dressed in summer uniform of shorts, shirt and long socks. A minute before the blast, as one they turn around so they are facing away from the explosion. Buckley listens to the countdown – ‘4, 3, 2, 1, flash turn now!’ At ‘flash’ the sky explodes, and it feels like an oven door has been opened right next to their bare necks and knees. They can turn now, as the initial flash is over and the possibility of eye damage has lessened. Buckley spins around to see a coiling black mass, shot through with flames, rapidly reaching higher for the colder air and then gradually flattening into a mushroom shape. He and his colleagues see the blast wave rushing towards them, knocking over the vegetation in its path. Then the wave hits and the men rock on their feet.
After the blast, the Indoctrinees venture towards ground zero to see what the explosion has wrought. Lowe dons his gas mask, boots and the protective clothing they call goon suits and climbs onboard a 3-tonne truck to travel to the edge of the contaminated area. He heads a small group of eight men and holds the Geiger counter. The device gets more and more frantic as the men near the blast site. The conditions are clearly too radioactive, so the group heads back to the decontamination camp run by the Australians under the direction of Harry Turner near Roadside, a waypoint at the junction of the network of Maralinga roads. Lowe’s film badge is ripped unceremoniously from his lapel by a big, tall, brusque Australian sergeant and thrown into a bucket, without its number or reading being recorded. The bucket is full of film badges, none of which will ever be seen again by those who wore them.
Meanwhile, Buckley nears his forward gun location and is puzzled to see that the arid reddish-brownness of the desert earth has been replaced with a strange whiteness, the earth transformed by extreme heat into white glass. He reaches his leading gun position and calls out his Geiger counter reading to the health physics representative. The reading is off the dial, and he gets the urgent message from his base ‘Return immediately, return immediately. Report to Health Control’. He doesn’t need to be told again – he hurries away from the unnatural white glass that overlies the red dust.
When the Geiger counters tell the team that it is safe to go back out, Buckley gathers together the sacrificial weapons that he placed in the forward area. He needs to test fire the guns that are still in one piece to determine what damage they have incurred. This is a laborious process that requires a strict safety protocol. One of the senior brass tries to hurry him up, suggesting that if Buckley is afraid to fire the guns himself then he will do it for him. Buckley is insulted and fires the next gun without taking his usual precautions. It blows up, nearly bursting his eardrums and leading to endless ear tests later on back home. So much for losing his temper and neglecting his safety training. Not long after his service at Maralinga, Buckley will retire from the British Army, and a few years later his health will fall to pieces. He will develop cataracts in his eyes, the blood disease haemochromatosis and severe arthritis, which will curtail his burgeoning post-service business career in the exports sector, a career that will earn him an OBE for services to UK exports.
Unlike Buckley and most of the other Indoctrinees, Lowe does a second stint in the forward area. He takes over from a sick colleague at the last minute and witnesses the second Buffalo blast, the ground shot at Marcoo, from a Centurion tank with two other Indoctrinees. This is incredibly scary, partly because he mistakenly believes it is an airdropped bomb and he fears for the accuracy of the bombardier. He does not know how far the tank is from ground zero, but at the moment of detonation he knows the tank moves about 3 metres sideways, a claim that will later be contradicted by a more senior officer. But he is there, and he knows. The massive tank moves like someone has picked it up. He watches through the periscope, which goes opaque at the moment of detonation because it is sandblasted. When he gets out of the tank, 30 minutes after the explosion, he sees the paint on the tank has blistered. Lowe is wearing ordinary light military clothing and no film badge. Later the British Army will deny that Lowe was inside the tank at Marcoo. His army record will never show that he witnessed Buffalo 2, and he will have trouble obtaining a war pension.
Lowe will later be promoted to colonel and will start to experience health problems when he is a military attaché in Washington in 1969. His severe gastric problems will be something of a mystery. In 1972, working as a military adviser to the British High Commission in Canberra, he will have an internal haemorrhage. After some diagnostic confusion, he will finally discover that he has stomach cancer and will have his entire stomach removed.
After Buffalo, the AWRE turned its attention to Antler, the next series of Maralinga tests. The second half of the 1950s was a pivotal time for atomic weapons development. Both the US and the USSR had performed airdrop tests of hydrogen bombs, weapons of huge yield, which led to growing concerns about what the tests were doing to the earth’s atmosphere. The UK herself was about to test a hydrogen device in the Pacific. Coupled with this, international tensions – particularly the Suez crisis in July 1956 and the Soviet suppression of Hungary in November – added to a sense of general foreboding. With bigger, more deadly atomic weapons, and world events seemingly on a conflict trajectory, public disquiet about atomic tests increased. Intellectual movements such as the 1957 Pugwash Conference of scientists and other scholars opposed to nuclear weaponry emerged. The UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was launched in 1958 and quickly grew in size and influence. The mood was shifting.
Howard Beale was the minister who had to balance growing public fears in Australia with British test requirements, at least until his abrupt departure from Cabinet in early 1958 to become Australia’s ambassador to Washington. His role was, in part, to use the techniques of public relations to maintain effective information management around the tests. In his 1977 autobiography the chapter on the atomic tests began by revealing his success at keeping the details secret. The French had called the Australians hypocrites for objecting to French tests at Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific after allowing the British tests in Australia. Beale noted that when this happened, ‘many people were taken aback, not at being called hypocrites… but to learn that we had ever conducted tests at all’. Beale then told his own (rather inaccurate in places) version of the tale, saying, ‘It is not one of which any Australian need be ashamed’.