Maralinga was neither Australia’s nor Britain’s finest hour. Both countries behaved at times with questionable ethics and little regard for future consequences. Later investigations revealed that insufficient safeguards were in place to protect people and land, even allowing for the less developed understanding of matters atomic back then. The harm done to the Indigenous population was substantial and shameful. The test authorities said openly at the time that there was ‘nothing to suffer damage except spinifex and mulga’ at Maralinga, despite the long and complex history of Indigenous presence there. One top-secret document prepared by the Australian minister for Supply Howard Beale when planning for the permanent test range said, ‘Revocation of an existing aborigines’ reserve would be involved… this could be achieved without undue difficulty as the area has not been used by aborigines for some years’. This statement was false.
Most of the events at Maralinga and the other nuclear test sites were top-secret. Today it may come as a surprise to the average person that Australia had a central place in the development of the atomic bomb. School history curricula tend not to mention this fact. Yet, while this country sacrificed much to assist Britain’s aspirations to become a nuclear nation, we did not benefit from it. The evidence suggests the opposite. The UK became the world’s third atomic power, after the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), while Australia was left with a radioactive contamination problem that cost tens of millions of dollars to mitigate. The report of the Royal Commission in the mid-1980s succinctly described Menzies’ actions in making Australian territory available without strong safeguards as both ‘grovelling’ and ‘insouciant’ – two words that capture perfectly the tone of controlled anger displayed throughout the report. The terms of the agreement struck between Australia and Britain, loosely worded as they were, were not to Australia’s advantage in either word or spirit. It is hard to imagine another country accepting the same conditions. Australia accepted them without any particularly strong overt pressure from the UK and even volunteered to bear part of the cost, which the British had not requested. The weight of colonial history provided the true pressure, reflecting how Australia saw itself in relation to Britain at that time.
Canada, suggested in the late 1940s as a possible test location for British bombs, was in many ways a more logical ally in nuclear weapons development. Like Australia, and in contrast to the UK, it had large swathes of lightly populated territory. Unlike Australia, it also had a well-developed research effort in the field and existing collaborations. Canada had a formal nuclear technology development relationship with the US and Britain – the ABC partnership – as part of the Manhattan Project. This gave Canada far higher status than Australia in the world’s small nuclear club, a status that would have ensured Canada a greater share of the fruits of the nuclear weapons research had the tests gone ahead there. Indeed, the British dangled the carrot of detailed weapons design information in front of the Canadians. Later, in 1963, Canada even began its own nuclear weapons development program before abandoning it and divesting itself of its permanently stationed nuclear weapons of US origin in 1984.
The UK couldn’t have access to the US test sites, so Canada was the next choice. The British surveyed seven sites there and favoured the remote northerly port of Churchill in Hudson Bay, part of the Province of Manitoba. However, when the Canadians learned that the British intended to conduct at least 12 major atomic bomb tests that would severely contaminate a new 450-metre circle each time, they swiftly declined. The Canadians were a little too concerned to protect their own interests.
Australia did not have the same standing in British eyes as Canada. Although both countries were former colonies, Australia had no form at all in the field. Until the postwar era, the best Australian physicists went abroad to do their research, including the great Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, who launched his formidable career at Cambridge’s legendary Cavendish Laboratory as a student of nuclear physics pioneer Ernest Rutherford. Australian nuclear physics research really got started when Oliphant, back in Australia, lured Ernest Titterton from the UK in the early 1950s. Titterton set up the Department of Nuclear Physics at Canberra’s fledgling Australian National University (ANU). The British atomic weapons test plan was being formulated at the time, and Titterton is prominent in the Maralinga story. The two men fell out though. Oliphant, one of the world’s most eminent scientists, was vociferously opposed to scientific secrecy and was considered by the Americans to be a security risk. The test authorities shunned him when he later became a critic of the nuclear tests in Australia.
This story is not as simple as the oppression of a former colony by a fading imperial power, however. Australia entered into the agreement with considerable ambitions of its own. The Menzies government had its reasons, not all of them sycophantic. One incentive was to maximise the value of the country’s newly discovered and extensive uranium resources. Uranium was the raw material for both atomic weaponry and atomic energy, but few countries in the world possessed it in such large and accessible quantities. Second, the Australian Government believed that if nuclear war loomed, assisting Britain with its nuclear program would help guarantee Australia’s own protection by Britain at least, and possibly the US as well. A third reason was that in the 1950s, Australia toyed with the idea of both civilian nuclear power and its own nuclear weaponry. Who better to learn from than the British (especially as the US would not countenance the idea)? But none of these ulterior motives came to fruition.
This story of many parts is also a Cold War tale. After the end of World War II, the British wartime leader Winston Churchill declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe. This ideological divide – between the West on one side and the communist nations headed by the USSR on the other – soon sparked an arms race based upon the devastating new weapons demonstrated in Japan. The Soviet Union, with considerable input from the atomic spies who feature later in this book, tested its own atomic bomb just four years later, in 1949.
The Cold War brought secrecy and suspicion into the dealings not just between enemies, but also between allies. In Australia, the Cold War ruptured security relationships with both Britain and the US. A spy ring uncovered after the war at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra implicated a number of Australian public servants (although no charges were laid). The British rocket tests at Woomera, also in the South Australian desert, were temporarily suspended because of these security concerns. Australia was forced to convince both the UK and the US that it could keep security secrets. Australia’s domestic spy service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), was established in 1949 during the dying days of the Chifley Labor government, under explicit pressure from the two allies. Despite the advent of ASIO, and the even more shadowy Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 1952, neither Britain nor the US really trusted Australia. In the end, Britain provided no nuclear secrets to Australia, and Australia was peculiarly reluctant to ask for them, even when they were being gathered on its own soil.
This is a story of scientific progress as well, and particularly the relatively new science of nuclear physics. Many of the main protagonists in the Maralinga tale were physicists. Some were well inside the Maralinga tent, such as the head of the series, William Penney, and the scientist often said to have been ‘planted on Menzies’, Ernest Titterton. Titterton was famously characterised as a Dr Strangelove figure, and his reputation was trashed during the McClelland Royal Commission. Penney’s reputation came out the other side rather better, though still damaged by the cloak and dagger. Other scientists, particularly the Australians Mark Oliphant and Hedley Marston, were on the outer. They had grave doubts about the nuclear tests in Australia and paid a professional price for raising them.