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Brooking wrote another letter, on 29 September, discussing in more detail the definitions of minor trials doing the AWRE rounds:

From the purist’s point of view it might be taken to rule out ‘single point detonation’ trials and maybe certain nuclear trials which could give rise to small amounts of fission. We can however argue that such fission is not the intention of the trial and that if we did produce any it would be an accident, which we are, of course, unable to guard against.

This appears to imply that fission could be produced ‘accidentally on purpose’, after which culpability could be plausibly denied if they were found out. Brooking noted the US intended to do the same ‘if their politicians will let them’. And they did, with the Roller Coaster experiments in Nevada.

Justice McClelland took a jaundiced view of this series of AWRE documents, used as evidence during his Royal Commission. ‘The disingenuous tone of this debate… hardly encourages a belief that the Royal Commission has been told the full story of the minor trials.’

AWTSC secretary John Moroney had pointed to potential problems with plutonium from the Vixen B experiments in November 1963. He wrote to Roy Pilgrim, setting out his concerns about the test range:

» Residual plutonium will continue to constitute the predominant radiation hazard at the Range.

» There are a few areas, which we believe to be well protected, in which the plutonium levels could constitute a serious radiation hazard.

» The present residual plutonium contamination at Maralinga will continue to be a potential hazard for many years and far beyond the period for which activities at Maralinga of the MEP type can be envisaged.

Moroney correctly pointed out that the main hazard at the site was from inhalation of the dust. ‘Experience at Maralinga indicates that plutonium moves quickly into the top few millimetres of soil; we do not know how deep it will move ultimately but in a low rainfall region such as Maralinga it may not go far.’ He suggested that using the Maralinga site to conduct experiments to assess the hazards of soil-borne plutonium would be a good use of the facilities.

In a memorandum the following year Moroney complained that Pilgrim had never replied to this letter. Eventually, Pearce replied, addressing some of these concerns as plans progressed for the first clean-up operation, known as Hercules, in 1964: ‘This clean-up operation has, of course, precipitated the programme on which we were engaged as a result of your letters of November 1963’. Pearce affirmed that the UK had no intention of repatriating any of the Maralinga plutonium, or ‘radioactive sources’, as he described it, to where it came from, ‘and so [we] have the option of disposing of [the radioactive sources] in Australia or of burying them at Maralinga’.

One well-known eyewitness account of the Vixen B trials came from Avon Hudson. Hudson, a member of the RAAF, came to Maralinga in 1960, at the start of the Vixen B test program. Years later he campaigned for recognition of the suffering of the nuclear veterans. He became the first Maralinga veteran to speak to the media about his knowledge of plutonium waste at the test site, gave evidence at the McClelland Royal Commission and also co-wrote a book with Australian academic Roger Cross on the Maralinga legacy, Beyond Belief. He told a tale of lax health procedures and pressure to carry out dangerous orders while the experiments were underway. Hudson helped to build the feather beds that held the plutonium-filled assemblies: ‘These firing platforms were the ones that could cause so much havoc when it came to spreading radioactive pollution on the range. We knew nothing of what we were doing at the time’.

The minor trials, and particularly Vixen B, were disastrous for Australia. The main substance used, plutonium-239, is among the most toxic materials known, with a radioactive half-life of more than 24 000 years and the capacity to kill people through stochastic radiation effects inside the body. The nature of the experiments themselves, where simulated nuclear warheads were detonated on the open range using conventional explosives that blasted radio-active material high into the air, where it spread out in 150-kilometre plumes, was self-evidently dangerous. The experiments were conducted in the presence of hundreds of service personnel, some of whom ventured into the blast area within 20 minutes of an explosion while wearing only basic protective clothing. The experiments were conducted without the kinds of safeguards and monitoring that would enable analysis of risk and causation. The radioactive residue of the experiments was allowed to remain at the site for decades, without robust safeguards and, for a period, without patrols to keep sightseers or Indigenous people away from the contaminated areas.

When Britain finished its testing activities at Maralinga, at the conclusion of the MEP in April 1963, the highly dangerous aftermath of the minor trials lay openly on the ground or just below the surface. The British Government and test authorities knew the damage they had left behind. The Australian Government allowed this to happen through both omission and commission. They created the AWTSC to oversee Australian interests. But for much of its life, it was run by Professor Ernest Titterton, who, in the words of the Royal Commission, ‘aided and abetted’ British behaviour that was ‘characterised by persistent deception and paranoid secrecy’. So just exactly how did the AWTSC look after Australian interests?

6

The Australian safety committee

We have not consented to any tests being conducted except under the strictest conditions of safety, and we do not propose to do so.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies, 1956.

The Safety Committee’s role was as much concerned with public relations as it was with scientific safeguards.

Tim Sherratt, ‘A political inconvenience: Australian scientists at the British atomic weapons tests, 1952–53’, 1985.

It is inconceivable, especially in the light of Titterton’s cavalier treatment of the truth throughout his testimony… that he did not know that he had been planted on Menzies.

Royal Commission into the British Nuclear Tests in Australia, Report, 1985.

Professor Sir Ernest Titterton’s life came to a tragic end. A car accident not far from his Canberra home in September 1987, when he was 71 years old, made him a quadriplegic. He lived for another three years, longing for euthanasia, until an embolism took his life. The accident came two years after the McClelland Royal Commission report trashed his reputation for his role as the chair of the AWTSC and publicly associated his name with the fictional nuclear maniac Dr Strangelove from the eponymous 1964 film.

The AWTSC is one of the most alarming aspects of the British nuclear tests in Australia. The committee formed to protect Australian interests instead enabled the unfettered ambitions of the British nuclear elite. While it is unlikely that it was set up with this intent, its role evolved to become more of a public relations mechanism than a true overseer of highly dangerous activities. So much of this came down to the personality of Titterton, a compact, trim, crinkle-haired dynamo and divisive figure throughout. Titterton was involved with planning for the tests in Australia almost from the start. When virtually no-one other than Robert Menzies knew that the British planned to test atomic weaponry in Australia, Titterton was edging towards a crucial role – the nexus between the AWRE and everyone else.

Titterton was an English physicist whose career got underway just as the science of nuclear weaponry was progressing dramatically from theory to practice. He joined the wartime British mission to the US and designed the triggering device for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, the epochal test that demonstrated success for the Manhattan Project. He seems to have become a true believer from an early age and carried his convictions of the rightness of atomic weaponry – and of civilian atomic energy – through his life. The AWTSC might have become a well-regarded, conscientious and august body that looked after Australian interests under difficult circumstances had Titterton not commandeered it for more questionable purposes. Now, it looks like a smokescreen.