The Pearce Report has created considerable confusion over the decades because it is totally wrong about some centrally important things, most notably the level of plutonium contamination. More than 22 kilograms of plutonium was exploded in the Vixen B tests at Maralinga. Pearce said that 20 kilograms of this was safely buried in 21 concrete-topped pits dotted around the perimeter of a firing site called Taranaki, about 40 kilometres north of Maralinga village. On the basis of this information, Australia allowed the UK to sign away its responsibilities for the site in 1968. The Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee (AWTSC) was the Australian body responsible for monitoring the British testing program to ensure the safety of the Australian environment and its population. John Moroney, its long-time secretary, will later tell the scientists that it would have been ‘ungentlemanly’ for Australia to question the edicts of the British atomic scientists at the time.
The first week on the ground at Maralinga, which begins on 22 May, proceeds uneventfully. At first, Burns, Cooper, Williams and their team think that the information in the Pearce Report is accurate. They are unable to read it themselves but have been given a summary by Moroney, now head of the Radioactivity Section at ARL. Their initial observations accord with the Pearce assertions – uniform radiation of a microcurie in the old money, or 40 kilobecquerels under the more recent measurement system, per square metre, which is close to normal and no cause for concern. (A kilobecquerel is 1000 becquerels, the international standard unit of radioactivity.) The scientists are not wearing protective clothing; they walk in shorts under the clear Maralinga sun, up and down the dusty grid at Taranaki carrying their radiation gauges. They are careful men, but they know that many myths about radiation have no basis in reality. People ignorant of the physics of radioactivity have a tendency to hysteria – a natural fear of the unseen and unknown. Based upon the data in the Pearce Report the scientists believe that they could stand at the site for hundreds of hours and even, hypothetically, throw handfuls of dust into the air and breathe it in, and still they would get only their annual ‘safe’ dose.
They start efficiently, knowing that a political circus is about to descend that may slow them down. A delegation headed by the South Australian premier John Bannon and Senator Peter Walsh, accompanied by an entourage of media, is scheduled to arrive on a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) plane on 24 May. Although the scientific trip has been arranged for months, it happens to have been scheduled only a month or so after the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) investigative public affairs show Four Corners screened an exposé about a ‘nuclear veteran’ dying in Adelaide who blames his service at Maralinga for his illness. By now, Maralinga is a fixture in the Australian media. Veterans have been making allegations since the South Australian RAAF veteran Avon Hudson blew the whistle in 1976 and became the face of nuclear veteran anger; he will continue his campaign for decades, his outrage undiminished by the years. The initial media rumblings of 1976 were followed by a series of landmark investigative reports by Brian Toohey in 1978. Then the Adelaide Advertiser ran a high-profile feature series on the plight of the nuclear veterans in 1980. The Maralinga issue, dormant between 1957 (when even superficial media coverage effectively ended, six years before the final atomic experiment) and 1976, is now a media staple.
Radiation scientists can generally do without political and media attention, because it always brings misinformation. Burns, Cooper and Williams have no reason to be glad that Maralinga has bubbled to the surface again. Often journalists approach them for comments about a radiation issue then misquote them in their stories or sensationalise the issue to suit some agenda. Radiation is dangerous, the scientists acknowledge, but the average person thinks it is a thousand times more dangerous than it actually is. The media sometimes play into these fears, distorting radiation research.
If the media have an agenda, so do the politicians. The scientists joke among themselves that the visiting politicians will probably take credit for the scientific expedition, despite it having been arranged long before the current spate of media interest. They are right, of course – an announcement that the scientific expedition is the federal and state government response to the renewed public interest in Maralinga is not far away. The scientists will laugh about it for years to come.
The scientists are not overly concerned with the history of this remote desert location. They are scientists – they are interested only in the evidence they find, not in assigning blame for past political decisions. They come to the task with open eyes as well. They know that the Brits have not been overly forthcoming with assisting in the process of preparing the site for the handover. The British are still being tight with their information about Maralinga, too. A large amount remains classified and unavailable to Australian authorities, years after the site shut down. Nothing has really changed since the days of the tests.
At its heart, this tale turns on a power imbalance between the British test authorities and the country that provided the expansive territory they needed to set up a permanent nuclear test facility. Changing global attitudes to nuclear weapons and international agreements to limit atmospheric nuclear testing meant that the permanent site was in active service for only seven years. It has lain more or less idle since 1963, other than some clean-up operations.
Maralinga has been of no interest to the British since they struck the 1968 agreement with Australia, ending their responsibilities to the site. The agreement was predicated on the assumption that Britain thoroughly decontaminated the site and cleared the debris to the satisfaction of the Australian Government. In 1977, political pressure forced another survey, carried out by ARL and the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, which perpetuated the conclusions of the Pearce Report. So, too, did the 1983 report AIRAC (Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Council) 9, which will soon be discredited. None of these reports has come close to the truth. Instead they have clouded the issue both politically and scientifically. In 1979, though, after a major public outcry sparked by Brian Toohey’s stories in the Financial Review in October 1978, the British were forced to send military personnel to remove drums full of salt imbued with plutonium buried at the Maralinga airfield. They did so reluctantly and only after prolonged negotiations. Pearce himself visited Maralinga for 48 hours in 1978 during those negotiations and reaffirmed his 1968 report. That incident was nothing more than an inconvenience.
The scientists get on with their environmental monitoring work as best they can, diverting briefly for the visit from the pollies and the journos, who drop by for four hours on Thursday. ARL head Keith Lokan arrives with the official party and helps to show them around, explaining what the scientists are doing. The day is mild and dry. The scientists have not detected any serious contamination, but they have found a few areas that show higher than expected activity. Lokan briefs the journalists about these ‘hotspots’ – small areas of intense radiation – during the visit. A famous moment occurs when he searches for one that was previously discovered. The political party stand outside the fenced-off TM101 testing site, about 20 kilometres to the northeast of the old Maralinga village. Suddenly the radiation monitor starts screaming, right under the foot of one of the male journalists, who quickly jumps back. Peter Walsh’s tough female press secretary instantly remarks, ‘Now your balls will drop off!’ to laughs all round. Among the media is the British journalist Sue Lloyd-Roberts, who will later co-write a book on Maralinga with Denys Blakemore, Fields of Thunder: Testing Britain’s Bomb. She looks around the abandoned site, with its barbed wire, radiation warning symbols and concrete-topped pits, and writes, ‘More ominously, teams from the Australian Radiation Laboratory guiding the ministerial team showed the presence of radioactive material on the surface of the range with their constantly clicking Geiger counters’.