If an important part of the tests was getting information on where the plutonium ended up, the environmental consequences, then you would think they would put the effort into more scientific thought into getting those measurements more or less right. We know full well that other countries performing these experiments at the same time certainly did get it right. The Americans got it right. So you would think that the British would have given thought to getting those measurements.
Why did they not put in the effort to get it right? We can only surmise now, but it is at least possible that the British had moved on by 1967 and their focus was to divest themselves of the inhospitably hot and remote Maralinga range. Perhaps they wanted to tie up the loose ends as efficiently and quickly as possible. A superficial and inadequate survey, unsupervised by Australian authorities, produced a convenient outcome. It was good enough.
The British attitude since Australia started becoming restive over the issue in the late 1970s has been an irreconcilable combination of ‘there is no risk at the site’ and ‘if there is a risk, the Australian Government knew about it and accepted it, and it is their problem not ours’. Margaret Thatcher’s UK Conservative government will, later in 1984, present a submission to the Royal Commission that will say in part:
The Australian government knew that the nuclear tests to be carried out [at Maralinga] would cause residual contamination and that, for that reason, public access to it would need to be restricted for the foreseeable future… Scientific knowledge is not now, and certainly was not then, sufficiently advanced to enable a complete decontamination of an area in which nuclear explosive tests have taken place. In 1955 [when the agreement to establish Maralinga was being negotiated] the Australian government did not seek such an onerous, if not impossible, undertaking from the UK government, nor would the UK government have committed itself to the use of the Maralinga range if it had contemplated any such requirement.
But, as we will see, the British authorities did not tell the Australians that plutonium-239 would be dispersed in this way at the site. At the time of the agreement to establish Maralinga, the 1960s minor trials were not part of the negotiations. The Australians didn’t know exactly what went on at Taranaki until the ARL scientists discovered the reality and the science started pouring in after their landmark survey. Australia should have known, but it didn’t.
Soon after the political delegation returns to Canberra from Maralinga, ARL makes contact with one of the visitors, the federal minister responsible for Maralinga, Senator Peter Walsh. They tell him that the site does not conform to the information in the Pearce Report. Walsh immediately announces in parliament that the scientists have found 28 plutonium-contaminated fragments at the site. The ARL scientists have provided the number 28 deliberately at this stage – a number they can verify based on the data available. When they started to get hotspot readings during their survey, the scientists conducted a scan across one of their rectangles, focusing their attention on a narrow area, and documented 28 fragments in that designated zone. Later surveys will ultimately find about three million fragments spread over square kilometres.
The discovery of fragments is highly significant, not just because their presence undermines the assurances given by the British. Before this, everyone connected to the site believed that the major danger would be from inhaling the dust containing small particles of plutonium, although they think that this particular risk is minimal (a view that will soon also be challenged). The fragments suggest new risks. They are highly radioactive and if handled by people – for instance, visitors collecting souvenirs from the site – the radioactivity might enter the body by other means, such as through wounds. The Australians at the site have started to realise what they are facing.
Each fragment is found to be significantly radioactive, measuring about 100 kilobecquerels or more. To put this into perspective, in Australian universities in the 21st century a researcher who wants to do an experiment using radioactive material that is 400 becquerels or more will need a special licence and training, and extensive special handling equipment. This for material that has only one-twenty-fifth the amount of radioactivity of each one of the fragments found at the Maralinga site during May 1984. Moreover, plutonium in these quantities is a safeguardable nuclear material. Under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 (which will be extended indefinitely in 1995), to which Australia is a signatory, all material that could be used to create a nuclear weapon has to be declared and prevented from being used for weaponry. Such material should not be lying around on the surface in collectible quantities. Then there are the fingerprints of British atomic weapons fuel remaining in that plutonium, which will shortly be discovered by the ARL scientists in their forensic ‘nuclear archaeology’ laboratory analyses of the material. The exact way that each nuclear nation makes its bombs is highly classified, yet the material left behind on the ground at Maralinga was open to analysis, thus revealing some of the secrets of the British bomb. Nothing could be more foolhardy or irresponsible, not to mention the mockery made of all the paranoid secrecy during the test series in Australia. Millions of these fragments will eventually be found lying on or just below the surface at Maralinga, readily accessible to anybody casually visiting the area. The Pearce Report contains no hint of this possibility.
A long period of analysis of the Maralinga site will follow this fateful ARL visit. The ARL scientists will document the major discrepancies between the levels of contamination claimed in the Pearce Report and what they have found on the ground and will present several influential reports to the Royal Commission. Later still, even more damning information will detail the magnitude of these discrepancies and British culpability (see chapter 11).
Later in 1984, Peter Walsh speaks several times in federal parliament about Maralinga. This issue is both a growing priority and an irritant to him. The treasurer Paul Keating nicknames him Sid Vicious because of his dour, unsentimental personality and his tough, pragmatic approach to all issues in his portfolio, including Maralinga. In a lengthy statement to parliament on 4 May 1984, Walsh confirmed that he was seeking to release publicly the entire Pearce Report. That week investigative journalist Brian Toohey published his brilliant National Times story based in part on the leaked report. In his parliamentary statement, Walsh said, ‘Let me assure the Senate and the Australian people that this Government has no interest or intention of keeping facts relating to the nuclear tests in Australia secret’.
In June 1984, Walsh addresses parliament after receiving a chronology of the British nuclear tests that he commissioned from the physicist John Symonds, a consultant to his department. Symonds will later prepare an exhaustive account of the British tests for the Royal Commission. In this parliamentary statement, Walsh refers to the particularly problematic minor trials: