As the countdown began, Mr Kiritome told the people to put their hands to their ears to muffle the sound of the blast. There were a few screams as the shock wave hit and the screen went blank. But everyone soon recovered. Later the islanders were allowed to troop up on deck◦— and found everyone else wearing white cotton overalls, covering their heads, faces and bodies. Some of them were studying the effects of the bomb with binoculars.
“We didn’t have any protective clothing. We went on deck wearing our normal clothes,” said Mrs Kiritome. “We were watching the black cloud and smoke from the blast drifting toward us. When it came overhead, I felt something like a light shower falling on me. I thought it was rain. My husband stood under a lifeboat so he was protected from the shower. I felt wetness on my head, face and skin.”
After several hours the islanders were taken back to their homes. Mr and Mrs Kiritome found all the windows and doors blown in and a concrete wall cracked. Their pet frigate bird was running round the house, blind. A few days later Mrs Kiritome was alarmed to discover that something had happened to her hair. Every time she brushed it large strands came loose. To make matters worse she developed burns to her face and parts of her shoulder.
A New Zealand navy ship HMNZ Pukaki was stationed 80 miles east of ground zero. She was an observation and weather reporting vessel which had been present at most of the Grapple tests. As she took her final position for the blast there was a flurry of excitement: the radar operators reported a small but firm radar contact about 12 miles away. The ship immediately started to close on the unknown contact at 12 knots.
There was high tension on board and all the men were put on maximum alert. Then as the ship closed to about five miles, the radar contact disappeared. The word was the intruder was a submarine and the sonar team began searching the depths. The ship reached the contact area, but there was no sign of an intruder. An urgent message was sent to Christmas Island and within an hour two Shackleton aircraft arrived on the scene and continued the search. Nothing was found.
It all added to the extreme anxiety that the crew were now feeling. After more than an hour’s delay they were all ordered up on deck and issued with protective ‘anti-flash’ gear. They were told to sit down with their backs to the blast. Even at a distance of 80 miles the flash was intense. They felt the heat at the same time. One of the crew described it like sunbathing on a cloudy day and the clouds suddenly opening to let the sun through. The heat could be felt through white overalls. Then they heard a double crack of explosion, like a double barrelled shotgun blast.
But more than anything else the crew were amazed at the size of the fireball that formed on the horizon, and the towering mushroom cloud that began to grow was awe-inspiring. Within minutes everyone on board was looking up at the swirling mass of cloud boiling over their heads.
Crew member Gerry Wright recalled in his diary: “Silence. Everyone just watched in amazement at the power of energy that had been released before them. Only the cries of blinded frigate birds broke the silence. They would soon die as uncounted casualties of modern science.”
The danger of fallout from the giant cloud, now stretching a hundred miles from horizon to horizon, was not lost on Pukaki’s captain, Bernie Elliott. In the ship’s log, he noted the size of the cloud and the fact that it had stretched over Pukaki “and far beyond” despite the ship being upwind, adding: “But such was our faith in the scientists ashore that no-one was heard to say, ‘I hope it doesn’t rain.’”
Meanwhile back at the airfield, the decontamination unit worked on WH980 all day. One of the crew recalled the desperate attempts to bring the radiation count down. In a sworn statement before he died in 2003, Ken Sutton, an Australian aircraftsman, said: “It was the hottest aircraft we had ever handled. No-one was even allowed near it; we just hosed it down from a distance. But the following morning I was taken by two men in white overalls, scientists I believe, who had stop watches. They instructed me to climb into the Canberra to retrieve some calibration equipment they wanted. I was told I had just two minutes to get in… and then get out. I asked, ‘Why only two minutes?’ They just looked at me and one said, ‘Any longer than two minutes and you might as well not bother.’ In overalls and face mask, I climbed into the aircraft and worked faster than I had ever worked in my life. I had the strangest feeling because everything looked so normal, yet I knew it was the most dangerous, lethal place I had ever been in. I got out as fast as I could, handed the instruments to the scientists and dived for the showers. I spent 30 minutes in there scrubbing down.”
WH980 spent another day ‘cooling down’. Kevin Murphy reckoned it would be several more days before it would be released. But to his surprise the following day, Eric Denson showed up at the airfield once again, driven in a Jeep. He gave Murphy a wave of acknowledgement as he made straight for the aircraft. Murphy was amazed to see the Canberra being cleared for takeoff. “They never took off so soon after coming out of the clouds. The planes were just too dangerous. It would usually take several days, at least a week, for them to be scrubbed clean. I wondered what the hell was going on…”
The aircraft, with Denson at the controls, took off once again. Murphy scratched his head as it flew into the blue. It was in the air for 1 hr 15 mins, according to Denson’s log book which also revealed the nature of the mission: a routine radar calibration and formation exercise. Murphy saw it return and taxi back to the decontamination unit. He saw Denson’s lean, wiry frame climb out of the cockpit… and he never saw him again.
“He was abruptly sent home,” said Murphy. “No-one told us why.”
No reason has ever been given for this second flight which went against all normal procedures. But everything about this bomb was unusual.
Pukaki, in the gloomy half-light caused by the cloud continued on routine weather balloon runs throughout the day and into the night. On Tuesday morning April 29, it was ordered back to Christmas Island. But instead of taking the usual route via the west side of the island, the ship received orders to take the easterly route which would take the vessel through ground zero.
As it passed tests were carried out to monitor radioactivity in the seawater. The water was tested after being drawn up through the ship’s water inlet valves in the keel, 12 feet below the waterline. At first all was well with a zero radiation reading, but suddenly a huge spike appeared on the graph recording radiation levels.
The on-duty Petty Officer sounded the alarm as the graph rocketed to well above danger levels. There was panic as other officers joined the scramble to view the instrument. Finally the captain came down to restore order. It was suggested there had been an error in the vertical axis, but that didn’t convince anyone.
As soon as the Pukaki sailed into Port London, she was boarded by two stern-looking men in plain clothes; word got around they were from naval intelligence. They examined all the ship’s paperwork over the previous 48 hours and left with most if it secured in a briefcase.
They also interrogated the radio officers about the ‘disappearing contact’ on the morning of the bomb test. When one of the officers speculated the contact might have been a Russian sub, one of the officials was overheard to say: “Who said they were Russian?” (An unconfirmed report later said that a Royal Navy sub HMS Aurorchs had been present for the Grapple Y drop and in fact had been ordered to surface soon after the blast. It was speculated the sub was used as a spot check method of testing the island’s defensive radar equipment. The allegation came from a former crew member who insisted on anonymity. No official records exist of the incident, although it has been established that Aurorchs was in the general area at the time.)