These are images you've probably never seen before; it's an atomic bomb detonating in
the heart of the Australian outback. We're used to hearing about nuclear testing in the United
States, but many Aussies don't realise that our own country was also a testing ground.
The price Australia paid for this was steep with devastating impacts on our people and environment.
And to make matters worse, Australia never got to share in any benefits from these tests.
It was the British using Australia to test its bombs. They claimed to have cleaned up the site
before handing it back to Australia with a report saying it was now safe. But in 1984,
more than 20 years after the test program ended, Australian scientists walked the
land with Geiger counters to check for radiation and got the shock of their lives.
Expecting to find low levels of contamination, they wore shorts and no protective clothing,
but instead, their readings fluctuated wildly. As they stumbled over rocks and soil, they realised
they were treading on plutonium-soaked earth. They even found chunks of the deadly substance itself.
Plutonium, a man-made element, is created in a nuclear reactor by bombarding uranium
with neutrons. The isotope in question here is plutonium-239, which has a half-life of over
24,000 years so remains dangerous practically forever. Inhaling just
20 milligrams of plutonium can cause a fatal illness.
The scientists were there to survey the land before it was to be handed
back to the traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja people, who were displaced in their
hundreds by the tests. The Australians were shocked and unprepared for what they found.
The British had claimed to have cleaned up any contamination, and a report put together
by UK scientist Noah Pearce made no mention of these deadly plutonium fragments. It's enough
radioactive material that international laws would require it to be safeguarded from bad
actors trying to make a bomb. It also contains secret traces of how the British bombs were put
together but was just left lying out in the desert unguarded and undisclosed for decades.
In the 50s and 60s the British detonated 12 major atomic bombs and performed hundreds
of related experiments across Australia, leaving parts of the country permanently
contaminated by deadly radiation. It’s a story of negligence and harm
that starts with a few physicists and a seemingly worthless heavy metal: uranium.
It's the heaviest of all natural elements and was
known to have more neutrons than protons in its nucleus.
Bombarding the nucleus with neutrons at high speed could cause it to split,
undergoing nuclear fission. In 1938, researchers in Paris discovered that
the uranium atom flings out extra neutrons when split. Noone initially thought those
neutrons could be harnessed or controlled for anything, but soon theories of a chain
reaction made a bomb possible. Neils Bohr and John Wheeler published a memo on the fission
process just three days before war broke out, putting everyone on the same starting line.
Uranium-235 could easily sustain a chain reaction where the neutrons flung out by
one nucleus splitting would cause other nuclei to split, each time releasing a great deal of
energy. A material reaches critical mass when more neutrons can go off and split
other nuclei than are lost in the reaction. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls working in England,
found that just a few pounds of uranium-235 were needed to reach critical mass.
The British secretly worked on this idea under a deliberately boring-sounding name,
Tube Alloys. The British were well in front of the Americans at this stage,
and in 1941 British research was given to the US, where it fueled the Manhattan
project that culminated in the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
After this, the US didn't need the British anymore, and after a couple of high-profile atomic
spies were discovered, they didn't trust the UK to keep secrets. UK physicists were shut out,
and the Atomic Energy Act was introduced by the US in 1946 that banned collaboration on nuclear
weapons development. It took the British by surprise, and this betrayal was why Britain
turned to developing their own bombs and ended up coming to Australia to test them.
Australia had its own reasons for allowing them to.
1. Australia wanted to maximise the value of their extensive uranium resources.
2. They thought that helping the British could protect them in case of nuclear war.
3. They wanted to learn from the British in
case they decided to make their own nuclear weapons or energy.
However, the British provided no nuclear secrets to Australia, and Australia was reluctant to ask.
Australia was an ideal location for the British tests. There were vast areas of land,
we had a prime minister who said yes without asking too many questions and well it
wasn't Britain and any harm would be out of sight and out of mind for them. The British
arrived in Australia in 1952 and tested their first atomic bomb at the Montebello Islands.
They were keen to test the effects of detonating a weapon in the hold
of a ship and analyse the specifics of a phenomenon called base surge,
which involved a large upward movement of radioactive water.
The weapon was 25 kilotons which is 10 kilotons more than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima
so it was a very powerful weapon. It was one of the most powerful, not the,
but one of the most powerful bombs detonated in Australia. It did spread fallout over a wide area,
that is still actually being investigated scientifically. I do know from my own research
that the fallout went as far as Brisbane so it was tracked across the continent.
For the next tests, the British moved to Emu Field in the Australian desert. There Operation Totem
detonated more bombs, this time testing the impact of differing proportions of plutonium. They left a
kilometre-wide patch where the earth was heated to such high temperatures that it became glass.
Totem One which was detonated on the 15th of October of 1953 created a very mysterious
phenomenon that later became known as the Black Mist. We still don't fully understand what the
Black Mist was. We do know that it traveled about 170 kilometers to the northeast of
the Emu Field site where it rolled over largely indigenous populations around the settlements of
Wallatinna and Granite Downs, that kind of area. We know that it was a very strange phenomenon,
a greasy black cloud that had a strange smell. Some people said it smelled like kerosene other
people said it smelled like a dead kangaroo and it stuck to everything and very soon after the
Black Mist rolled over those communities people started to get very ill and some people died.
Some people had chronic illnesses, some people reported eye problems and indeed blindness.
Next Britain's Focus shifted to testing a hydrogen bomb before an international treaty
to limit nuclear weapons testing took effect. Since hydrogen bombs are even more powerful
than Atomic ones, Australia did actually put its foot down and said no to testing them. So
instead the British just tested a device that could operate as a fission trigger for one and
this remains the biggest Atomic device ever to explode in Australia. It was tested back
at the Montebello Islands in June 1956. Its Cloud rose 14 000 meters high, so different from what
authorities had predicted that many people thought something had gone terribly wrong.
Back in the desert in 1956-57 this time at a more permanent base at Maralinga,
seven more atomic bombs were detonated as part of Operations Buffalo and Antler. These
were detonated in a few ways; from steel towers, dropped from aircraft or from tethered balloons
300 meters high. There was also Buffalo 2 detonated at ground level that created a 21
meter deep bomb crater. Damage from these tests spread over a large part of the continent but
the worst was still to come. The most dangerous scientific experiments in Australia's history
were the Vixen B series of so-called minor trials conducted between 1959 and 1963.
The minor trials, and that name is rather ironic and it's kind of deliberate as well
it was intended to be misleading, they were extremely dangerous and extremely
damaging. The Vixen B trial involved using conventional explosives to detonate a lump
of plutonium. This is a test to see what would happen if an aircraft carrying
an atomic weapon crashed or caught fire or you know there was some accident or even terrorism.
There were 12 Vixen B tests altogether and in one of those we know for sure a chain reaction
did eventuate, so that is it was a small atomic weapon. The rest of them were more
like what would be known today as dirty bombs, suitcase bombs, they were they just spread the
radioactive material in a plume shape across the landscape. Essentially Vixen B left more than 20
kilograms of plutonium-239 at the site without any safeguards and that had implications later
for international agreements that Australia was party to but also just for anyone who
happened to enter that territory they were at risk of exposure to highly dangerous material.
Secrecy and coverups meant the British nuclear tests in Australia remained mysterious for
decades. Until a Royal Commission presented the findings of its investigations 1985,
Australia really had no idea what had gone on.
The tests massively disrupted and harmed the Aboriginal people,
who didn't have the federal vote and were not counted in the census until 1967. In Maralinga,
people spotted living on the land were directed to a station at Yalata. Still,
small groups did walk across the grounds after the tests began.
The native Patrol Officer William McDougall and his offside Bob McCauley they had the task of
keeping Aboriginal people away from the site and that was an impossible task given the size
of the territory and the the routes between water holes and people visiting family you
know it was a it was a busy place and people were traversing the territory all the time.
One particularly famous example of that happening during the tests was the Milpuddie family. They
walked onto the Maralinga range in 1957 several months after a test had been held
at a site called Marcoo, the only bomb test at Maralinga that involved detonating a device on
the ground and so it created a crater, a very deep and wide crater. The Milppuddie
family camped by the side of that crater. They weren't found until a patrol the next morning
and they were hastily taken away it was the father mother and children and some dogs
and they were rather brutally showered and had geiger counters run over them.
On the orders of Minister for Supply Howard Beale their dogs were shot in front of them.
Edie Milpuddie, the wife was pregnant at the time and she lost her baby soon after. There
were plenty of other instances where people were treated just as harshly placed onto trucks taken
away to places on The Great Australian bite to missions and places like that were you know losing
contact with their land and so the Milpuddie story is an important one on a human level to
understand what happened to real people who were displaced and mistreated by the British trials.
The British did not accurately describe what they were leaving
behind. Low-rank military personnel put together the data in the Pearce report,
and their measurements lacked an understanding of how radiation could be dispersed. That was strange
since understanding the dispersal of radiation and its consequences for the environment was
an important part of what the British hoped to gain from the tests in the first place.
There's still quite a bit of controversy about whether or not that was adequate
however I'm satisfied that the site is much safer than it was before the cleanup. There
is still limits on visiting there. There are time limits on how long you can spend on the
site and no one can stay there indefinitely in the Forward Range part of the of the Maralinga
range. The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24400 years so it you don't get rid of it
on human time scales anyway. So yes, no one will ever be able to inhabit those places.
The state that Emu field and Monte Bello were left in by the British was not much better,
and today there are still signs up warning tourists not to stay longer than an hour.
Australia fronted many of the running costs and gave political backing and
military personnel but was never in charge or privy to the information
gained. The media was muzzled by strict government censorship,
and the general public was kept in the dark about the dangers posed by radioactive fallout.
Military personnel involved in the tests were exposed to dangerous radiation levels, and many
have suffered severe health problems. The indigenous communities living where
the tests were carried out were not consulted or informed of the dangers
they faced. Many were forced to abandon their ancestral lands and relocate to other areas.
I think we all as Australians have an obligation to make sure that this never happens again I think
it's a very very dark era in Australian history and we need to guard against
government secrecy and under the table agreements between Australia and the so-called great powers.
Despite the passage of time, the true extent of the damage caused by the tests
remains unknown. The legacy of the nuclear tests in Australia is a chilling reminder
of the dangerous power physics has given us and the lasting consequences of our actions.
This video covered a serious topic and if you're looking for something a little more
light-hearted to watch next I'd like to tell you about a new video series that I'm involved
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