Clouds of Deceit (11 page)

Towards the end of Attlee's administration in 1951, the British
Prime Minister told the Australians that the effect of the Monte Bello test would be to contaminate the north-eastern islands in the group, and that contamination might well spread to other islands as well. The area would not be free of contamination for three years after the explosion, he added. During that period, it would be unsafe for human habitation or even visits from the pearl fishermen who had been its only regular visitors before the test.

The question of how to keep people off the islands became pressing as the task force prepared to leave. Penney and a number of his AWRE staff left the islands only six days after the explosion, sailing for Onslow on the mainland in HMAS
Hawkesbury
and then flying to Britain. The process of re-entry to the ‘dirty' area to retrieve equipment and take samples was held up for four days from 12 October due to bad weather. Several boats were damaged in gale-force winds - a landing craft sank at its moorings, a motor launch went on the rocks carrying the echo-sounder used for surveying the bomb crater, and a 35-foot pinnace broke loose and was never seen again.

By 23 October, the salvage operation was complete. The Royal Engineers were given the job of dismantling any structures left on the islands to prevent future visitors using them without realizing the danger. Finally, on 31 October, HMS
Campania
led the task force from the Monte Bello Islands to Fremantle.

They left behind the Australian ship,
Hawkesbury,
and an Australian unit whose tasks were to carry out training in radiological safety and to keep people out of the area. The unit set up camp on South East island, less than a mile to the south of Trimouille, with a Land Rover and a wide range of radiation detection equipment supplied by the British. The unit carried out a week of training exercises on Trimouille in early November. They were joined by eleven ratings from
Hawkesbury,
who came ashore for lectures and practical work. The unit left the islands on 16 December: radiation records show they were exposed to about one-fifth of the amount of radiation now permitted for workers in the radiation industry.

After the unit's departure, the security of the islands was left
in the hands of the Royal Australian Navy, which made periodic visits and mounted security patrols. In reality, it was impossible for such patrols to prevent the odd landing on the islands, but the security of the area was a pretty low priority for everyone concerned, British and Australians.

Penney was questioned closely on the subject at the Royal Commission hearings in 1985. Whose responsibility was it to keep people out, he was asked? ‘I believe it was the Australians',' he replied. ‘The advice I gave was that we must be sure that nobody outside … no outsiders land on that island for two or three months and that we would review the situation as we went along.'

The account he gave of the decisions that were taken had a haphazard air about it, and lacked any consistency about whether or not there was a risk. At some point, he couldn't remember when exactly, but it might have been three months after the explosion, his chief of staff at AWRE ‘came along waving a bit of paper. He said, “The Australians want to take the guard off. Do you think that's all right?” I said, “What's the radiation?”' A bit later, Penney said, he was told that a search party had been to the islands and he heard what levels of radioactivity they had found. They were ‘all right', he said, but he insisted that, if the guard was taken away, steps must be taken ‘to stop anybody going near the place. So the undertaking was made to put up notices in words in various languages, Japanese being one … scary kind of words. Just when that was I can't tell you to the month. It wasn't '52. It could have been middle to late '53. It might have been early '54.'

In the light of these rather loose arrangements, it is not surprising that when a dead body was found on a beach on one of the islands during the Operation Mosaic tests at Monte Bello in 1956, there was a moment's panic until it was realized that the corpse was an old one - that of a fisherman - and had probably been there long before any atom bombs were tested in the area. But even after the Mosaic tests, one of which was the big 98 kiloton blast, the only long-term method adopted for keeping people off the islands was the erection of signs.

This arrangement was accepted in spite of the known fact that
some parts of Trimouille Island had posed a radiation hazard
three years
after the first test - and that that hazard was being increased by the addition of contamination from a further two bombs. Nevertheless, the British and Australians decided against any attempt to fence off ‘hot' areas in the islands, apparently because to do so would involve all the bother of erecting barbed wire on several islands in the group. Once again, the only hope of chance visitors to the islands avoiding contamination was that they would be able to read, and that they happened to speak one of the languages used on the signs.

When a team from Greenpeace, the environmental pressure group, visited the Monte Bellos more than thirty years after the first test, they found that ‘the overwhelming beauty of the islands … lulled us into a false sense of security about the dangers of visiting a radioactively contaminated area'. At Alpha Island, where one of the Operation Mosaic bombs was tested, ‘one would have had to walk on contaminated ground' to read the warning signs. As a general rule, ‘the radiation hazard signs around the ground zero [the point on the earth nearest the centre of the explosion] sites were too small in size, difficult to read from a distance and too few in number.'

The Greenpeace team was told, on applying for a permit to visit the islands at Port Hedland, on the mainland, that only six other permits had been issued that year. Yet they encountered four other yachts in the islands in the short period they spent there, suggesting that unauthorized visits regularly take place.

Greenpeace claims it will take sixty years for radiation levels at the ground zeros on the islands to decline to limits recommended as safe for the public. They want contaminated areas to be fenced off and marked with prominent signs warning of the dangers. Since this safeguard was considered ‘virtually impossible' in 1956, when the danger was at its height, the chances of its happening now seem slight.

Headline over
Daily Graphic
editorial, October 1952

‘Britain now has what is believed to be the world's most powerful atomic weapon.' This is how the now-defunct
Daily Graphic
greeted - incorrectly - the test at Monte Bello. ‘Scientists who saw yesterday's palm-shaped explosion off Western Australia speculated whether it was the first hydrogen bomb that was set off.'

In autumn 1952, Britain was actually nearly five years away from being ready to test the hydrogen bomb. Even the US had not managed it so far; they would explode their first successful hydrogen device, which was far from being a usable weapon, on 1 November 1952 at Eniwetok. The notion that Britain might somehow have been able to leapfrog ahead to the hydrogen bomb is in the realms of science-fiction; British scientists had only just succeeded in meeting the deadline imposed on them by politicians for testing the atom bomb, and the effort had been a massive drain on the country's depleted post-war resources.

The
Daily Graphic
justified its flight of fancy with reference to the opinions of unnamed ‘scientists'. It cited the shape of the cloud and the bomb's ‘greater and more widespread destructive force on the surface' as evidence. The first is due, as we have seen, to the turbulence of the winds encountered by the cloud. The second is the result of the explosion taking place eight or nine feet under water.

The story's origins can be traced to two motivating forces: the understandable desire of the press to report exciting events even when little hard information is available, and a sense of patriotism which had little outlet in the austere post-war years. With little information flowing from official sources - journalists had to wait three weeks for anything more than bald announcements
that the test had taken place - reporters scrabbled around among what contacts they had in the scientific community, puzzled over eye-witness accounts, and cobbled together what they could.

Here is Chapman Pincher in the
Daily Express
of 3 October 1952, reporting ‘the facts known in London' about the Monte Bello test: ‘The first bomb was almost certainly exploded on the top of a steel tower.' The
Daily Graphic
took the same line, but attributed the information to eye-witnesses on the mainland. ‘Reports from Rough Range, North-West Australia, said the weapon appeared to be a bomb exploded from a tower,' it reported rather more cautiously.

The
Empire News,
two days after the test, took an even more imaginative line which clearly stemmed from a hint that the bomb had been in some way intended to supply information for civil defence. ‘By the time you read this,' the paper announced, ‘British atomic scientists at Monte Bello will have a fair idea of your chances of surviving an atomic attack on Britain.'

Not a bad guess, so far. But now Arthur Morley, writing from Sydney, creates a pot-pourri of facts, guesses and fantasy. The scientists' main reason for coming out to Monte Bello, he goes on, was ‘to explode an atom bomb
on top of specially-built new British shelters, mock houses, grounded aircraft, water mains, and electricity cables.
The materials landed for ARP testing, I understand, were
tactical atomic weapons,
atomic shelters, a new British paste or salve to protect the face and hands from flashburn,
injections to minimize the effect on the human system of radiations,
and new simple protective clothing.' (My italics.) These are flights of fancy. It had been a race against time to produce the weapon in time for the Monte Bello trial and there certainly were not spare tactical nuclear weapons lying around to use in tests of this sort. Even more startling is the notion of ‘injections in advance of radioactive material in minute doses to attempt to build up immunity', as Morley later describes them. Far from giving immunity, minute doses of radioactive material will themselves cause cancer - there is no way of building up immunity to radiation in the way that there is to some illnesses.

It was not until 23 October that journalists discovered that the
bomb had been exploded on board a ship. The Prime Minister's statement to MPs that day triggered off another round of ecstatic newspaper reports. The
Daily Graphic's
report of the announcement, under the headline ‘AMAZING A-BOMB by Churchill', was breathless with excitement.

‘Heat 100 times greater than on the sun's surface…' it gasped. ‘A 1,450-ton warship vanished in vapour… Thousands of tons of water and rock hurled a mile or more into the air… Then a tidal wave. This is the picture of Britain's amazing first atom bomb explosion as drawn by Mr Churchill yesterday.'

Seven years after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the destructive power of the atom bomb was hardly a revelation. In fact, Britain's Monte Bello test was believed to be the
thirty-fourth
atom bomb exploded in the world. So the gloating tone of the press coverage of the event was more to do with glee at Britain's joining the nuclear club than with the excitement of a new scientific discovery. Newspaper reports were one-sided and uncritical, but they obviously did have uneasy feelings that there might be another way of looking at the development.

The
Daily Graphic
accompanied its enthusiastic news report with a leader uncompromisingly entitled ‘The big bang - for peace'. Its clear intention was to scotch the notion that Britain's possession of the bomb was a dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons which might endanger world peace. ‘It is tragic that peaceful nations should be forced to seek continual progress in such terrible agents of destruction,' it intoned solemnly, ‘but it is vital that they should maintain a commanding lead.'

A
lead,
note, not the balance of weapons between West and East claimed by Penney. The editorial ended on a note of double dishonesty. ‘Both here and across the Atlantic', it said, ‘each new atomic achievement brings greater security to the world.' The clear implication was that attempts by Britain and the US to keep in front of Russia in the possession of nuclear weapons were somehow intended to keep the peace, while Russia's striving to catch up was not. It also insinuated that the use of British and American weapons against Russia was unthinkable. But plenty of people did think about it.

In a book published four years before, in 1948, just before Russia proved to the world that it had developed the bomb, Chapman Pincher wrote that there was a view, ‘widely held by US citizens and some senators', that ‘Britain should help America to attack Russia now whilst the atom bomb monopoly remains. There are many people in Britain who believe that the day of attack is being delayed
only until a sufficiency of atomic armaments is available.
' (My italics.) So much for the claim that the West's bomb programme was ‘for peace'. (Mercifully, Pincher goes on in his book to say that this enthusiasm for a joint strike against Russia ‘ignores certain political and psychological features of a democracy which make such an unprovoked attack virtually impossible'.)

Churchill's revelations to parliament about the Monte Bello test inevitably reinforced the general air of congratulation that had already attached to it in the press. Reporters hunted around for additional scraps of information which would provide further proof of Britain's status as a nuclear power. In November, the
Daily Graphic
ran a story showing that Britain was up ahead in defending itself from bombs as well as making them. It revealed that ‘after seven years of anxiety, the world now knows there is something that even an atom bomb cannot harm'.