Clouds of Deceit (18 page)

Much of the picture drawn above comes from formerly secret documents belonging to the British government. Some of the admissions come from Penney, the British scientist most closely associated with the test programme. It is curious, then, that British ministers - who had access to the documents while their contents were still concealed from the rest of us - have always been so confident about the safety of the tests.

Undoubtedly the most shocking admission to emerge about the tests came on the final day of the Royal Commission's London hearings, 18 March 1985. Penney accepted that, ‘in hindsight', the Totem I test took place in unsafe conditions.

The two Totem tests, on 14 and 26 October 1953, were a rush job. They took place at Emu Field, in the South Australian desert, only 110 miles from the nearest inhabited area and within fifty miles of an aboriginal hunting area. They were held because of a decision that Britain should make 200 of the 600 atom bombs which the British Chiefs of Staff considered necessary for a joint British-American stockpile.

Britain did not have the capacity to produce sufficient pure plutonium for 200 bombs, so the Totem tests were designed to try out impure plutonium. ‘The purpose of the test is simple,' says a contemporary memo to the Minister of Defence. ‘It is to find out how much of the isotope 240 can be tolerated in plutonium used for military purposes … The need for carrying out this trial earlier is primarily due to the Chiefs of Staff proposal for doubling the production of fissile material.'

A Ministry of Supply document prepared five months before the test of the Totem I device predicts its yield as five kilotons, only a fifth of the size of the Hurricane bomb. It warns that fallout would be greatest if the weapon was exploded when the wind was blowing at the same speed and direction at all levels of the mushroom cloud. ‘If these conditions should exist at the time of firing, then to avoid any risk of slight sickness this narrow wedge [of land] should not include a centre of population,' the report warns.

The first attempt to fire Totem I took place on 7 October. Standby was announced at eight in the morning, but by one o'clock the weather was so bad that it was called off. It rained heavily over the next few days and, frustratingly, standby could not be declared for a whole week. The weapon was fired at seven o'clock in the morning on 14 October: a circle of 200 yards radius around the steel tower on which the bomb was sitting was pulverized, indicating the bomb was much bigger than expected. In fact, it was ten kilotons, twice the size anticipated. Another official document released to the Royal Commission shows that the weapon was exploded in
precisely
the conditions - a steady wind at all levels of the cloud - which scientists had warned against five months before.

A narrow plume of radioactivity moved north-east from Emu,
passing over aborigines camped at Wallatinna Station and Welbourn Hill.

Ronald Siddons, one of the authors of the report which forecast how the Totem I bomb would behave, told the Royal Commission that the document underestimated the actual level of fallout by a factor of three. ‘I believe that it was unduly risky to proceed with Totem I at the time it was fired,' he said.

Siddons, who is now a Deputy Director at AWRE at Aldermaston, said: ‘If I had been asked at the time, my advice would have been not to fire it.'

As recently as 1983, the British Ministry of Defence denied any connection between Totem I and the black cloud which aborigines claimed to have seen over Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill after Totem I. But AWRE secretly asked meteorologists to look into the claim. One of them, Dr William Roach, confirmed to the Royal Commission that ‘the fallout cloud would have been seen about mid-morning, possibly as an extended black curtain'.

It is not only the British government which has doubted the aborigines' claims. The Australian report, AIRAC 9, published in January 1983, says fallout from Totem I ‘may have slightly exceeded' current recommendations on radiation dose limits for members of the public. It concludes that ‘AIRAC has found no evidence that any Aboriginals were injured by the nuclear tests.'

The evidence presented to the Royal Commission leaves little doubt that the British were guilty of exploding an atom bomb in conditions that caused a thick cloud of fallout to pass over aboriginal encampments to the north-east. Two more pieces of evidence suggest the aborigines' claims of ill-health may be justified. The Royal Commission was told that, far from fallout at Wallatinna from Totem I being just over the present annual limit for members of the public, it could have been as much as 160 times that limit.

Dr Alice Stewart, the epidemiologist who has studied the Christmas Island tests, told the Commission that the number of aboriginal deaths from thyroid cancer and leukaemia in South Australia after the tests was too high. The South Australia Health Commission found that twenty-one aborigines living in the region of the atom bomb tests - Emu Field and Maralinga –
died of cancer between 1973 and 1980. This incidence of cancer deaths was higher than it should have been, according to Stewart.

The aborigines' claims of a black mist causing sickness and death in the desert in 1953 first came to light in 1980, when an aborigine called Yami Lester recalled an oily black cloud passing over his campsite at Wallatinna Station. He described how sickness and diarrhoea affected most of the aborigines camped there; he thought some of the very young and old might have died. Lester, who was about ten years old at the time, recalled how his eyes became sore and he lost the sight of first one, then the other.

Lester's claim was met with scorn by both the Australian and British authorities. Five years later, those official denials can be construed as adding insult to injury.

The British and Australian authorities have claimed to know of only one occasion when aborigines were found on a firing range. This incident took place at Maralinga on 14 May 1957, when a family of four was found to have spent the night camped at the bottom of the outer slope of the crater caused by the bomb code-named Marcoo. This bomb had been exploded the previous October as part of the Buffalo series of tests. Although it was a small weapon - only 1.5 kilotons - it was exploded on the ground and caused a good deal of contamination for its size.

The Australian AIRAC 9 report in 1983 says the dose received by the family ‘cannot possibly have led to any identifiable ill effect'. Nevertheless, it clearly caused a panic at the time, according to evidence given to the Royal Commission. Geoff Eames, the barrister representing aborigines at the hearings in London, told Lord Penney that troops had been lined up and warned that they would be court-martialled if they spoke about the family to anyone outside the test site. They were told that the penalty they would get if found guilty was either death or thirty years in prison.

Rudi Marqueur, a captain in the Australian army at Maralinga, saw the male aborigine from the family walking from the contaminated area towards a caravan used for decontamination. Peter McClellan, the barrister assisting the Commission, asked
Marqueur whether the incident was ‘of considerable concern' to those in charge of Maralinga. He replied: ‘It certainly was, very much so, and at the same time we were warned … everybody was warned to keep the whole situation quiet.'

Richard Durance, the Australian commander of the Maralinga range, was questioned about the incident by Geoff Eames during hearings in Australia. It became clear that the incident was so important that the Australian Minister of Supply, Howard Beale, was told about it. Here is the exchange:

EAMES … that was a cause of acute political embarrassment, was it not?

DURANCE I think so.

EAMES And you were aware that political embarrassment was being felt very keenly by Minister Beale?

DURANCE Yes.

EAMES And you were aware that from the government's point of view, that incident must not leak out to the public?

DURANCE I was aware that he was pleased that it did not leak out.

For the family - a man, a woman, two children and their three dogs - the incident must have been terrifying. Suddenly plucked from their traditional lands by uniformed men, handed over to a security patrol, and moved many miles to the aboriginal reserve at Yalata: the events must have been the equivalent for Europeans of being scooped up by aliens from another planet. They were forced to take showers to get rid of contamination, a procedure that distressed them immensely. Rudi Marqueur was told, he said in evidence, that ‘there was quite a lot of cahooing and screaming going on because the female did not want to have anyone else wash her under a shower, and her husband apparently also objected to the fact that she was going to go under that shower.' In fact, the family was lucky to arrive at Yalata still in possession of their dogs; the Minister of Supply, Beale, was furious when he heard that the dogs had not been shot.

In view of the stern warnings given to troops about revealing
this incident, it is hardly surprising that many servicemen - like Gordon Wilson, the school caretaker from Hull, who regularly met aborigines in the prohibited area at Maralinga - just did not mention sightings to their superiors.

The AIRAC 9 report took an optimistic view of attempts to keep aborigines off the range: ‘It is evident that strenuous attempts were made to prevent the entry of Aboriginals into hazardous areas, and although it would clearly be impossible to affirm that such an intrusion never took place, it seems most unlikely that any Aboriginals were present elsewhere than the fringes of the Prohibited Area at the firing times and in the period following them.'

The Royal Commission, on the other hand, heard a wealth of evidence that aborigines strayed into prohibited areas. Patrol officers charged with keeping them off the range at Maralinga complained that their task was hopeless in view of the huge area of land involved. Durance, the range commander, admitted he was not given specific instructions about keeping aborigines off the range when he took over in June 1956. He was questioned on the subject by Geoff Eames.

EAMES Were there any instructions in writing as to what steps should be taken to ensure that Aboriginal people did not move on to the range?

DURANCE If there were, I was not given them.

In fact, Durance seems to have taken over as commander in distinctly tense circumstances which involved some criticism of how the previous range commander, Colonel Dewar, had been running things. Eames asked Durance if he was given verbal instructions about the policy on the range to do with aborigines.

DURANCE The conversations were rather limited, as I was there to relieve Colonel Dewar and it was very embarrassing and we did not go into a great amount of detail. My function then was to try and find out what had not been done that had to be, and what had been done that should not have been done.

Durance went on to admit that, because a
possibility
that aborigines could have strayed on to the range had been demonstrated, the tests in 1956 and 1957 at Maralinga should have been cancelled. He told Geoff Eames that ‘I cannot get away or deny the fact … that information that you have presented this morning … implying human beings there in 1956 and 1957 … the tests should not [have taken place].'

Before the commission was set up, a former RAF officer claimed he had found four dead aborigines in a crater after the tests at Maralinga. John Burke died of stomach cancer before he could give evidence at the hearings, but he said he also saw about 200 dead cockatoos and rabbits near the crater. Bill Grigsby, who was in the Royal Navy, told his wife before his own death in 1977 that he found aborigines camped in a bomb crater at Maralinga in 1962. Although the major weapons tests were over, minor trials were still going on. Grigsby said all the people in the small group in the crater were covered in sores. Patrick Connolly, who served in the RAF at Maralinga between 1959 and 1962, said he had seen large numbers of aborigines all over the restricted area.

During Lord Penney's evidence to the Royal Commission, Eames told him that one man had been responsible for clearing an area stretching a hundred miles from the range, and that the man concerned thought his job hopeless and just a public relations exercise. Penney said he had not known any of this; he believed the tests were taking place in an uninhabited wasteland.

The Totem I blast which put at risk aborigines at Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill also proved an unexpected radiation hazard for members of the British, Australian and American air forces. Their job was to fly through the radioactive cloud after the blast to take samples. The crew of the single British plane, an RAF Canberra, got high doses of radiation in spite of flying in a plane completely sealed with tape. The six Australian Lincolns, whose crews took no precautions against radiation, on British advice, picked up so much contamination there were fears for the safety of air and ground crews. The American crew of the two USAF
B-29s said the radioactivity from the cloud was the most intense they had ever encountered.

The Australian document, AIRAC 9, took a characteristically cheerful view of the contamination problem caused by Totem I. It said that ‘radioactive contamination of the Lincoln aircraft flying from Woomera to track the cloud of the first Totem test was found to be heavier than anticipated' but concluded that it was ‘most unlikely' that it had caused any injury to the crews.

The story which has unfolded since the publication of AIRAC 9 is much more worrying. Although the British Canberra which sampled the cloud only six minutes after the explosion had been sealed before take-off, the plane encountered so much radiation that Penney refused to allow it to carry out the same operation at the Totem II test twelve days later.

The Australians fared even worse. Squadron Leader Ray Turner, of the RAAF, told the Royal Commission that his plane flew into a cloud of red dust and could not get out of it. The meter for measuring external radiation - the only piece of monitoring equipment on board the plane - went to its maximum reading on entering the cloud and stayed there throughout the flight. Turner and the rest of the crew ate their rations on the plane and, unlike the Canberra crew who used oxygen, breathed contaminated air.