The Cold War and Nuclear Testing at Maralinga

Before we get into the testing in Australia, we have to go back in time to the end of World War II, so we can find out why the British felt the need to set off nuclear explosions in the Australian desert. And why the Australian government said, “Yeah sure mate, you can blow up your bombs in our back yard!”

Britain, the USA and the USSR- were in a grand alliance during WWII and they were having conferences to work out how they were going to conquer their common enemies Germany and of course Japan. This alliance has been referred to as a marriage of convenience and the relationship deteriorated shortly after the war ended. At these conferences, the allies struggled to agree on a bunch of issues related to resolving problems created by the war. At the final conference, on the 24^th July 1945, the US President Harry S Truman, casually mentioned to the Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, that the US had ‘a new weapon of unusual destructive force’. In Truman’s account of this conversation he says, “The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’” According to Stalin’s defence minister, in private, Stalin knew he was talking about an atomic weapon and was noted to have said, “We’ll have to speed things up.” Some historians argue that this apparently nonchalant exchange marks the beginning of the Nuclear Arms Race.

Others say that the race began with the Manhattan Project, which was the top-secret atomic bomb development program funded by the US government. In a culture of clandestine spies, and confidential communications, I imagine that it would be very hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of the arms race as reliable sources are probably few and far between. 

Less than 2 weeks after Truman and Stalin’s water cooler exchange at the Potsdam Conference, America dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan immediately killing an estimated 80 000 people. 3 days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  

One of the physicists working on project was J. Robert Oppenheimer- often called the “Father of the Nuclear Bomb”. If you get an opportunity to look it up on YouTube, there’s some footage of him reflecting on the destructive force of the nuclear bomb. He looks almost haunted as he quotes Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita and says, ‘“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.’

As you can imagine the use of nuclear weapons, and fear of their destructive power created a political climate of anxiety and the race was on for countries to create their own nuclear weapons. And so, a frenzy of nuclear testing spread across the globe.

The US was testing bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean and in Nevada. In 1949, the Soviet Union set off its first nuclear test and then went on to do hundreds more both above and below ground. In the 1960s both France and China joined in the testing race. However, today we will be looking at the United Kingdom’s Nuclear testing program that was conducted on Australian land, the gross misconduct of the tests and the shroud of secrecy that engulfed this testing program.

I was 10 years old when the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Testing in Australia occurred, and although in that very same year, I read a book which my first apocalyptic  nuclear fiction called “Children of the Dust”, I actually had no clue as to what had gone on in the real world in my country. As an Australian, I have caught the name Maralinga in my peripheral hearing, but it wasn’t until many years later, when I read Judy Nunn’s historical fiction “Maralinga”, that I realised the real life dystopia that that the Aboriginal people and the guinea pig soldiers lived through during the Cold War arms race.

In the early 1950s, the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, received a request from the Prime Minister of England, Clement Attlee, requesting if Britain could conduct their nuclear weapons testing in Australia. Without so much as talking to the politicians in his cabinet or requesting any information or reports on the possible health or environmental risks, Menzies said yes, and even committed Australian servicemen to help the British carry out their tests. Thus, began the testing in Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, and the 2 sites in South Australia, Emu Field and Maralinga.

Clearly, not a scientist, in a 1953 statement to the press, Menzies said “No conceivable injury to life, limb or property could emerge from the tests that have been made in Australia.” Hmmm. Not exactly sure how to respond to that one with my historical and scientific hindsight. But this is not the first nor the last time an Australian Prime Minister has said something dumbfoundingly uninformed.

Back to Maralinga, for thousands upon thousands of years the Ooldea Well had served as a sustainable water source for the Aboriginal people of the Nullarbor Plains, (The Nullarbor Plains is about the same size as Great Britain.) However, when a train was built to cross the Nullarbor in 1917, this thirsty piece of Industrial Revolution technology, managed to suck the water source dry in a matter of 20 years. Around this same time the government began to create missions or reserves to accommodate Aboriginal people who had been displaced from their land. 

In 1951, about 470 Aboriginal people were forcibly removed from their country around Maralinga and were taken to a mission at Ooldea.  Then in 1955 an area of about 3000 square kilometres, that’s about 7 times the size of my city the Gold Coast, was “secured” as a government atomic testing site. I use the word “secured” in the loosest of contexts. It was known by the government that Aboriginal people may be still living in the area, there was initially only one man appointed as patrol officer, and then later a second to secure this entire area, twice the size of the city of Hobart.  To have only two people patrolling an area that size and searching for a people who were familiar with the land and had been using this area as throughway for generations, was seemingly an arbitrary attempt at ensuring the safety of the local Aboriginal people.

There is even an account of a family who camped near the bomb crater for 7 months after the detonation and suffered still births, brain tumours and premature death. Many other Aboriginal people suffered sickness from coming into contact with the contaminated fallout in the area. But seriously, if a family can camp in a nuclear bomb crater for seven months without being noticed, then this demonstrates the ineffective level of care that was being taken to ensure human safety.

Frank Walker, investigative journalist and author of the book Maralinga: The Chilling Expose of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country says that there were many reports of the soldiers who were working at Maralinga, finding the corpses of Aboriginal people in the bush, but at the time these claims were denied vigorously by the Government. The troops were ordered, that they had never seen the corpses. Even though they had to bury them.

The Aboriginal people who did survive, have had a long history of health issues like cancer, lung and liver problems, and of course many of them died young.

The First Australians were not the only ones whose lives and health were disregarded in these nuclear experiments. Imagine being a soldier in the army present at a nuclear test, wearing just a uniform of shorts, a shirt and a hat and being told, “turn your back to the blast and push your palms into your eyes sockets”. Some RAAF airmen were ordered to fly through the mushroom cloud without protective clothing to conduct sampling. This was the experience of many of the 8000 personnel who worked at Maralinga during the testing.

Although, the Minister for Supply assured the newspapers of the time that the precautions guaranteed the safety of everyone in the village. Testimony of the soldiers present report that many soldiers were ordered into radioactive areas, before being taken back to camp to be hosed down and monitored. 

The press at the time seemed to take an almost whimsical air about the testing. One very short article accompanying a picture of an explosion states, “The device exploded at Maralinga assumes a ‘cabbage’ shape… before rearing upwards into the more familiar ‘mushroom’ shape.” Not exactly exemplar journalism and also not a super useful source for a historian exploring the effects of the nuclear testing.

Many of the decedents of the veterans who were exposed to radiation at Maralinga, were born illnesses including but not exclusively: tumours, d own syndrome, cleft palates, cerebral palsy, missing bones and heart disease. I did want to go into the Royal Commissions and court cases that have come about because of the 7 atomic bombs that were set off at Maralinga, but I like to keep this podcast snappier than this episode currently is, so that could be a rabbit hole for you to fall down.

The clean-up of Maralinga was dubbed, “Operation Brumby”. A Brumby- for those non-horsey people- is a breed of wild, free roaming Australian horses. It is kind of apt that they named the clean up after a wild horse, because it certainly was a haphazard and somewhat half-hearted clean-up operation. Some of the contaminated debris was buried in trenches and then covered with concrete. Other efforts included ploughing the nuclear contaminated soil back into the ground. Total dodgy brothers!

There has since been a $108million dollar rehabilitation program implemented and the test site was returned to the traditional owners in 2009.

The way that these tests eventually came to a stop was through the signing of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, the atmosphere or underwater. And so, the Doomsday Clock was able to move away from midnight that year and rest at a comfortable 12 minutes from midnight. For comparison, in 2020 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have the clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever bee.

In terms of further viewing, I highly recommend the documentary on ABC iView Maralinga Tjarutja which goes further into the treatment and land rights of the Aboriginal people. And also the 6-part series Operation Buffalo which is a historical drama set at the testing site. However, it is rated M as there are a handful of saucy scenes and a bit of bloodshed. Oh, and search YouTube for some historical propaganda video footage of Operation Buffalo, you’ll see what a jolly old time was had by all.  Additionally, there is also an episode of Dark Tourist on Netflix called “The Stans” that I encourage you to track down, as it looks at the nuclear tests in Kazakhstan.

This is Kelly Chase, on the case.