The fall-out from nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the fifties continues as more documents reveal decades of denials and cover-ups, hindering proper compensation for victims. Sue Rabbitt Roff investigates.
The UK detonated at least 12 atomic and hybrid fission-fusion weapons in Australia in the 1950s. Eight were detonated on 31-metre towers, barely 5% of the heights at which the bombs were detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nobody claimed then that they didn’t devastate the cities beneath them, killing between 150,000 and 250,000 civilians.
There was at least one ground burst – known to be the dirtiest in terms of fallout because the radioactive debris fell close to ground zero rather than being blown across Australia and out to territories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
The Brits detonated more than 200 kilotons of radioactive explosives at 100 feet or less, including one that had a yield of 98 kt in 1956.
Best we Forget – Australia’s 70 year old nuclear contamination secrets about to be exposed
Deny, deny, deny…
Successive UK governments deny that anyone in the armed forces was injured apart from the crew and decontaminators of the ‘sniffer’ aircraft that tracked the fallout clouds. However, they did eventually concede that Aboriginal communities had been injured and the Maralinga and other ranges were contaminated. Which rather puts the lie to their denials.
Australia foolishly accepted a clean-up and compensation payment of £20,000,000 in 1993. Interestingly, this ‘indemnity’ did not cover deaths or injuries that ‘result from nuclear tests or experimental programmes at the Monte Bello Islands in respect of which the cause of action occurred before 27 June 1956.’
The Australian National Archives hold 3.6 metres of ‘Identification cards of persons employed at Maralinga’ through to 1967 – mostly civilians. The Department of Veterans Affairs published a study in 2006 of 10 983 male subjects, of whom 7116 were military participants and 3867 were civilians.
More than 22,000 British scientists, civilians and military personnel participated in the tests.
Members of the armed forces were prevented from suing the Ministry of Defence by the (UK) 1947 Crown Proceedings Act’s Section 10, which granted immunity against tort litigation. Section 10 was repealed in 1987 – but not retrospectively, thereby continuing to disenfranchise the men (virtually no women were sent to the tests) who increasingly realised that their poor health may well have been radiogenic. As did their families.
Compensation claims building
But the tide may be turning. In July 2024, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) paid a reported £72,000,000 in compensation for hearing loss to 9000 members and veterans of the armed forces in the eight years from 2012 to 2020, with a further 10,000 claimants anticipated. Other armed services personnel in service after 1987 have begun to put their claims for duty of care in court in recent months. Hundreds of Royal Marines have issued proceedings claiming they were knowingly exposed to asbestos. UK military pilots allege that toxic fumes from military helicopters are causing a range of deadly cancers – which the MOD has known for decades.
It’s in this context that UK nuclear veterans have begun to prepare a case suing for the failure of duty of care to themselves and their families before, during and after the nuclear tests in Australia and off Christmas Island.
The re-reading of the archival material could be of considerable significance to Australian nuclear test veterans given that Governor-General William McKell decreed in Air Ministry Order A.652 dated December 1952 that the air forces “raised in the United Kingdom do serve together and act in combination wheresoever,
serving with the naval, military and air forces of His Majesty raised in the Commonwealth of Australia and in the Dominion of New Zealand.
Curiously, it has been overlooked for nearly forty years that in 1988, the House of Lords upheld the right of a nuclear veteran to sue the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) for its failure of duty of care during the conduct of the tests.
More documents revealed
There has been a steady flow of Freedom of Information enquiries in the past two years. Whereas in November 2022, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) said it had been able to locate only ‘1 blood test for 1 member of the service personnel’ at the 21 tests the UK led or participated in.
However, after a dozen applications for information, the response in April 2024 acknowledged that there is ‘prominent public interest in permitting public authorities to maintain their accountability to publish information in a manner and via a suitable platform ensuring accessibility to the public; … we propose to offer to write to you advising you of how and where the information can be accessed in due course if you should wish us to do so.’
Nobody is holding their breath on this. But there are already pivotal archival documents online that include:
- An October 1955 memo stating: ‘It is quite clear that the responsibility for radiological safety is at all times [emphasis in original] vested in Director, A.W.R.E, acting on behalf of the Ministry of Supply;
- In the same month, the MINISTRY OF SUPPLY London stated that ‘‘The United Kingdom is responsible for radiation safety on the range. During trials this responsibility is exercised by the Director, A.W.R.E., on behalf of the Minister of Supply, and in inter-trial periods by the Commandant, Maralinga.
- On 9th December 1955, an Outward Telegram from the Commonwealth Relations Office informed the U.K. High Commissioner in Australia:
‘2.In our view United Kingdom (Ministry of Supply and A.W.E.R.E.) U.K.M.O.S.S. [UK Ministry of Supply Staff/ Melbourne] and Range Commandant are one organisation with a task to be done. We consider that [redacted] must receive instructions direct from the United Kingdom and be responsible directly to United Kingdom for all operational requirements, such as technical work at Maralinga and running range to meet United Kingdom requirements, while Australians, through any channels they may arrange, would be responsible for general administration of force in matters of discipline, postings, welfare, leave etc…’
‘4. … we consider that Maralinga is not a joint project in sense that Woomera is but British project carried out on Australian soil with help from Australia in those matters in which Australia is best equipped to help….’
- A memo annotated /56 AIR PLAN OPERATION “BUFFALO” states:
‘2. A permanent atomic weapons proving ground is being created at Maralinga under the auspices of the Ministry of Supply and the Department of Supply, AUSTRALIA’.
Executive Responsibility
8. (a) The Royal Air Force will assume overall executive and administrative responsibility for the Combined Task Force. A senior R.A.F. Officer has been nominated as the Task Force Commander. The Air Task Group which forms part of the Task Force will also be C(sic)ommanded by a Senior R.A. F. Officer.
(b) The scientific aspects of the trials, including Target Response, will be controlled by the Director of Atomic Weapons Research Establishment [AWERE] or his nominee.’
There are many documents that show that radioactive contamination of participants was clearly anticipated by the scientists of AWERE.
For instance, the HMS DIANA was instructed to sail directly in the expected path of the fallout from the Buffalo detonation precisely to record contamination expected to fall on it and its crew. Pilots of the MOSAIC ‘sniffer’ aircraft were not allowed to see the intensity of the cockpit exposure reading so that ‘ the pilot and crew are not confronted with a psychologically embarrassing reading of several thousand ‘r’ per hour when they know that the maximum [permissible] dose is only 25 r.’ The 250 ‘indoctrinees’ were sent into known radioactive areas at Buffalo.
One AWERE memo noted that:
‘They [Australians] would not know that fall-out contamination from close-in area is very different from samples obtained from the cloud, and that only the latter is sufficiently representative to enable quantitative estimates to be made…
’It was proposed to give Australians ‘a little piece of the filters, but that we wait a few days so that some of the short-lived isotopes have decayed a good deal.’
These documents are the tip of the iceberg of evidence that the Australian government of the day was deliberately misled into allowing the British nuclear tests. But perhaps, seventy or so years later, they are also the tipping point.
Neither the British tests Scientific Director William Penney, who planned and observed the bombing of Nagasaki, nor the Australian Weapons Tests Safety Committee member Professor Ernest Titterton, who detonated the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo in July 1945, were blind.
But both felt able to turn blind eyes to their duty of care when building and testing Britain’s atomic and hydrogen bombs in the Dominion and Protectorate territories of the United Kingdom.
It’s time we took the awe out of the AWE.
Pre-Olympics nuclear bomb lies exposed, while veterans yet wait for compensation
Sue Rabbitt Roff studied and taught at Melbourne and Monash Universities. Her recent writings on cultural aspects of settler colonial Australia have been published in Meanjin, Overland, the Conversation, the Independent and on Pearls & Irritations. She is currently writing a revisionist history of British atomic tests and nuclear trials in Australia.