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By Root 1076 0

minister Clement Atlee sent a top secret personal message to Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, a staunch Anglophile, asking if the Australian government might agree to the testing of British nuclear weapons at the Monte Bello Islands, off western Australia. In effect, Atlee asked Menzies if he could lend him his country for atomic tests. Menzies agreed immediately, with no record of him having consulted any of his cabinet colleagues on the matter. Menzies is known to have ruled his cabinet with an iron fist and is unlikely to have received much resistance anyway. The agreement was the start of a program of testing and involvement of the Australian people that was to last years, with little proper safeguards for the land or the people involved, even to the use of over 15,000 Australian servicemen to be involved in “safety testing,” not to mention the Aboriginal population of the area.

Despite Atlee having mentioned the risk of radiation hazards in the initial tests, Menzies was happy to agree to the use of the site, only too pleased to assist the “motherland.” It wasn’t as if they didn’t know at least some of the risks. The world had already seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet Menzies agreed without a question. Was it that he had his eventual knighthood in mind? Despite sending a telegram to Atlee after the initial Monte Bello tests, asking, “What the bloody hell is going on? The cloud is drifting over the mainland,” Menzies went on to agree immediately to further tests on the Australian mainland proper, replying to Churchill promptly. These tests were to be held at Emu Field, northwest of Adelaide.

On October 15 1953, Totem I, a device of ten kilotons, was detonated, and two days later, Totem II at eight kilotons. Three days after the Totem trials, Australia was formally notified by the British government of its desire to create a nuclear test facility. In August 1954, the Australian cabinet agreed to the establishment of a permanent testing ground at a site that became named Maralinga, north of the transcontinental railway line in south Australia. Prime Minister Menzies was instrumental in pushing this agreement through.

In addition to the larger tests held at these sites, the British conducted over six hundred smaller trials, resulting in some 830 tons of debris contaminated by around twenty kilograms of plutonium, merely buried in twenty-one pits around the area. In addition, around two kilograms of plutonium was dispersed across the south Australian landscape during dispersal and fallout pattern trials held at the same time. By the time the British had finished their tests in 1958, twelve nuclear bombs had been exploded in the atmosphere about south and western Australia, and the minor tests had scattered millions of contaminated metal fragments almost one hundred miles from the test site at Maralinga. One area, covered with fine plutonium dust, will be uninhabitable for 240,000 years. The Australian Radiation Laboratory currently says that only “intermittent forays” of less than nine hours should be permitted in these areas.

Throughout the program, Britain kept the details of these tests secret, despite using Australia’s land and people — secret even from the Australian government itself. Australia’s compliance, spear-headed by Menzies, went much further than simply allowing the tests. In 2001, the British government admitted to using Australian servicemen in what it calls “clothing trials” after the Maralinga nuclear blasts in 1956. These servicemen were used in various exercises, one day after the explosions at ground zero, exercises that involved running, jumping and crawling over the landscape. According to the British Department of Defence, the purpose of these tests was to see if the uniforms were adequate. They weren’t testing the people; they were testing the clothes. The people involved in these tests were called indoctrinees. Yet a year after those trials, protective clothing was still not available. According to Retired Major Alan Batchelor, when the explosions went off, they were positioned