You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [58]
After the final tests in 1957, the folly of the Australian government continued. In 1966, after a series of radiological tests, Britain mounted Operation Brumby to clean up the test area. During the operation, the twenty-one pits were filled with contaminated equipment and were capped with 650 tons of concrete. Instead of removing more of the radiated material, Britain merely plowed topsoil under to reduce surface contamination, making it harder to remove the material at all. A top-secret report on the operation was prepared, submitted to the Australian government, filed and promptly forgotten. Australian authorities subsequently signed documents absolving the British government from any further responsibility for the test sites, one in 1968 and another in 1979, after the removal of one pound of solid plutonium to Britain.
In 1984, when 3,000 square kilometers of land surrounding the test sites was due to be returned to the Tjurutja Aboriginal people, scientists of the Australian Radiation Laboratory carried out a radiological survey of the site. They were stunned to find that the levels of radioactivity were on the order of ten times higher than those reported by the British eight years earlier. They found significant contamination extending far beyond the fenced boundary. They concluded that as much as twenty kilograms of plutonium was distributed over the test area, not the two kilograms claimed by the British.
In response to the ARL findings, in July 1984 the Australian government set up the Royal Commission to inquire into British nuclear tests. The findings of the commission blamed Prime Minister Robert Menzies for the tests being held in Australia. It also found the British government to be guilty of concealing vital information on the tests from the Australian government and that, in collusion with nuclear scientist Professor Ernest Titterton, they had deliberately distorted facts. The commission also recommended that compensation for injuries sustained during and after the tests should be extended to Aborigines, particularly those exposed to the black mist that swept over them after some of the atomic tests.
Whether ill-informed, simply naïve, or prompted by a misguided loyalty to British interests, the Australian government of the time, under the iron leadership of Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving prime minister, had embarked on a program that would do lasting damage to the Australian landscape and its people. Menzies was knighted in 1963 and retired only three years later in 1966. The cancer and radiation remain to this day.
You Are Doing It When, How?
Africa is a big continent, so big that we can’t confine this section to a single story or example. It is just a too rich an assortment to not let you have a good selection of the amazing mistakes and wonderful absurdities that can be found on the Dark Continent.
Inefficiency is nothing new to Africa. That said, the fact remains that the governments of sub-Saharan Africa are constantly finding new and better ways to be inefficient. If nothing else, this is darkly humorous, unless you have to live with it, that is.
INEFFICIENCIES ON THE DARK CONTINENT;
OR, DARWIN WAS WRONG
AFRICA
Mike Resnick and Ralph Roberts
You Lost Our Navy?
SWAZILAND 2002
The most recent incident occurred in the fall of 2002, when an African nation lost its navy. Okay, it was a navy of just one ship, but still….
“The situation is absolutely under control,” Transport Minister Ephraem Magagula assured the Swaziland parliament in Mbabane, according to the Johannesburg Star. “Our nation’s navy is perfectly safe. We just don’t know where it is, that’s all.”
The navy in question was the landlocked country’s only ship, the Swazimar. That’s right — a navy of one ship. (Well, let’s be reasonable. Just how many naval vessels does