Test zone: Britain's nuclear laboratory

Amid details of New Zealanders' exposure to nuclear fallout in the Pacific, MATHEW DEARNALEY looks at why Britain chose our side of the world for its tests.

Maralinga was Britain's "atomic city" in the parched South Australian outback.

Australia allowed its former colonial master to use the desolate Aboriginal tribal grounds to explode nuclear bombs. Radioactive wastes were spewed over thousands of square kilometres.

New Zealand was given a ringside seat, sending five military officers to join an elite team in what Britain clearly intended as trials to see if troops and other conventional military assets could operate in a nuclear theatre.

Britain felt under tremendous pressure to produce a nuclear deterrent. It is hard now to conceive how dangerous the world seemed by the early 1950s, with the Berlin airlift fresh in mind and the Korean War threatening to escalate.

The United States had shut Britain out of its nuclear programme after dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring the Second World War to an end, and there was panic in Whitehall when Russia blasted its way into the nuclear age in 1949.

British scientists, with a handful of New Zealanders, had been intimately involved in atomic weapons development with the United States and Canada during the war.

But the United States passed a law in 1946 making it illegal for Americans to provide nuclear information to other countries, and would not allow Britain to use its Nevada or Marshall Islands test grounds.

Britain was desperate to become a nuclear power to retain its place among the world's decision-makers. Its hunt for a testing site extended to the farthest reaches of the empire.

It has now emerged that New Zealand turned down a British request in 1955 to explode a hydrogen bomb in the Kermadec Islands, 1000km northeast of Auckland, now part of a huge marine reserve.

Previously classified documents recorded British Prime Minister Anthony Eden telling his New Zealand counterpart, Sidney Holland, that he was disappointed "you did not feel able to help us."

But Britain encountered no such resistance from Australia's Robert Menzies, who did not even consult his cabinet in his eagerness to allow a bomb test in the uninhabited Monte Bello Islands, just off his country's northwest coast, in 1952.

Eleven other nuclear bombs were detonated in Australian territory up to 1957, including two more at Monte Bello and nine in South Australia, where Britain has admitted using military officers including five New Zealanders as test subjects.

New Zealand's main nuclear involvement was in 1957 and 1958, however, when 551 crew members of the frigates Pukaki and Rotoiti observed massive hydrogen-bomb explosions in Britain's nine-bomb Grapple series around Christmas Island in the mid-Pacific.

Where and when were bomb tests carried out?

Maralinga was just one of three Australian sites for atmospheric nuclear tests, hosting seven atomic blasts in 1956 and 1957.

But Britain continued using it until 1963 for nearly 600 so-called "minor tests," such as trying to find out how plutonium performs in above-ground explosions, the main source of contamination which critics say could linger for 250,000 years or more.

Maralinga is at the western end of South Australia, near the beginning of the Nullarbor Plain and the transcontinental Adelaide-to-Perth railway.

Britain's first test was in 1952 at an island in the Monte Bello group off what is now the northwestern iron-ore port of Dampier. Although there were enormous logistical and meteorological problems conducting tests there, Britain returned in 1956 for two large explosions it feared Australians would not accept on the mainland.

Two tests were also conducted in 1953 at Emu Field, about 1200km northwest of Adelaide in the Great Victoria Desert.

Monte Bello was chosen for the bigger bangs as Britain rushed to prepare Christmas and Malden Islands for its first hydrogen bombs, against mounting international opposition.

Christmas Island - now named Kiritimati - lies just north of the Equator, while Malden is about 200km to the southeast.

Three bombs were exploded over Malden in 1957 and six over Christmas Island the year after, before Britain wound up its atmospheric testing programme.

What did the Australian public think?

They didn't have much say at first, according to Australian Institute of Criminology research director Peter Grabosky in the book Wayward Governance: Illegality and its Control in the Public Sector.

Prime Minister Menzies waited until after the 1951 federal elections before telling Australians that atomic weapons were to be tested on their territory.

He had earlier agreed in principle to a British request to blasts at the Monte Bello Islands, without leaving any record of having consulted cabinet colleagues.

Britain tried to keep the lid on concerns about the exposure of Australian airmen to high levels of radioactivity from flying through nuclear clouds above the 1953 Emu Field explosions, by letting Australia set up a safety monitoring committee.

Although the committee had a right to veto the timing of any further tests, members complained that they were given almost no information on which to base safety assessments.

The New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans' Association even has a 1955 memo from Britain's chief atomic scientist, Sir William Penney, suggesting that Australians be given only small and degraded pieces of contaminated air filter samples if they asked for any.

Public anger mounted with the second and third tests off Monte Bello in 1956, after wind changes blew fallout inland, instead of out to sea.

It was a public relations disaster. After banner newspaper headlines warning of radioactive clouds headed across Australia, an opinion poll two months later found 60 per cent of Australians opposed to the tests.

A British ship which had sailed through an atomic cloud to find out how it and its crew would fare was barred from landing at Fremantle and forced to sail to Singapore to be decontaminated.

How was Britain able to go on exploding bombs in Australia for so long?

Australian politicians, notably Supply Minister Howard Beale, tried to douse public fears.

He did, however, make several blunders, according to British journalists Denys Blakeway and Sue Lloyd-Roberts in their 1985 book on an Australian Royal Commission into the tests, Fields of Fire, a translation of the Aboriginal name Maralinga.

Britain's initial response to Beale's efforts was to offer Australia the services of an experienced press officer.

But members of the Australian safety committee were also keen to be seen flexing their muscle, calling for a more comprehensive air-sampling system. They had to admit, however, that it would be impossible to stop fallout from Maralinga drifting across half of Australia.

Beale, in one last pitch for public support, called Maralinga "a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of their forefathers ... is still the driving force of achievement."

"England has the bomb and the know-how. We have the open spaces, much technical skill and a great willingness to help the Motherland. Between us, we shall build the defence of the free world, and make historic advances in harnessing the forces of nature."

There were no such sentiments years later when the royal commissioner Justice James McClelland arrived in London in 1985 to open hearings in an inquiry which he had taken the year before to the outback.

He accused Britain of bending over backwards to avoid responsibility for the environmental mess and ill-health it had left, and later branded Menzies a "lickspittle of the British" who bent to their every wish.

When Britain realised Australian hospitality was running out, it decided to move its tests to Christmas Island. It invited New Zealand and Fijian servicemen rather than Australians to observe those.

What mess did the British leave in Australia, and what have they done about it?

Britain has consistently refused to acknowledge responsibility for health defects among the more than 15,000 Australian servicemen, 550 New Zealanders and 22,000 Britons involved in conducting or monitoring bomb tests.

In 1968, it signed an agreement with Australia purportedly releasing it from all legal liabilities and responsibilities.

Its stance may have to change soon if New Zealand veterans, with financial help already received from our Government, decide in coming weeks whether they have sufficient ground for a class lawsuit against the British Government.

Britain did give Australia £20 million ($67.5 million) as a supposed full and final settlement to clean up the test sites in the wake of the royal commission. But Australia had to foot the rest of a $134 million bill for Maralinga alone, while acknowledging that some of the land may be uninhabitable for generations.

Three hundred thousand cubic metres of plutonium-contaminated soil and other debris has been buried, but Aborigines to whom much of the former 3000 sq km bombing range has been returned are prohibited from camping on 120 sq km of it.

There have also been attempts to bury radioactive material left on the Monte Bello Islands, but Australian nuclear veterans' leader Max Kimber told the Herald that recent cyclones had uncovered much of it.

Mr Kimber is bitter that his members, unlike New Zealand test veterans, are unable even to receive war pensions for medical ills ranging from skin diseases to leukaemia.

What sort of radiation exposure was there?

Denys Blakeway and Sue Lloyd-Roberts acknowledge that servicemen were on the whole kept reasonably protected from high-level radiation, but point out that low-level radiation has since emerged as a potential cause of cancers and other diseases.

Scottish researcher Sue Rabbitt Roff found 45 cases of the rare bone-marrow cancer multiple myeloma among 2000 veterans whose records she studied in 1999.

This was 10 times the incidence among the general population, and 32 of the veterans had already died.

A Massey University high-tech microscope specialist, Liz Nickless, is preparing to travel to Scotland to study latest techniques in radiobiological analysis before returning to examine the chromosomes of New Zealand veterans from blood samples.

Her expedition is supported by the test veterans' association from a $200,000 Government grant for legal and medical research, with the Cancer Society and Royal Society paying her travel and accommodation.

The grant followed information given to the Government by association research officer Ruth McKenzie two years ago that only 209 of 475 children born to New Zealand servicemen who witnessed the Christmas and Madden Island blasts were "alive and well."

Veterans' wives and partners had also suffered 145 miscarriages and 18 still births, she told a Government inquiry.

Two of the five New Zealand veterans exposed to radiation on the ground at Maralinga suffered skin problems, but their families are not sure whether these were caused by two explosions they witnessed from distances of 3.2km and 8km.

Another New Zealander, the late Flight Lieutenant Charles Verry, worked at several test sites as a Royal Air Force helicopter pilot and his family wonder whether radiation may be linked to his death from a heart attack at 46.

The British journalists say the highest exposures were suffered by nomadic Aborigines, who could not read warning signs and in some cases camped in highly radioactive craters.

Various Aborigines complained to the royal commission of a "black mist" which they said descended on them in the desert, causing vomiting, diarrhoea and, in some cases, death.

Widespread radiation from nuclear fallout was a particular problem in Australia because most of the explosions were near the ground, but it is still not clear just how much radiation fell on Australians from the sky.

Radiation from Christmas Island was more likely to have been blown high into the stratosphere, although New Zealand veterans' leader Roy Sefton sees this as little comfort for Pukaki crew ordered to sail beneath a nuclear cloud for 23 hours.

What would have happened to the fallout once it reached the stratosphere?

It could have ended up circling the globe for months or even years before coming down to earth in rain with long-life radioisotopes such as iodine 131 and strontium 90, which are particularly dangerous to humans if they enter the food chain.

The United States Government estimates that the global fallout from a one-megaton nuclear explosion, the size of most of those at Christmas and Malden Islands, would eventually cause 200 to 2000 cancer deaths if occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.

Although concern about fallout prompted Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union to stop most nuclear testing in 1958, it took the international community led by New Zealand and Australia until 1975 to drive French tests underground at Mururoa Atoll.