Clouds of Deceit (19 page)

When the plane landed at Woomera, it was met by scientists who started running Geiger counters over everything. Turner said they went off like machine guns - ‘They were making a hell of a noise, rather loud and rather fast.' His flying suit was taken away and he was told to take several showers.

One of the Australian planes landed at Williamtown air base, in New South Wales, after the sampling mission. The next day, an American airman walked round the Lincoln carrying a Geiger counter; all he could say was, ‘Oh, shit… oh, shit.' The American had intended to take a lift on the plane back to its base at Richmond, near Sydney. But he told the crew he had decided to take the train instead. ‘That bloody machine is hot,' he said. ‘I'm not going anywhere near it.'

It was from the Americans, in fact, that the Australian air
force learned just how badly contaminated its planes were. An Australian report on the Totem tests released to the Royal Commission shows how unprepared the Australians were to deal with any hazard - unsurprisingly, since the British had told them there wasn't one.

‘It was fortunate that the US Air Force element contained personnel very experienced in [decontamination] operations and were thus able to assist the operations commander at Richmond by advising him on the degree of contamination on aircraft and personnel and the safety precautions to be observed,' it says.

‘It was only through seeking assistance of the US Air Force specialists and equipment that it was at all possible to ascertain that Lincoln aircraft and personnel had obtained any degree of contamination.

‘The precaution to have the Lincoln aircraft which landed at Williamtown inspected proved the importance of this aspect and how ignorance on the part of RAAF personnel on matters of this nature could possibly have proved dangerous.'

Squadron Leader Turner told the Royal Commission that ground staff refused to work on his Lincoln the day after it had landed and been found to be radioactive. Some ground staff
did
work on the contaminated Lincolns before it was realized how radioactive they were: one man spent three hours on the wing of the hottest of the Lincolns on the day after the cloud sampling operation.

The Australian air force was furious about the incident. A senior officer wrote angrily: ‘We were firmly told this was not a hazard… It does appear there was a hazard… It would seem that this service is not informed of the hazard its own personnel may undergo.'

The Americans, by contrast, knew exactly what they were doing. The British had allowed them to send two B-29s to the test because the British embassy in Washington had made it clear to the UK government that the USAF intended to sample the Totem cloud whether the British gave permission or not.

In fact, an American air force plane had been allowed to take samples at Operation Hurricane. But by the time of the Totem
tests, the US had failed to comply with a British request to hand over some of these samples - they were treating the British just as the British were treating the Australians. In the event, the Americans did hand over some of their samples after Totem I, but they sent the bulk to Guam for analysis. The samples were so radioactive that Guam could not handle them, and they were flown to Washington.

Although the risks to air and ground crew were most serious at Totem I, there is no doubt that incidents of planes becoming very radioactive happened at later tests. An RAF plane became ‘substantially contaminated' during the Mosiac series of tests at Monte Bello in 1956, according to AIRAC 9. The hazard continued to exist during the Christmas Island tests: Christopher Donne, an RAF pilot who flew sampling missions at the hydrogen bomb tests, told the Royal Commission that ‘on the last and largest of them I was subjected to high radiation levels and prevented from doing any more sampling work'. The British and Australian air and ground crews involved in sampling missions probably received some of the highest doses of any servicemen at the tests.

The British government's claim that it knows what doses individuals received rests on the premise that the system for monitoring personnel was both well administered and accurate. The evidence is that it was nowhere near as good as it is claimed to be.

A prerequisite of a really comprehensive monitoring system is that the procedure laid down is followed in every case. Brian Last, a fitter in the Australian air force, was issued with two film badges during his service at Maralinga in 1956. When he left, he took the second one with him. ‘My daughter still has it today,' he told the Royal Commission. Last is not the only veteran who left the tests without handing in his film badge for checking. He also gave evidence that other people at Maralinga took their film badges apart out of curiosity - thus exposing the film and destroying the reading - and then put them back together again.

Doug Rickard, an Australian whose job was to issue small, pocket-size dosimeters to men who were going into areas where
they might be at risk at Maralinga, has admitted making up the readings he was supposed to record when the dosimeters were returned. This was because each one had to be charged by battery before being handed out - many of the batteries were flat, he says, so the dosimeters didn't work. He would ask an individual where he had spent the day, and make up a dose accordingly.

Even when dosimeters and film badges
did
work, and
were
collected in for checking, the readings they gave were not always reliable. One of the many British documents released to the Royal Commission was an AWRE report which examined the reliability of film badges and small dosimeters.

It recorded an experiment during the Operation Buffalo trials at Maralinga in 1956. A mahogany model of a man was placed in a contaminated area, wearing both film badges and dosimeters. The report concluded that the film badge tended to
under-record
the dose received by the lower half of the body - including the genital organs - by 40 per cent. It also noted it was quite common for film badges and dosimeters worn simultaneously by the same person to show different readings.

When this evidence was raised with Penney, his response suggested that much of the measuring done at the tests was carried out with primitive equipment. In 1957, he said, there was ‘a tremendous upheaval in health physics', the branch of science concerned with people's exposure to radiation. The reason was the catastrophic fire in a plutonium-producing pile at the Windscale bomb factory, which sent a plume of radiation south-east across the UK.

Penney was appointed to run the inquiry into the incident. ‘What it taught me was that the instrumentation of the pile needed improving,' he told the Royal Commission. ‘That although we thought we had got a lot of instruments, we weren't sure they were all running correctly.'

In other words, the instruments used for monitoring general levels of radioactivity in nuclear establishments and at the bomb tests were liable to error, on top of the doubts about the accuracy of equipment used to check the exposure of individuals. The knowledge came too late to improve matters at the bomb
tests in Australia: the Windscale fire started the day
after
the last British atom bomb test took place on Australian territory.

Much time and effort went into working out the safest time to explode each weapon, the idea being to carry out the test at a time when the wind would carry the atomic cloud well away from populated areas, or at such a height that it would pose no threat. A lot of this effort seems to have been wasted; in fact, it looks suspiciously like a public relations exercise.

Thomas Brindley, an Australian soldier responsible for monitoring fallout at Maralinga, told the Royal Commission about a curious experience he had. After the very first test at the site, a blast code-named One Tree, Brindley was out to the east of the range. ‘We heard on the radio … [that the] Minister for Supply had said that the fallout had gone harmlessly away to the north-west. And we were sitting below Coober Pedy in the fallout area, which is directly east.' Australians would obviously be much happier if fallout was drifting north-west across the desert towards mountainous Western Australia, instead of heading east towards populated New South Wales.

We have already seen how part of the fallout from Operation Hurricane drifted across the mainland at 10,000 feet instead of the much more innocuous 25,000 feet predicted. During the Royal Commission's hearings in London, Peter McClellan, the barrister assisting the commission, read out comparisons between the cloud paths predicted for various tests and where they actually went.

The cloud from the third test in the Buffalo series at Maralinga, for instance, was supposed to go just north of Brisbane, on the east coast of Australia. Where it actually went was just north of Sydney, about 400 miles further south. When it came to the fourth Buffalo test, fallout was intended to go north of Brisbane again. What actually happened became clear in this exchange between McClellan and Penney:

MCCLELLAN The observed pattern -

PENNEY
(interrupting)
Goes everywhere!

MCCLELLAN Half to three-quarters of Australia. At the time,
did it become known that the cloud had behaved so differently … was any concern expressed?

PENNEY When that was known, to my knowledge, no concern was expressed.

The cloud from the biggest British bomb tested in Australia, the 98-kiloton blast known as Mosaic II, was supposed to drift harmlessly out to sea from the Monte Bello Islands. Instead, the wind changed and blew fallout across the small towns on the coast of nearby Western Australia - Onslow, Roebourne, Dampier and Port Hedland. This event was the cause of the frantic signal to the British from the Australian government which demanded to know what was going on.

Other clouds - Operation Hurricane and the second Totem test - simply got lost. The overall picture, in which radioactive clouds can be seen drifting unpredictably across populated areas of Australia, is hard to reconcile with claims that the Australian population was never put at risk.

The extent to which the population of Australia was exposed to radiation from the tests is difficult to assess because of the inadequacy of the efforts made to measure it. No information at all is available on long-range fallout from the first three tests - Operations Hurricane and Totem - because no aerial surveys were made to look for it.

At the later tests, aerial surveys were carried out to check for fallout at considerable distances from the tests; from Totem onwards, monitoring stations were set up on the ground to collect fallout. Evidence given to the Royal Commission cast doubt on the effectiveness of all these systems in giving accurate measurements. But the spirit in which the monitoring was done is clear, and explains the confidence with which rather inadequate data was used as the basis of assurances to the Australian people about the safety of the tests.

The purpose of setting up the monitoring systems was revealed quite clearly during exchanges between Peter McClellan and Lord Penney during the Commission's London hearings. McClellan said the monitoring stations were set up specifically
to check fallout from the tests. ‘Was that done', he asked, ‘because of concern [that] there may be some safety problems?'

‘No,' said Penney, dismissing the notion that there could be any danger to the Australian people. ‘It was done
to confirm it was all right.
' (My italics.) When McClellan pressed him, Penney expanded on the theme in a way which stressed the public relations nature of the exercise. ‘It was to demonstrate it was safe,' he insisted, adding, ‘We were sure, but there's nothing like being doubly sure.'

It seems a curious departure-point for a scientific investigation. It may also explain why the exercise was carried out with rather unreliable equipment. Ground monitoring was done by festooning the countryside with sticky paper, which was supposed to catch particles of fallout. McClellan suggested to Penney that the sticky-paper method hadn't worked very well at all. ‘Well,' said Penney, ‘I can't really say yes or no. They don't look as if they'd be too good but they did give a reading.'

The problem with the sticky-paper method was that it was adversely affected by rain. Unfortunately, the other system used for monitoring on the ground, air pumps which measured airborne contamination passing through them, was also unreliable. McClellan raised these problems with Donald Stevens, an Australian scientist who was director of the Australian Radiation Laboratory from 1956 to 1977 and a member from 1956 of the Australian committee set up to look after the safety of the civilian population during the British bomb tests.

MCCLELLAN You were also involved in the monitoring of fallout in Australia outside the declared area [the official danger zone]. In this programme, two types of equipment were used, air pumps and sticky-paper samplers. You recall the air pumps ran into some problems, however, particularly in outback Australia - for example, dust clogged some filter papers and inhibited the standard flow of air through them, with the result that in some areas there may have been an underestimate of airborne contamination at ground level. Are you able to give me any idea of the order of underestimate that would have been involved?

STEVENS No, I could not.

MCCLELLAN Could it be in the order of hundreds or thousands of per cent? What sort of range would you expect?

STEVENS No, I would be completely guessing, Your Honour.

McClellan then asked what happened to the sticky-paper samplers when it rained. ‘Well, the sticky paper was a gum form on a plastic base, as it were,' said Stevens, ‘and under heavy rain conditions this became … lost its tackiness … lost its ability to hold the deposit on it.'

MCCLELLAN Well, have we reached the position then, sir, [that] by 1958 it was recognized by the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee [the Australian safety committee] that there were problems in the collection of fallout information from both the air-pump method and the sticky-paper method?