Cross & Hudson, Beyond Belief

Roger Cross & Avon Hudson, eds. Beyond Belief. The British Bomb Tests: Australian Veterans Speak Out. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2005.

It is a cruel fact, but unfortunately true, that the long-standing complaints of the Maralinga veterans are not something many people are interested in hearing about. The atomic tests may well be, as the authors of this book claim, 'a deep scar on Australia's social history,' but for younger people they are ancient history. They took place fifty years ago, before most of the population was born. They happened in a cultural climate so remote from today that hardly anyone can genuinely feel more than a mild sense of collective shame for what was done. We are denied even the pleasure of pointing the finger at those responsible and forcing them to account for their actions; for probably not one of those who designed the bombs, planned the tests and ordered them conducted is still alive.

For the present generation of politicians – in government or opposition – there are no votes in Maralinga. For many years, and certainly since the findings of the McClelland Royal Commission, the government's transparent strategy has been to stonewall, to cite lack of proof, and simply to wait: to wait for nature to take its course. Since even the youngest of the survivors of Maralinga are now old men, the policy of 'bugger off and die,' as one veteran put it, is working. Three of the contributors to this book died before publication.

Furthermore, there are, even today, apologists for the tests among the scientific establishment who are prepared to say, as a retired physicist, Prof. J.O. Newton, said as recently as 1992, that

the major weapons tests were a great success as far as safety was concerned; there is no tangible evidence that anyone was harmed by the fallout. It may possibly be true . . . that a few people may develop cancer as a consequence of the low-intensity fallout radiation.[1]

In other words, one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. But on the question of what the benefit of the Maralinga omelette for this country may have been, then or now, Newton is wisely silent.

Beyond Belief is the latest attempt to keep the issue of the veterans alive. It is mostly the edited reminiscences, with a linking commentary by two well-known campaigners, of those who worked as young men, and in mostly humble capacities, at the Monte Bello, Emu Field and Maralinga sites. Frankly polemical in tone, and not particularly well edited – the commentary could have done with some more efficient proof-reading – it does not try to be objective, or to test its evidence. It offers itself as oral history, but it is really oral testimony, and aggressively partisan testimony at that.

Nevertheless, it is a salutary read, and for this reason particularly: it gives the lie to those who say that the tests were conducted with due attention paid to the known risks at the time. It is true that the very long-term hazards, especially those which cause genetic damage, were not fully appreciated in the late 1950s. But unless a lot of people have joined in conducting a disinformation campaign over several decades, it is also true that frequently there was a reckless disregard for the most familiar precautions. It is hard to credit that during the twelve Vixen B 'minor' trials (1960-3), twenty-two kilograms of vaporized plutonium were spewed across the open desert by explosive charges, just to see what would happen. In the so-called 'clean-up' afterwards some of this was simply harrowed into the dusty top-soil. Yet at the time everyone responsible knew very well that the half-life of plutonium-239 is c.24,000 years and as little as one microgram in the lung can cause cancer.

Even more incredible, if possible, is the testimony of Doug Rickard, who before his early death was one of a tiny few who have received official compensation. In September 1957, in one of the Antler rounds, the British used a deliberately 'salted' bomb to produce cobalt-60, one of the most lethal gamma-emitting isotopes known. It has a half-life of 5.3 years, a useful duration that could make it suitable for use in the so-called 'doomsday device,' a bomb specifically designed to inflict the maximum kill with minimal physical destruction.

It is indisputable that the late Ernest Titterton, a professor of physics at ANU and Britain's lickspittle during the tests, criminally concealed this information, in order to give the uninformed Australians 'a bit of a test' (to quote his own words) in recovering the minute pellets of cobalt from ground zero. The British eventually flew out some special lead boxes in which to repatriate that lethal cobalt. But that was too late for Rickard. By then he had passed Titterton's 'test' by industriously scraping up many pellets with his booted foot and collecting them in tobacco tins. He also unwittingly condemned himself to a lifetime of ill-health. He displayed immediate symptoms of severe radiation poisoning and at the unheard-of age of twenty-seven contracted myelofibrosis, or bone marrow failure, a disease of elderly people, from which he eventually died.

Although the sub-title of Beyond Belief hints otherwise, it contains no important new information. Its most credible testimony has long been on the public record, and the editors do their cause a disservice by padding this out with some dubious anecdotes which, to put it kindly, have lost nothing in the repeated telling; and with other downright irrelevant matter such as a chapter on the French tests in Algeria and at Moruroa.

After Commissioner McClelland's three volumes, John Symonds' official history of the tests (both 1985) and a surge of pieces of book-length investigative journalism at about the same time, it is unlikely that anything substantive remains to be uncovered. McClelland himself recognized this when he concluded that 'because of the deficiencies in the available data, there is now little prospect of carrying out any worthwhile epidemiological study of those involved in the tests'. These words practically spelt finis to the veterans' hope for compensation and, unfair though it may be, the issue is probably closed. Beyond Belief is unlikely to revive it.