Asia Times: Fallout from nuclear amnesia


	May 16, 2001	atimes.com

Oceania

PACIFIC BEAT
Fallout from nuclear amnesia
By Alan Boyd

SYDNEY - If a week is a long time in politics, then a lapse of 50 years truly tests the boundaries of government accountability.

Never ones for magnanimous gestures over the botched affairs of state, politicians tend to hide behind security notices or collective amnesia when the blame is being apportioned.

So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that it has taken this long for the authorities in Britain and Australia to come clean on one of the more incredible chapters of the early Cold War nuclear frenzy. Britain has admitted for the first time that troops were used as human guinea pigs for a testing program in Australia in the 1950s that helped it join the United States and the Soviet Union in the nuclear club. The admission came begrudgingly, and only after it had been independently confirmed in released Australian military records that servicemen were deliberately exposed to nuclear fallout to test their levels of tolerance to illness. Stricken with a range of cancers and deformities, some of the soldiers have been fighting for decades to have their plight accorded official recognition, which might open the door to compensation.

Why such obduracy over events that occurred a lifetime ago and have long since lost any of the relevance that they might once have had to global security? Probably because Western governments are loathe to stir an even bigger can of worms over the considerable liberties that they took on the nuclear issue between the 1950s and 1990s, when Pacific states were frontline laboratories for superpower experimentation.

From Bikini to Maralinga and Christmas Island to Murarora, scarred landcapes bear mute testimony to the practice of commandeering territory for military objectives, often without the acquiescence of indigenous populations.

Maralinga, an area of 3,200 square kilometers in South Australia's desert Nullabor region, was occupied by the Maralinga Tjarutja Aboriginal tribe when it was leased to Britain in 1952 as an extension of a rocket development program at the nearby Woomera space center. By 1963, nine major nuclear atmospheric explosions had taken place within the site, including two US tests that were conducted under a sub-leasing arrangement. Three other British tests were held in Western Australia.

According to the files released by Canberra, the Aborigines were kept well away, along with the security detachment of 20,000 British soldiers and 15,000 Australians. However, one mixed unit of 24 soldiers, thought to have also included several New Zealanders, was told to walk through the test zone three days after a detonation for what was termed "clothing tests".

Dressed in heavy woolen garments in one of the hottest regions on earth, the soldiers - none of them volunteers - were given a battery of medical tests to check which type of clothing offered "the best protection against radioactive contamination in conditions of warfare".

Both Britain and Australia deny that the men were in danger. An official Australian report states that the sites for these tests did not "present any significant health risks, because all the radioactivity released in the explosions was either widely dispersed [ie, worldwide] at the time, or has decayed sufficiently".

But that was not the case with the hundreds of smaller tests that were conducted at ground level using radioactive cobalt, uranium and plutonium, and usually involving hundreds of soldiers in various roles. More than 7,000 kilograms of uranium was deposited in one site. Two detonations involving a combined 1,000 kilograms of plutonium took place in another area and 550 kilograms of plutonium was used in a third location.

Lawyers representing veterans in the UK and Australia contend that safety was so lax that scores were exposed to radiation illnesses. Often the only protection they were offered was "a quick wash under a hose".

Now that the lawsuits are flooding in, usually in response to second-generation birth defects, Australia has been quick to shift the compensation burden to Britain. London argues that there is no medical evidence linking the defects with Maralinga. As recently as September 1997, it had informed the European Court of Human Rights that servicemen were never allowed into the testing areas, a statement that has now a decidedly hollow ring.

Any further admissions of guilt might invite unwelcome scrutiny as to why Britain failed to provide for the welfare of the Aborigines who were deprived of their heritage by the tests. And why it has declined to foot the bill for cleaning up the site, which remains highly contaminated despite the removal of some radioactive material in 1997 and will be partly uninhabitable for at least another 30 years.

For all of its obscurity, Maralinga was a milestone for Britain's coming-of-age as a nuclear power. In 1957, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sparked a nationalist fervor with news of the successful tests, which he said would put his country "in the same position as the United States or Soviet Russia".

"It will be possible then to discuss on equal terms," he said.

Isn't it really time that those some equal terms were extended to the participants and innocent bystanders who, for better or worse, helped project Britain into the nuclear age?

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