Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb
By Wayne Reynolds
Melbourne University Press, 2000
218pp, $32.95(pb)
REVIEW BY JIM GREEN
It has been known for many years that Australian governments considered, and pursued, the development of nuclear weapons from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Several books and articles published in the 1990s have shed considerable light on this history.
Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb is a useful and original book by Wayne Reynolds, a history lecturer at Newcastle University. It is based on archival material in Australia, the United States, South Africa, Canada and London.
Reynolds reveals that the planning and pursuit of nuclear weapons in Australia stretches back to the second world war. The project was monumental in scale and bound up with post-war projects such as the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme and the Australian National University in Canberra.
Reynolds focuses on the period from 1945 to 1957, during which the US was closely guarding its nuclear weapons expertise. Britain also wanted nuclear weapons. Having failed to cement a "special relationship" with the US, and with Canada hitching its military fortunes not to the Commonwealth but to the US, Britain's fall-back plan was to use the resources and real estate of the Commonwealth to develop nuclear weapons.
One of several historical misconceptions undermined by Reynolds' research is that the post-war history of the British Empire was one of steady decline. The impasse in Anglo-American relations led to a rejuvenation of the empire, motivated largely by military, and in particular nuclear, matters.
Commonwealth countries, especially Australia and South Africa, were associated with many facets of Britain's empire bomb project, providing uranium, land for weapons and rocket tests and scientific and engineering expertise.
Australia's 'Manhattan Project'
Washington saw nuclear weapons as the ideal counter to the numerically superior armed forces of the "Communist bloc". They had a similar appeal to Australia. Reynolds argues: "The possession of atomic weapons for a small white population in a troubled area, a situation that was to be replicated in southern Africa, provided the ideal solution."
Canberra tried to use its empire links to get nuclear weapons: "The empire provided Canberra with its only access to atomic weapons and the global war planning that would determine their use."
"Many of the great national projects", Reynolds writes, "such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the Woomera Rocket Range and the Australian National University, were in large measure based on the assumption that Australia would one day be a nuclear weapons state".
Of course, there were multiple agendas for these projects, and the extent to which they owed their existence to the empire bomb project is open to endless debate. Nevertheless, Reynolds provides irrefutable evidence — much of it previously unpublished — that links them to the empire bomb project.
A number of universities established nuclear science and engineering departments after World War II. Mark Oliphant asked for — and got — 500,000 pounds sterling to establish the Research School of Physical Sciences at the ANU and to begin the construction of a research cyclotron, even though initial projections put the cost of the research school at more than half the university's entire budget.
The US Manhattan Project provided the obvious (and the only) model for large-scale nuclear development: the development of atomic reactors adjacent to hydroelectric facilities because a great deal of accessible water and electricity was needed. The site for reactors would need to be isolated, but accessible to research facilities at laboratories and universities.
Hence, the attraction of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectricity scheme. Nelson Lemmon, the federal minister for works and housing, said in 1949 that the Snowy Mountains scheme was "an endeavour to ensure that Australia does not lag in the race to develop atomic power", and that the "power will be used for defence purposes".
"Nuclear scientists would conduct experiments on the ANU cyclotron", Reynolds writes, "and the Snowy Mountains Scheme would provide the plutonium that would one day go into the rockets developed at Woomera".
Lucas Heights
The Australian Atomic Energy Corporation (AAEC) was established in the early 1950s to build and operate research facilities in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights. "[I]t is clear that Lucas Heights owed its existence to a considerable degree to the need for Australia to preserve the atomic weapons option", Reynolds notes.
Part of the bargaining surrounding the weapons tests in South Australia included an agreement by Britain to sell Australia a research reactor. A contract was signed in June 1955 for a British company to build the Hi-Flux Australian Reactor (HIFAR), which is still in operation at Lucas Heights. HIFAR, in the minds of those Australians and Britons in the know, was a first step towards the construction of larger reactors capable of producing substantial volumes of plutonium for weapons.
Exactly what weapons-related research was carried out at Lucas Heights has always been a mystery. Reynolds sheds a little light on this. The major research project in the early years of the AAEC concerned beryllium. This research is likely to have been pursued, at least in part, because of British interest in developing thermonuclear weapons. Publicly, however, the beryllium research was justified in terms of its potential use as a neutron moderator in power reactors.
End of the atomic empire
In 1957, the US renewed close atomic co-operation with Britain, motivated by the Soviet Union's success in developing thermonuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Third parties, such as Australia, were excluded from this cooperation.
"Every aspect of the empire deterrent weapons programme was served up on the altar of the Anglo-American special relationship", Reynolds writes. British weapons tests moved to Nevada. Australia's nuclear research program had to be reined in to ensure compliance with non-proliferation protocols agreed with the Soviet Union. Testing of delivery vehicles was gradually wound down.
According to Reynolds, "At no stage did we envisage a separate bomb. The idea was that we would have an Australian bomb as part of a joint project". This changed as the empire bomb project came to an end.
Efforts continued to acquire nuclear weapons from Britain and the US, and parallel efforts were made to develop an indigenous capability to build nuclear weapons.
In 1962, the federal cabinet approved an increase in the staff of the AAEC from 950 to 1050 because, in the words of the minister of national development, "a body of nuclear scientists and engineers skilled in nuclear energy represents a positive asset which would be available at any time if the government decided to develop a nuclear defence potential".
The 1963 decision to buy F-111 bombers from the US was partly motivated by their capacity to be modified to carry nuclear bombs if required.
The AAEC's beryllium research was wound down in the mid-1960s, but research into uranium enrichment was pursued from 1965 for both civil and military purposes — initially in secret in the basement of a building at Lucas Heights.
The plan to build a nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, announced in 1969 by Prime Minister John Gorton but abandoned in the early 1970s by his successors Billy McMahon and Gough Whitlam, had a military subtext as Gorton later admitted.
Two recent analyses of Australia's historical pursuit of nuclear weapons are those of Jim Walsh, in the Fall 1997 Nonproliferation Review, and Jacques Hymans, in the March 2000 Nonproliferation Review. Both Walsh and Hymans offer a disingenuous, sinners-to-saints history, in which Australia renounces nuclear weapons and becomes an active participant in international disarmament and non-proliferation initiatives.
However, as Reynolds notes, it was only the cementing of the military-nuclear alliance between the US and Australia in the 1970s that signalled the end of any serious pursuit of Australian nuclear weapons. Australian governments have been active participants in international nuclear fora, but they have invariably attempted to block serious disarmament and non-proliferation initiatives at the behest of the US.