By Craig Cormick
The Australian government is preparing to fight a nuclear war with Britain.
To be more precise, the Australian government is trying to convince the British government that it should clean up the contamination from its nuclear weapons testing in Australia over 30 years ago.
The cost would be as high as $650m.
Between 1952 and 1957 the British conducted 12 major nuclear tests in Australia. The land where the tests were conducted is still dangerously radioactive.
Weapons grade plutonium has been found at the test sites; thousands of British and Australian servicemen may have received dangerous levels of radiation; much of the test information is still being kept secret; and the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land are very angry that their land and many of their people were allowed to be contaminated.
In the 1950s the conservative Australian government was very happy to allow Britain to develop a nuclear weapon program in Australia, and seemed to take little interest in the possible long-term effects of the tests.
However the present government can no longer ignore the issues, as the effects of the tests are no longer long term — they have become current. An Aboriginal delegation is already in Britain lobbying for a clean-up, as is minister for primary industries and energy Simon Crean.
The 12 British nuclear tests were conducted at the Monte Bello islands off the north-west coast of Western Australia, and in central Australia, with the majority being conducted at Maralinga, a remote area in South Australia which is said to mean "Field of Thunder" in the language of the local desert people.
The Maralinga tests included many so-called "minor" tests, which continued until 1963.
While the Australian government has obtained a lot of information about the major tests, the minor tests have never been fully explained. These tests comprised about 500 experiments, including crashing airplanes with nuclear bombs on board, setting fire to atom bombs and placing them in conventional explosions.
While not categorised as nuclear explosions themselves, these tests left far more radiation than the major tests and resulted in large amounts of plutonium being spread over a wide area.
A scientific team, known as the Technical Assessment Group (TAG), comprising Australian, British and US scientists, has now mapped the areas of contamination at Maralinga and found radiation levels that table limits in some areas. It has also completed a report for the Australian government on clean-up options. Estimates vary between $13 million to simply fence off the dangerous sites, to $650 million for a full clean-up.
Paul Malone, a Canberra journalist who was instrumental in making public much of the previously secret information about the British tests, said the British have a moral obligation to clean up the land.
He said, "Many of the tests were conducted in extreme secrecy, with Australians kept in the dark. For example, highly radioactive cobalt 60 was sprayed around the Tadje site [Maralinga], and the Australian health physicists who were working in the area were not even told of its presence until they found it accidentally."
The local Aborigines were supposedly removed from the area during the tests, but the 1985 royal commission into nuclear tests found that many were in the prohibited test area and were exposed to radiation during and after the tests.
Yami Lestor, who was a director of the Institute for Aboriginal Development at Alice Springs, was 10 years old in October 1953, when a test code-named Totem 1 was exploded in the desert. The desert people heard the noise of the explosion, and Yami Lestor remembers the black mist that engulfed his family that evening.
He said, "I can't say how many died. All I can remember is that we moved camp many, many times after the black mist came. In our culture, we always move camp when someone dies."
Yami Lestor later became blind and blamed his blindness on the black mist.
Likewise many thousand British and Australian soldiers were exposed to radiation as a part of the tests, often with inadequate protection. In 1986, following the royal commission, over 200 Australian veterans or their families had lodged claims for compensation for illness or death, due to radiation exposure.
The royal commission also recommended that Britain pay for the clean-up of the test sites. But so far Britain has not agreed to this, claiming that Australia had already agreed to its previous clean-up of the area, known as Operation Brumby.
Yet that clean-up only entailed ploughing the contaminated land under topsoil, which many experts have said was not effective.
Dr Mike Costello, of the Technical Assessment Group, said, "You learn that the shallow burial doesn't work when these radioactive parts can be uncovered by erosion".
An even more telling example of the lack of effectiveness of Operation Brumby occurred in June last year, when the British high commissioner, Brian Barder, was touring the range. Accompanying scientists were reported to have stumbled upon an active uranium core, possibly part of a nuclear weapon, lying in the sand.
In the two decades after the bomb tests, workers have uncovered much radioactive materials in the area.
The 3000 sq km range at Maralinga has been described as an atomic bomb scrap yard, patrolled by only two men.
In 1984 the Maralinga Aboriginal people were granted title to their lands, but subsequent tests of the land, outside the testing range, found radiation contamination, including highly dangerous plutonium.
The Maralinga people accept that some areas of Maralinga will never be able to be safely cleaned up, and they prefer the fencing options for these areas.
But even if their campaign is successful and the British government agrees to the full clean-up, some large areas of their land will still remain dangerously radioactive for a quarter of a million years.