Robert Milliken noted that at the time of the Royal Commission, Titterton and McClelland ‘were then aged 69, robust, vain and possessors of particularly sharp and competitive minds’. They were bound to clash, he asserted, because they were so similar.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case against Titterton in the Royal Commission, the man certainly made a strong impression on people. Nearly everyone who came into contact with him had a story to tell, not all of them flattering. The overall impression from the many accounts is that Titterton was larger than life, an insensitive and opinionated man with considerable intellectual snobbery who crashed through any barrier. Sometimes he crashed through physically. ARPANSA scientist Peter Burns told of working for the AWTSC in an office next to the front door, ‘and you would know when Titterton had arrived because the front door would rocket back on its hinges and smash against the back wall, and he would stomp up the stairs snivelling and snorting. At the end of the day he would stomp down the stairs and smash the door open to make his exit’. He was well known for his pettiness, refusing to install a light in the nuclear physics laboratory ‘on the grounds that someone might sit there and read the newspaper’, said Newton. Rather than giving away the produce of his home garden, he sold his tomatoes and lettuces to colleagues. This man had once been in charge of the flow of all atomic test information from the British to the Australian Government. As Peter Burns put it, ‘He knew all the British weapons people and they told him what they were doing and he told the Australian Government that it was all right. A lot of information closed off there’.
William Penney maintained later that the safety committee was not denied important information. His statement to the Royal Commission said that, in his experience:
no information pertinent to the possible effects of the explosions on the Australian people was withheld. Design details of the weapons were not given for two reasons. One was simply the expressed policy of the Australian Government not to become a party to such information nor to become a nuclear weapon state. Secondly, the UK then as now, was obligated not to release to a third party certain information entrusted to it by the Americans. This did not preclude the Australians from receiving military and civil defence information about the effects of atomic weapons nor from participating in measurements to that effect.
In some ways, the diffidence shown by the Australians – on the one hand actively seeking to be party to the information yielded by the British tests while on the other kowtowing before the British secrecy agenda in the most abject way – did make for a confusing set of messages. Australia did, for a while at least, want to be a nuclear nation, and it wanted to know what the British discovered. The government hoped that if it supported the trials with money and other resources, the British would share this scientific information. The British never thought the same thing, perhaps because the Australians were not upfront about what they wanted. Perhaps, too, the wall created by Titterton was too high for the Australians to climb over.
The AWTSC was formed on 21 July 1955, during the preliminary surveying and commissioning of the Maralinga test range. It arose from discussions between Prime Minister Menzies, Minister for Supply Howard Beale and Minister for Defence Sir Philip McBride. The committee’s role was always ambiguous. The British test authorities did not seek its formation. Rather, the committee was set up because the Australian Government wanted to play a distinct part in the tests, to do more than just provide the venue. Ostensibly, the AWTSC was established to evaluate safety aspects of the tests from 1955 onwards, and to act as a conduit between the UK test authorities and the Australian Government. In reality, at least according to some, it did not play a significant role in advising on safety matters. Instead, it provided reassuring window-dressing. The safety committee sought legitimacy for itself in various ways. In October 1958 it published a journal article stating it ‘was responsible for ensuring that chosen firing conditions could not lead to damage of life or property on the continent’.
Significantly, the AWTSC did not get involved with the minor trials and concerned itself mostly with the big bomb tests. John Moroney, its former secretary, confirmed this during his feisty evidence to the Royal Commission. He said, ‘The minor trials were looked at in the light of the adjective [minor]’. A change occurred later, he asserted, when ‘the minor trials ceased to be minor’, because of the use of plutonium-239 in Vixen B.
The committee reported to the prime minister, through the minister for Supply. Menzies, in a letter to his minister for Civil Aviation (later Defence minister) Athol Townley in May 1955, specifically requested that the new safety committee ‘include members who are sufficiently well-known to command general confidence as guardians of the public interest, and who are not in any way to be identified as having an interest in the defence atomic experiments’.
Right from the start, Australian access to the scientific knowledge bonanza arising from the bomb tests was politely but firmly deflected. Before he formed the AWTSC, Leslie Martin, as defence scientific adviser, was granted some access to Hurricane, on strictly limited terms. The British, while on the surface agreeing to share some information, were rather passive aggressive in denying that information. The Australians tiptoed around gingerly, not daring to suggest access to anything more than peripheral facts. They knew that Titterton was on the inside, as a letter from the chief of naval staff to the Defence secretary Sir Frederick Shedden showed: ‘As you know Dr. Titterton is attending apparently by private arrangement’.
Whether Martin and Butement could also be involved was the subject of considerable discussion, and the British High Commission in Canberra stalled on making a decision. A draft Australian Government letter to be sent to the High Commission to try to clarify the situation pushed for the inclusion of Martin, because of
the considerable Australian contribution in resources to the Monte Bello tests and their close proximity to Australia; the important programme of Defence Research and Development being undertaken by Australia in conjunction with the United Kingdom; and the need for the Defence Scientific Adviser to acquire the fullest information to assist him in advising, from the Australian viewpoint, on the technical feasibility of the use of the Woomera region for future tests; the Australian Defence Scientific Adviser should be present at the Monte Bello tests in order that he might be fully acquainted with the details of the tests.
The Australians reassured the Brits that ‘Professor Martin is appropriately covered by the Official Secrets Act, etc… and he is the Defence Scientific Adviser and comes within the provisions of the Crimes Act which corresponds, in part, to the British Official Secrets Act’. The government had to lobby for one of Australia’s most trusted defence scientists to be included in the official party for Hurricane, while Titterton was there ‘by private arrangement’.
The tone is conveyed in a series of letters between the Prime Minister’s Department and the British High Commission. The secretary AS Brown wrote to Ben Cockram at the High Commission in September 1952:
My understanding is that the United Kingdom intended by their invitation… that Professor Martin’s attendance at the Monte Bello Test would be in such a capacity as would enable him to acquire the fullest information on the details of the test relating to weapon effects and the layout of the site. It was not intended that he should have access to the weapon itself nor its intimate functioning. The Australian authorities agree that at this stage we are not interested in the weapon itself but only in its effects and the general set-up of the test.