Over 30 years later, Toohey viewed the story as part of a continuum that forced government accountability: ‘These articles were worth doing because they gave the public a glimpse of what was being withheld in a democratic society’.
Toohey’s revelations were quickly picked up. The Sydney Morning Herald assigned reporters to travel to Maralinga and see what was there. Killen had said that, thanks to the Toohey article, he had to urgently upgrade security at the site. ‘When journalists flew in there was no sign of the increased security measures announced on Thursday night to guard a buried lump of plutonium from terrorists… When told of this yesterday the guards at Maralinga just chuckled’, the Herald reported on 7 October.
In the same issue a familiar name reappeared. Ernest Titterton wrote a feature-sized spread to answer the growing controversy, his final free kick before the McClelland Royal Commission robbed him of credibility. The feature conveyed an impatient tone that Titterton undoubtedly felt at having the plutonium issue dredged up after all these years. The media coverage since Toohey’s story was ‘near to hysterical’, he claimed, but the buried plutonium didn’t pose any danger. Someone could carry it around in their pocket and no harm would befall them. There was limited truth in this, although Titterton did not explain how dangerous even a tiny particle could be if it was inhaled or ingested. He was on even shakier ground in claiming that terrorists would have no use for half a kilogram of plutonium, since all plutonium could potentially be useful to them. He argued that the British would hardly leave buried a quantity of plutonium, a valuable material that might be worth tens of thousands of dollars, if it were in any sort of usable form. He also made claims, later shown to be wrong, that Brumby, the 1967 clean-up, had taken care of these problems. He insisted, ‘Putting aside politics and emotional grandstanding, it is clear… that the public need have no worries about terrorist activity’.
The Herald’s political correspondent Peter Bowers examined the mystery of the buried plutonium on the same day. Bowers wrote that Uren was calling for Killen’s resignation in light of the recent revelations about minor trial contamination from William (now Lord) Penney. For the first time, Penney had revealed some information about the minor trials, particularly the Tims trials that had resulted in the infamous ‘discrete mass’ of plutonium. This was the beginning of revelations about the residue of the minor trials: ‘Lord Penney revealed that small-scale nuclear tests, which he described as “little mock explosions”, were conducted apparently long after full-scale bomb testing ceased. The experiments have remained a highly classified secret for the past 17 or 18 years’. Uren suggested that Killen had misled parliament by denying what was left behind at Maralinga.
Two days earlier, on 10 October, the Herald had reported that Britain had been formally asked to repatriate the plutonium to the UK. The speed of this request appeared to reflect media pressure, with the story noting ‘that the Government had been forced to act quickly’ after the Toohey story’s published details of the Cabinet submission. A supplementary piece reported the official British stance that lasted until the McClelland Royal Commission. A spokes-person for the UK Atomic Energy Authority said that, ‘although his department had no record of what was left at Maralinga… it was unlikely that any plutonium was involved’. He also denied that any atomic waste had been sent from Britain to Australia.
This was the same official line run back in 1976 in response to the Adelaide stories. By the next day, 11 October 1978, as pressure mounted, the Herald reported that the British were planning to send a team of experts to Maralinga to investigate the remaining plutonium as both governments tried to damp down concern. The British high commissioner Donald Tebbit dismissed the idea that the plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists: ‘Even the [Great Train] robbers would have trouble coping with this situation. They might do better with a toy pistol’, he said. This story also gave more detail about the much-discussed ‘discrete mass’, which had dominated media coverage since 5 October, with Tebbit explaining ‘this material originated in six separate minor experiments’ when a small disc of plutonium was shattered into numerous fragments ‘which were collected into a steel container filled with common salt. No nuclear explosion was involved’.
Another original Maralinga participant emerged back into the light. On 11 October the Herald quoted Howard Beale, then in retirement, who dismissed as ridiculous any claims that the buried plutonium could be a terrorist target. He reserved a portion of his scorn for the source of the story: ‘What right has an official in the government to play God and leak documents of this nature? I think it was immoral and quite wrong to let this document loose’. Beale lectured reporters on their particular responsibility to assess the national interest before publishing and, perhaps reflecting his own approach, also remarked on the procedures that should have been in place to prevent such a leak: ‘An issue as sensitive as the Maralinga one should have been handled by the smallest number of people possible’.
Toohey’s follow-up story on 11 October added more fuel. This article, titled ‘Maralinga: the “do nothing” solution’, brought the wrath of Killen down on Toohey’s head. The story questioned the Australian Government’s response in light of a statement issued by the British High Commission on 10 October that nothing needed to be done. The story quoted a radio interview in which the acting Australian Foreign minister Ian Sinclair agreed with this and said that the plutonium was safe where it was buried. The extent of tensions between the Australian and British governments did not come out in the story, however. Behind the scenes, confidential cables were being exchanged between the UK deputy high commissioner in Canberra Henry Dudgeon and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that belied the apparent agreement of the public pronouncements. Dudgeon mentioned the ‘cavalier tone’ of the official Australian request for the removal of the plutonium and declared that ‘the Australians of course fully accept that we no longer have any legal obligation relating to Maralinga’. Toohey was not deterred when Sinclair backed the British stance with a supportive statement that played down the risks, particularly as the Cabinet submission had made strong statements about the terrorist threat posed by the material at Maralinga.
Toohey’s follow-up story also picked up on Jim Killen’s responses to the original one:
Mr Killen relied on his verbal dexterity in several answers he gave in Parliament yesterday. For example, he said that no Cabinet submission prepared by himself had said the plutonium at Maralinga was ‘currently’ a terrorist threat. Last Thursday he said in his press statement that the [Australian Financial Review’s] report of his submission and its emphasis on the potential terrorist threat provided sufficient cause for him to substantially increase security at Maralinga on that very day.
The story reported that Killen had told parliament he found out about the plutonium problem only in early 1977, which seemed to accord with his public statements. In 1976, when Tom Uren and some elements of the media had begun to question what was at Maralinga, the Defence minister had seemed not to know and had asked his department to dig deeper. Toohey concluded his contentious 11 October story by tying it to a then-current political debate: ‘If the Government ends up doing nothing about the Maralinga plutonium it will only have succeeded in raising public doubts about the safety of nuclear materials at the same time as it is trying to convince the world that any Australian uranium exports will be on the strictest possible safety terms’.