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The Roller Coaster investigation
The results from Roller Coaster show that the measurements made in the Vixen B trials underestimated the ground deposit of Pu by a factor of ~10… Obviously this was known at Aldermaston in 1966 when the program for cleaning up Taranaki was being developed, but it was not conveyed to Australia.
I was really angry when I read all the reports, then we got out there and suddenly found ourselves knee-deep in plutonium.
We may never know the intent, but we do know the consequences.
Maralinga was uncovered incrementally. Bit by bit, as worrying details came to light, Australia’s citizens learned what had been done a generation earlier. It did not all come out at the Royal Commission, either. The last piece of the jigsaw – the extent of the contamination, and the fact that the British did not share what they knew about it – took a concerted effort by John Moroney, a once-loyal servant of the British tests who analysed the data, and a dogged journalist, Ian Anderson, who brought it to public attention.
Discovering the true nature of the plutonium tests at Maralinga was a significant and celebrated achievement. It required sophisticated journalism informed by a strong understanding of science and an ability to get at hidden information and make sense of it. Anderson’s story, ‘Britain’s dirty deeds at Maralinga’, which appeared in the British-based weekly magazine New Scientist on 12 June 1993, was considered to be a landmark story by both the experts who provided its source material and the peers of the journalist who wrote it. More than ever before, the story revealed the truth of the minor trials.
Anderson was Australian editor of New Scientist and a pioneering science journalist, loved and respected among his peers. His work on Maralinga was part of an enviable legacy. He was a leading contributor to the development of Australian science journalism, through his position at New Scientist, his foundation and leadership roles in the main professional organisation for science journalists and communicators, Australian Science Communicators, and in his initiation of ScienceNOW, the festival of new science held in Melbourne. In Anderson’s obituary in New Scientist in 2000 (he died prematurely at the age of 53), his close friend Tim Thwaites wrote, ‘No-one has contributed more than Ian to the promotion of Australian science and technology to the world. Through the excellence of his reports in New Scientist and other publications, he presented Australian research to an international readership’.
‘Britain’s dirty deeds’ earned Anderson two Michael Daley awards for science journalism and appears to have influenced the course of ministerial talks when Australia was negotiating with the UK for a monetary contribution to help clean up the Maralinga site. This story marked the first time that the extent of plutonium contamination at the desert test range was made public. It also exposed the fact that the British authorities had known the level of contamination and covered it up. The story contributed ‘moral pressure’ at a crucial moment, opening disturbing new information to public debate that raised fundamental questions about the nature of the Australia–UK relationship. Anderson’s story appeared at a crossroads moment in the history of the toxic old site. The story triggered a renewed media interest in this particular example of nuclear colonialism.
Anderson had a ready analogy when he discussed his story. When it was published, the Australian cricket team was playing at Lords in London in an Ashes series. He told listeners on several radio shows that Australia was facing ‘the old enemy in another arena’. The theme of ongoing battle between traditional adversaries was especially resonant since Anderson published his bombshell in a popular British publication with a large British readership. An editorial in the same edition substantively supported Anderson’s story.
As the Australian cricket team faced the bowling attack at Lords, Australia’s Energy minister Simon Crean and Foreign minister Gareth Evans were entering the finale of a long-running dispute to obtain funds for a large-scale clean-up operation at Maralinga. Archie Hamilton, the Conservative British minister of state for the Armed Forces, and others in John Major’s government, argued that their responsibility had been signed away in the 1968 joint agreement. Anderson’s story asserted that the Australian Government, when it signed this agreement, was not informed that the British test authorities knew Maralinga would remain toxic for tens of thousands of years into the future.
Like many influential stories, ‘Britain’s dirty deeds’ had a serendipitous beginning. Anderson took his car to Heidelberg Mitsubishi in Melbourne’s northeastern suburbs one day in early 1993. Scientist Geoff Williams, whose car was also being serviced, ran into Anderson in the waiting room. Williams was one of the small team of radiation specialists who had gone to Maralinga in 1984, the expedition that had led directly to the establishment of the McClelland Royal Commission later that year.
At the Heidelberg garage, Williams and Anderson, who knew each other from some long-forgotten New Scientist story, began chatting about Maralinga. Anderson had reported on Maralinga a few years previously, and Williams knew enough of Anderson’s work to trust he would understand the complicated material he discussed. He told him about some new safety trial data from the US that had implications for understanding the plutonium contamination at Maralinga. By the time Anderson drove his freshly serviced Mitsubishi home, he had the beginnings of the story.
Williams had suggested that Anderson contact his colleague and senior ARL manager John Moroney, who had inside information. Moroney had been studying for a masters degree in physics at Melbourne University under Professor Leslie Martin in 1957, when Martin was about to retire as chair of the Australian AWTSC. Moroney, considered an efficient, intelligent and scientifically literate young man, gave up his studies to join the AWTSC as secretary. He stayed until it disbanded in July 1973, becoming one of the world’s leading authorities on atomic fallout in the process. When Williams suggested Anderson talk to him in 1993, Moroney was head of the Radioactivity Section at ARL.
Several years before, the Royal Commission had provided a mechanism to call witnesses, review thousands of pages of documentary evidence and breach the persistent secrecy around the British tests. However, exhaustive as it was, it could not tell the whole story. In the early 1990s, ARL obtained newly declassified documents about radiological tests in the US known as Roller Coaster. The Royal Commission did not consider the Roller Coaster documents because they were not available when it sat.
The Roller Coaster tests had gone virtually unnoticed outside Nevada, and were not listed as part of the publicly available record at that time. Hardly anyone knows the name even now, and the tests are not mentioned in books about Maralinga. When the ARL scientists, and specifically John Moroney, started to look through the records they began to understand that radioactive contamination left behind at Maralinga was far greater than they had believed before 1984 when the Pearce Report was still considered accurate. The subsequent Royal Commission, which owed much to the astonishing revelations of the landmark 1984 site expedition, received precious few British records about Vixen B, so while it did note Vixen B left significant contamination, the true extent of it remained unknown until Moroney’s later investigation.