Every cliché of the mad, obsessed scientist is entangled in that quote from the report presented to the AWTSC on 11 June 1957. This fact about the British tests ignites public sentiment like few others. Where the tests intersect with the tragedies of infant deaths, few Australians are likely to be unmoved. Many of these concerns centre firmly on Titterton. The meeting minutes recorded that ‘Prof. Titterton will ensure that arrangements are made by the Australian Safety Committee for collection of all of the above samples and despatch them to the U.K. along with all relevant information, addressed to Dr. Dawson, A.W.R.E., who will pass them to A.E.R.E.’
The bones were scattered far and wide, from Australian laboratories in Adelaide and Melbourne to British ones in Aberdeen, Liverpool and London. The parents of the babies never knew. In all, bones from nearly 22 000 bodies – the majority of them babies – from both Australia and Papua New Guinea formed part of the experiments. Collection of samples in Australia was part of a bigger international program perhaps ironically titled Project Sunshine. The bones were tested for strontium-90. John Moroney from the AWTSC said in a letter to the pathologists involved (quoted in an Adelaide Advertiser article many years after the event), ‘You may have perhaps considered it possible that the question of sampling and radiochemical assaying of bones would not be regarded kindly by the general public. Consequently, I would be grateful if… you could treat this matter as either confidential or personal’. While a rational argument can be made that testing bone for traces of radio-activity during the early days of the atomic age has valid scientific justification, no amount of reasoning is likely to reassure the families of the 22 000 babies and others whose bones were tested. Stealing the bones of babies can never be seen in purely scientific terms.
Then there are the nuclear veterans. These aggrieved men, their wives or widows and their children have never been recognised for what they endured. Service personnel who go to war have well-recognised and justifiable rights. Service personnel who stood with their backs to an atomic mushroom cloud, or who scraped the spoilt soil into pits or washed down the aeroplanes that had flown through a high atomic cloud do not enjoy the same rights. The various veterans’ associations in Australia and the UK have fought against this intrinsic injustice for many years, with little success. John Keane summed it up in The Age in 2003:
Five decades after entering service, the thousands of British and Australian men who have survived Maralinga (more than a quarter of them are now dead) feel hurt and humiliated. They have no medals to pass on to their grandchildren, no letters of praise or apology from Tony Blair or John Howard, no wartime veterans’ privileges. What they do have are anecdotes about unusual clusters of multiple myelomas. Hip and spine deformities. Teeth that are falling out. Poor eyesight. Bleeding bowels. Post-traumatic anxiety and depression. And perhaps up to a quarter of them, according to preliminary data collected by the New Zealand government, have disabled offspring.
Despite many court cases and claims for monetary recompense, only a relatively small number of Australians – military and civilian – have been compensated for health problems alleged to have been caused at Maralinga or the other test sites. Documents associated with the Australian Participants in British Nuclear Tests (Treatment) Bill 2006 provided the following statistics:
Since the conclusion of the British Nuclear Testing Program, at least 79 common law actions against the Commonwealth have been instituted by ex-servicemen, other former Commonwealth employees and employees of Commonwealth contractors. Many of the cases before the courts have either been discontinued or withdrawn. Four cases have been heard by the court.
In addition, compensation has been paid under an administrative scheme to a number of service personnel, Indigenous people, civilians and some families of diseased people, with an average payout of $126 561. Even fewer of the many British service personnel present at Maralinga have been compensated, owing to British laws that until 1987 limited liability for injury suffered during military service. In 1988, the British Government finally agreed to pay war pensions to service personnel who developed blood cancers after their service at Maralinga.
Yet even the McClelland Royal Commission into the British atomic tests, motivated as it was by a passionate chair who sought to assign blame to those responsible for the tests, failed to find sufficient evidence of specific harm caused. While there is much anecdotal evidence, some of which has been presented in court, proving causality is extremely difficult. As scholar Paul Brown stated, ‘In a finding that continues to frustrate veterans, the Royal Commission concluded that illness, disease and abnormality cannot be unequivocally associated with radiation exposure well above the dose limit’.
The Royal Commission noted the fears that the tests had engendered in participants that stayed with them well into the future: ‘Operation of the “need to know” principle and the minimal amount of information given to participants has been a factor contributing to participants’ concerns and fears regarding what might have resulted from their experiences at Maralinga’.
In 2002, John Clarke QC was appointed by the prime minister John Howard to review veterans’ entitlements, including those of nuclear veterans. Clarke received 160 submissions on the British nuclear tests, and a chapter of the resulting report dealt exclusively with the veterans of the tests. Clarke called the nuclear tests ‘a unique, extraordinary event in Australia’s history’ and found that members of the armed services were exposed to dangers beyond those normally experienced in peacetime. As one of the submissions to the inquiry put it, ‘Australian servicemen were provided on loan to an experimental nuclear weapon test programme under the control of another country without prior scientific examination, independent advice or assessment of the potential dangers that could occur’. The report noted that these veterans were not at that point entitled to benefits under the Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986 because their service occurred during peacetime before 7 December 1972 and recommended that the Act be extended to enable some limited coverage. The Act was amended in 2006 to enable compensation for veterans suffering one kind of cancer, malignant neoplasia. This did not go far enough in the eyes of the veterans, who had reported many other kinds of cancers, as well as issues around fertility, genetic harm to their children and mental health. Finally, in 2010 the Rudd Labor government amended the Act again to broaden the coverage of nuclear veterans. Various nuclear veterans’ associations continue to fight for recognition of the harm caused by the service, and in many cases the children of the service personnel fight too.
Tens of thousands of service personnel were based at Maralinga, flew aircraft to and from the sites or were present at the other sites during the test series. Their stories have been told in various ways over the years, beginning with a remarkable series of articles in the Adelaide Advertiser in 1980. Later, the academic Roger Cross joined with nuclear veteran Avon Hudson to co-write Beyond Belief: The British Bomb Tests; Australia’s Veterans Speak Out, which revealed shocking tales of what went on. In more recent times the journalist Frank Walker has meticulously documented the stories of veterans as part of his book Maralinga: The Chilling Exposé of our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of our Troops and Country.