GRAPPLING WITH THE BOMB: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests
NIC MACLELLAN
Australian National University
Press, 2017, 383 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Nobody better reflects the military
and political elites’ cavalier attitude to nuclear weapons than the architect
of Britain’s hydrogen bomb program, Sir William Penney, who, in meetings in
1961 between US Democrat President, John F. Kennedy, and UK Tory Prime
Minister, Harold Macmillan, casually answered a question on how destructive the
new weapons were by saying that ‘it would take twelve to destroy Australia,
Britain five or six, say seven or eight, and I’ll have another gin and tonic,
if you would be so kind’.
This casual indifference of
Britain’s real-life Dr. Strangeloves to their grim new military power seeped
out of the cosy gentlemen’s club they inhabited to inflict an all-too-real toll
on the victims of ‘Operation Grapple’, the nine atmospheric H-bomb tests
conducted in 1957 and 1958 in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (now
part of the independent nation of Kiribati) in the Pacific Ocean, as Nic
Maclellan documents in his diligently-detailed yet anecdote-enhanced history,
published on the 60th anniversary of the tests.
In the vast seas, safely far
from London, any human inventory were considered unworthy of more than cursory
consideration, particularly the thousands of indigenous Gilbertese islanders,
‘primitive peoples’ (in the language of British authorities) for whom
radioactive fallout protection levels were set at more lax standards than for
the ‘civilised’ military and civilian personnel who staffed the test sites.
Britain (and France and the
US) did not need to seek, barter or bribe permission to irradiate their out-of-sight/out-of-mind
backyard, says Maclellan, a veteran activist for a nuclear-free and independent
Pacific, “only because they were colonial powers in the region” and could do as
they liked with their colonial possessions - “in the 1950s, there were no
independent and sovereign island nations in the South Pacific”. None.
Panicked by a mooted UN ban on
atmospheric H-bomb tests (a temporary moratorium was decreed in 1958 and made
permanent in 1963), Whitehall raced to join the US, Soviet and French H-bomb powers,
throwing time, caution and safety to the strontium-laden wind. One aspect of the British tests, however,
remained indispensable – keeping it from the public.
A “culture of secrecy”
pervaded the program, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s decision in 1954
to go thermo-nuclear to the ensuing decades of soothing, official reassurances
that the testing posed ‘negligible’ health hazards. Just to be sure, however, that such claims
would not be exposed through challenges in a court of law, the UK temporarily
withdrew from the UN’s International Court of Justice jurisdiction over nuclear
weapons tests in 1955 (a tactic London reprised in 2017 over the pace and scale
of implementing UN resolutions on general nuclear disarmament).
The involvement of Britain’s regional
Commonwealth allies in its H-bomb testing program was also designed to avoid alarming
the public. Australia had been ruled out
as a possible H-bomb test site because of “the Australian Government’s need to
mollify public opinion over radioactive fallout” which had been animated by
Australia’s hosting of Britain’s earlier tests of its (much less powerful but
still filthily potent) A-bombs but the ever-loyal, Cold War Menzies Liberal
government provided the uranium.
Reflecting troubling public
concern, the equally loyal New Zealand Nationals government posed the usually
unspoken question between political friends by writing to London that ‘why, if
there is no danger from these tests, do the British and Americans not hold them
near to home?’, regrettably demurring about proposals to use New Zealand’s
islands for the tests (which would be a ‘political H-Bomb’) but provided
extensive but less visible logistical support, on the quiet, for the testing program.
Whilst the British authorities
celebrated the H-bombs’ new megaton yields, the human casualties had less
reason to smile. Military personnel and
civilians copped the radioactive fallout, some, in what a confidential Army
memo admitted, as deliberate human guinea pigs with the aim of discovering the
effect of the explosions on ‘equipment, stores and men, with and without
various types of protection’. To add chemical
insult to radioactive injury, Fijian troops had their fly-ridden, military
camps doused with regular doses of the toxic insecticide, DDT.
The health legacy from the
nuclear tests endures through radiation-damaged genes passing on diseases and
birth defects to the children and grandchildren of the Commonwealth military
veterans and the islanders. Yet, the
British government continues to deny adequate financial compensation to the
victims by stubbornly contesting the health effects of radiation.
Denied, too, is the “moral
culpability of the state” for the damage it inflicted. A 2004 class action by 1,011 UK, NZ and
Fijian veterans ground to an exhausted halt in a decade-long tangle of technical
and legal mud, sparing Britain’s Ministry of Defence any payouts. As a sop in 2015, the Tory government included
the British nuclear veterans in a £25 million government charity fund but this covers
all UK military veterans, not just the A and H-bomb veterans (with diddley-squat
for the indigenous Kiribati citizens).
The fund is also constructed in a way that absolves the government from any
future legal liability for compensation.
There has been no admission of guilt.
The nuclear establishment at
its dangerous and devious worst is well displayed through Britain’s H-bomb
tests, where the initial crime is followed by bureaucratic chloroforming of
public enquiry, a defensive war of legalistic attrition and the political distortion
of independent medical findings. First comes
the damage, then the denial. The power,
and the danger, of the atom is easily matched by the power, and danger, of its
political masters.
