We had expected to use this space to publish an article which would have demonstrated that an Australian Prime Minister, the then Mr Robert Menzies, over-ruled the recommendations of his government’s safety committee and authorized the British authorities to explode their nuclear bombs at Maralinga.

This was in 1956, the time of armed intervention by Russia in Hungary, and by Britain and France in Egypt. A Security Council meeting to discuss the Suez intervention was scheduled for October 5, and the British government needed to have evidence of its own nuclear capacity in order to guarantee its role at this meeting.

Unfortunately, the winds were blowing the wrong way on the eve of the test, to which Russian as well as American observers had been invited. The scientists on the safety committee believed that a bomb explosion in these circumstances could imperil the population of the east coast. They therefore recommended that the tests be postponed.

This did not suit the British government’s timetable, and the Australian government recommended that the tests proceed. The bomb was exploded on September 27, and the fallout made its unforeseen way across Australia and was discharged over Queensland and the Pacific.

There has been no evidence available to us of the effects of this fallout, although presumably they could be obtained from hospital records of the time. We have however been informed that Brisbane’s normal milk supply was at the time dumped and replaced by milk from unaffected sources.

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We repeat, these allegations are not at present supported by documentation. Conclusive support or refutation could be obtained from the Commonwealth archives which relate to the period, or from the surviving members of the safety committee. This committee included Sir Ernest Titterton, Sir Leslie Martin and Mr LJ Dwyer, Commonwealth Director of Meteorology.

This committee would not, however, necessarily know about the fate of the Aborigines of Maralinga. It does appear certain that they were removed from their native lands by truck in order to allow the tests to take place, but it is difficult to discover when they returned. It is probable that they went back to their tribal grounds while these were still alive with radioactivity.

As we have said, we cannot document these claims. We can, however, explain why we no longer have the original article or its supporting documents available.

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After the article had been prepared, one of the secretaries who was typing it was visited by gentlemen who introduced themselves as members of the Department of Meteorology. They explained that they just wanted to check the article for its factual accuracy.

The consequence of this visit was that the original article was destroyed, and that the people who hold the supporting documents no longer felt free to make them available. We must therefore supply this paraphrase from memory.

We would point out that the representatives of the Department of Meteorology were at no time in contact with either the authors of the original article nor the editors of Overland.

The information contained in the article we had intended to publish in no way affected the present security of the Commonwealth of Australia. It dealt with weapons which are now obsolete and delusions of imperial grandeur which are now fortunately laid to rest.

It is however particularly relevant to the present debate on the mining of uranium deposits in Australia.

The proponents of uranium mining claim that our export of uranium would be subject to such stringent controls that it could never be used for warlike or unlawful purposes. This may be so, although the same safeguards were supposed to apply to the export of uranium to India, which has now exploded its own atomic devices.

The two critical issues in the current debate are the maintenance of security and the disposal of the waste.

There is no reason to suppose that any security system can be perfect. It is merely a matter of time before a fanatic who is prepared to sacrifice his own life gains access to sufficient uranium derivatives to hold a city to ransom. It is equally a matter of time before one of these ransom attempts goes wrong, and a city is razed. Yet even the economic cost of meeting a terrorist’s demands should be sufficient to deter our government from mortgaging our future.

But while the security may not be foolproof, it must be sufficiently rigorous to interfere with normal democratic processes. Our present experience in relation to this article shows the lengths governments will go to in order to suppress harmless but pertinent information. Once we are irreversibly committed to a uranium economy, no government will be able to resist the demand to sacrifice individual liberties to public safety.

When we consider the question of disposing of uranium wastes, however, we are placed in double jeopardy. The confidence of the scientists that they can ensure that these wastes will remain out of harm’s way for some thousands of years surpasses credence. The evidence we have seen, however, suggests that even if the scientists are right in what they propose, they can be over-ruled by governments interested only in short term expediency.

It has been suggested that the survival of western economies, and therefore of democracy as we know it, depends on the utilisation of atomic energy. We believe that the social and ecological consequences of such utilisation are certain to destroy the possibility of a democratic society, and likely to destroy mankind.

First published in Overland 67—1977