US Navy carry out ‘secret’ underwater nuclear tests in 1956

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The conflict in Ukraine has once again pushed the prospect of nuclear war onto the agenda. Russia holds the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons, around 6,257 of them with 1,458 of these being active, while 3,039 are readily available. The last time a nuclear strike was a real threat was during the Cold War, when the West and Soviet Russia were in a constant game of cat and mouse.

Perhaps the most memorable standoff came during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962.

An international scare ensued as the Soviets matched the US’ deployment of missiles in Italy and Turkey by installing similar ballistic missiles in Cuba just 90 miles away from Florida.

The era of the Cold War is characterised by nuclear tests from all the major powers, including the UK.

In 1954, Britain ushered in Australia’s atomic age after it carried out a string of nuclear tests in the countryside and Outback as part of Operation Buffalo, run by the UK’s Atomic Weapons Research establishment.

Inevitably, swathes of land were destroyed, including that which was used for agriculture.

For the next seven years, major and minor nuclear tests were carried out at Maralinga.

There, at the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, all sorts of nuclear experiments not involving nuclear explosions went on alongside seven big actual bombs being exploded.

Running alongside this was a top-secret programme of 550 experiments known as the Minor Trials, which included low-yield, tactical and battlefield radioactive activities with strange codenames like Kittens, Tims, Rats and Vixens

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In 2003, Melbourne’s The Age newspaper summed up the ethos of the Minor Trials in a piece exploring the extent of the experiments: “It was here that Britain and Australia lost their nuclear innocence.”

The minor tests led to contamination of the area with plutonium-239, which has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years.

Prior to this very little effort was put into finding and notifying the Anangu Pitjantjatjara people who lived on the land.

In addition to the immediate consequences of the nuclear fallout, the local Indigenous community would go on to endure the long-term hazards of poisoned land and water for more than 30 years.

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Maralinga was not the first time nuclear weapons tests had been conducted on Australian soil.

Three years before in 1952 Britain had detonated a nuclear weapon on the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia.

A further two detonations were carried out at Emu Field, but the UK then moved the site to Maralinga after previous locations were deemed to be too remote for nuclear weapons tests.

Maralinga was eventually closed in 1967, and the British Government began the process of cleaning up the 3,200 sq km of contaminated land.

Just a year later, the UK and Australian governments agreed that the area had been successfully decontaminated by covering contaminated debris in concrete and ploughing the plutonium-laden soil into the ground.

But this was not the case.

By the late Seventies there was a marked change in how the Australian media covered the British nuclear tests with a hint of suspicion beginning to creep into reportage.

Many journalists opened investigations and political scrutiny became more intense.

Then, in 1984, the land was slated to be returned to the Tjarutja people but scientists testing the area found that it was still highly contaminated.

Nine years later, in 1993, following a royal commission and after mounting pressure the British Government agreed to pay a portion of the estimated $101million (£57million) cleanup cost.

It was not until 1994 — 38 years after the initial blast — that the Australian government paid $13.5million (£7.7million) to the Indigenous people of Maralinga as compensation for what had been done to the land.

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