As a child of parents who would not have met each other if it had not been for war, that means, that in my life, I have always been very aware of the suffering, both immediate and long term, that war inflicts, and I also know that it is the innocent that suffer most. Decades later, a life knowing the desert country of Australia and a life in Japan has also taught us, and most recently in Fukushima, how disastrous radioactive contamination is for us all, including all other living things.

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The Doomsday Clock was introduced in 1947. In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, the Science and Security Board sends a stark signal to us all.

Peter Hylands records the Atomic Readings in Gifu.

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Our thanks to Dr Tatsuichiro Akizuki and President Barack Obama.

An atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 at 11.02am, just three days after the first explosion of an atomic bomb in war over Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bomb was assembled on Tinian Island on 6 August. On 8 August, Field Order no 17 issued from the 20th US Air Force Headquarters on Guam called for the bomb to be exploded the following day, at either Kokura, the primary target, or Nagasaki, which was the secondary and lately selected target. That same day the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

The B-29 bomber Bockscar reached the sky over Kokura on the morning of 9 August but abandoned the primary target because of smoke cover and changed course for Nagasaki, where it dropped the bomb at 11.02 in the morning.

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They shoot dogs, don’t they?

Atomic bombs were tested in the Asia Pacific region after WWII. There were numerous atomic bomb tests in Australia and Oceania. In Australia the British test sites were located at Montebello Islands (three tests) and Emu Field (two tests), Maralinga (7 tests). There were numerous other smaller tests (around 700) in Australia including one called Vixen B, which spread deadly and long-lived plutonium at Maralinga. These atmospheric and other tests in Australia commenced seven years after the effects of radiation on the Japanese population was evident.

The largest test on Montebello Islands, G2, was 98 kilotonnes of TNT. The largest test at Maralinga was around 27 kilotonnes of TNT. The Nagasaki bomb was just over 20 kilotonnes of TNT and the Hiroshima bomb 15 kilotonnes of TNT equivalent.

“Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was willing to provide whatever the British Government wanted, with virtually no questions asked. He gave permission for the tests without even consulting his cabinet, let alone parliament. Responding to a parliamentary question in 1953, he declared that the tests would produce “no conceivable injury to life, limb or property” and that they were essential to the “defence of the free world”.

Radioactive clouds spread across large parts of the Australian mainland and in the case of bombs exploded in dry desert country at Emu Field and Maralinga it was expected that the explosions would sweep away everything including animals, rocks and soil in a mushroom cloud rising to 30,000 feet. It was these fine dust particles with the radioactive particles attached that were particularly dangerous.

These once sung and sacred lands turned to useless scrub in the colonial mind.

The implications of the testing on service people, the general population and Indigenous people living on or adjacent to test sites were covered up and subsequently denied by the British and Australian Governments. There are many heinous stories in this twisted tale, here is just one story from Australia.

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Pom Pom Incident

On 14 May 1957, Charlie Milpuddie, wearing only a loin-cloth and carrying several spears and dingo pelts, approached a radiation monitoring unit.

“We ran a counter over him and he was red hot”.

Charlie’s family, his wife Edie, who was pregnant and later lost her baby at Yalata, and two children were also red hot.

“We gave the man and one of the children a shower but the wife was very shy and would only let us wash her hair. We had to shoot the two dogs because we couldn’t decontaminate them”.

Charlie was one of an estimated twelve hundred desert Aborigines exposed to radiation from the British tests at Maralinga and Emu Field. This radiation caused blindness, leukaemia and other cancers, birth defects, infertility and growth deficiencies to name but a few. The precious Indigenous desert country was also contaminated. The children involved in this incident also died prematurely.

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Project Sunshine and beyond: Secretive testing regimes in Australia

Following explosions of numerous nuclear devices in the atmosphere (in both Australia and Oceania) a measure could be made of Strontium 90 by investigating:

• Precipitation and soil;
• Foodstuffs, including vegetables, grains and milk products; and
• Human tissue

Most emphasis was given to the major centres of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane.

Body snatchers and fallout: Secret testing of Strontium 90 on dead infants in Australia. Nearly 22,000 infants were tested and samples sent to the UK and USA. The testing program ended in 1978.

“The bones should be femurs. The required weight is 20-50 grams wet bone, subsequently ashed to provide samples of weight not less than two grams. The date of birth, age at death and locality of origin are to be reported”.

It still persists

Karina Lester to ABC in 2021:

“Many Anangu see the country healing physically and can be torn between wanting to fulfil cultural responsibilities and the risk of environmental contamination”.

The Operation Buffalo atmospheric bomb tests (commenced 1954) resulted in fallout contaminating parts of the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, one bomb in the series depositing fallout between Lismore and Brisbane, another between Newcastle and Darwin.

“The general public from Adelaide to Townsville was completely unaware about what was happening, and so were the military personnel involved in the nuclear tests. They had aircraft in the air that were tracking clouds, and a lot of these planes went through the atomic clouds and got contaminated”. Associate Professor Liz Tynan PhD, James Cook University

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