Review of: Australia's bid for the atomic bomb
By Wayne Reynolds
Melbourne University Press, 2000. 218 pp., $32.95 (pb)

"Australia's bid for the atomic bomb" is a useful and original book by Wayne Reynolds, a history lecturer at Newcastle University, based on archives in Australia, the United States, South Africa, Canada and London.

It has been known for many years that Australian governments were considering, and to some extent pursuing, the development of nuclear weapons from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Several books and articles published in the 1990s have shed considerable light on this history. Reynolds reveals that the  planning and pursuit of nuclear weapons in Australia stretches right back to World War II, and that the project was monumental in scale and bound up with post-war projects such as the development of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme and the Australian National University in Canberra.

Reynolds focuses on the period from World War II to 1957, during which the United States was closely guarding its nuclear weapons expertise. The United Kingdom also wanted nuclear weapons. Failing in its efforts to cement a 'special relationship' with the US, with the recalcitrant Canadians hitching their military fortunes not to the Commonwealth but to the US, and with a sense of urgency engendered by the Soviet Union's rapid development the wherewithal to produce nuclear weapons, the fall-back plan was to use the resources and real-estate of the Commonwealth (the 'Fourth Empire') to develop nuclear weapons.

One of several historical misconceptions undermined by Reynold's research is that the post-war history of the British empire was one of steady decline. The impasse in Anglo-American relations led to a rejuvenation of the empire, motivated largely by military, and in particular nuclear, matters.

Commonwealth countries, especially Australia and South Africa, were associated with many facets of the empire bomb project, providing uranium, real estate for weapons and rocket tests, and a degree of scientific and engineering expertise. Beyond the direct involvement of the dominions in weapons production, they featured prominently in strategic planning in which trusted (i.e. predominantly white, English-speaking) dominions would form the nodal points of regional zones; for example Australia and New Zealand would form the nucleus in Asia and the Pacific, South Africa was the base for most of Africa, and so on.

Britain was the centre of the empire, but at the same time its most vulnerable part. A substantial degree of decentralisation was thought necessary because of the potential for nuclear weapons to wipe out Britain's military and industrial capabilities. In it most extreme form, a model we now associate with the internet was envisaged. The British Joint Planning Staff, in a November 1945 report, said, "It is desirable ... that the defence machinery of each Dominion and that of the United Kingdom should develop on parallel lines so that central co-ordination can be shifted from one part to another without dislocation."

Australia's ‘Manhattan Project’

Washington saw nuclear weapons as the ideal counter to the superior manpower of the Communist bloc. It had a similar appeal to Australia, Reynolds argues: "The possession of of atomic weapons for a small white population in a troubled area, a situation that was to be replicated in southern Africa, provided the ideal solution." Opposition to conscription in Australia further tilted elite opinion in favour of nuclear, rather than conventional, weapons.

The unilateral pursuit of nuclear weapons was out of the question in Australia (as evidenced by the scale and complexity of the Manhattan Project, and Britain's need to draw on the resources of its dominions), so Canberra tried to use its empire links to get them. "The empire provided Canberra with its only access to atomic weapons and the global war planning that would determine their use", Reynolds writes.

"Chifley and Menzies wanted the defence tools of modern empire: jet air-craft and atomic bombs. Australian soldiers had fought a number of wars in the defence of empire, and expected to be equipped with standard British equipment in so doing", Reynolds writes. "Empire defence co-operation ... would deliver the training, technology and ultimately the weapons that would counter the vast manpower available to Asian powers."

The closeness of the co-operation between the UK and Australia angered the US, which did not want to see the proliferation of nuclear know-how, even to allies such as Australia. All the more so because of perceptions that security was lax in Australia. One case in point was Mark Oliphant, who held to antiquated views about scientific openness and collegiality at a time when science and education were being militarised through and through. Oliphant was, nonetheless, a keen supporter of the empire bomb project despite contrary public statements.

"Many of the great national projects", Reynolds writes, "such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the Woomera Rocket Range and the Australian National University, were in large measure based on the assumption that Australia would one day be a nuclear weapons state." The mining of uranium was another component of the empire bomb project, with some uranium sold to the UK (and the US) and reserves held in Australia for 'defence' purposes.

Of course, there were multiple agendas for many of these projects, and the extent to which they owed their existence to the empire bomb project is open for endless debate. Nevertheless, Reynolds provides irrefutable evidence - much of it previously unpublished - linking these projects to the broader empire bomb project.

A number of universities established nuclear science and engineering departments after World War II. Mark Oliphant asked for - and got - 500,000 pounds sterling to establish the Research School of Physical Sciences at the ANU, even though initial projections had the budget for the entire university at less than twice that amount.

Reynolds contests the view that Canberra's post-war relations with Britain were marginal to the main game of cementing an alliance with the US. Events such as Menzies' willingness to host British weapons tests have been seen as relics of a fading empire. In the longer stretch, they were just that, but at the time the weapons tests were an integral part of the empire bomb project.

"Far from being the product of his (Menzies') desire to please Englishmen, Maralinga was justified in terms of long-term assumptions about Australia's major regional role in empire defence," Reynolds writes. The planned outcome - a nuclear-armed Australia - was not realised, but that was the plan nonetheless.

Radioactive fallout from the weapons tests was not an issue, except for the "the Communists and a few fellow travellers", according to Howard Beale, the minister of supply.

Snowy Mountains

Beginning with the post-war Curtin government, the Manhattan Project provided the obvious (and the only) model for large-scale nuclear development: the development of atomic reactors adjacent to hydroelectric facilities in the Tennessee Valley and Hanford. Canada pursued a similar path after the war.

The site for reactors would need to be isolated, but accessible to research facilities at laboratories and universities, and a great deal of electricity and water would need to be accessible.

Hence the attraction of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectricity scheme.  "The Snowy Mountains scheme was never a vast irrigation project, it was undertaken with nuclear power in mind to drive the industrialisation of Australia and provide weapons to neutralise the fear of the time - the so-called yellow peril", Reynolds writes.

Nelson Lemmon, the minister for works and housing, said in 1949 that the Snowy Mountains scheme was "an endeavour to ensure that Australia does not lag in the race to develop atomic power", and that the "power will be used for defence purposes".

"Nuclear scientists would conduct experiments on the ANU cyclotron", Reynolds writes, "and the Snowy Mountains Scheme would provide the plutonium that would one day go into the rockets developed at Woomera."

Lucas Heights

Another component of the empire bomb project was the Australian Atomic Energy Corporation (AAEC), established in the early 1950s to build and operate research facilities at Lucas Heights in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights.

"[I]t is clear that Lucas Heights owed its existence to a considerable degree to the need for Australia to preserve the atomic weapons option", Reynolds writes.

Part of the bargaining surrounding the weapons tests in South Australia included an agreement for Britain to sell Australia a research reactor; thus a contract was signed in June 1955 for a British company to build the Hi-Flux Australian Reactor (HIFAR), the reactor still in operation at Lucas Heights. HIFAR was, in the minds of those Australians and Brits in the know, a first step towards the construction of larger reactors capable of producing substantial volumes of plutonium for weapons.

Exactly what weapons-related research was carried out at Lucas Heights has always been something of a mystery. Reynolds sheds a little light on this question.  The major research project in the early years of the AAEC concerned beryllium, and this research is likely to have been pursued, at least in part, because of British interest in developing thermonuclear weapons. However, in public the beryllium research was said to be concerned with the development of power reactors using beryllium as the neutron moderator.

The end of the atomic empire

In 1957, the US renewed close atomic co-operation with the UK, motivated by Soviet success in developing thermonuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Third parties such as Australia were excluded from this cooperation. The empire bomb project was slowly wound down.

"Every aspect of the empire deterrent weapons programme was served up on the altar of the Anglo-American special relationship", Reynolds writes. British weapons tests moved to Nevada. Australia's nuclear research programme had to be reined in to ensure compliance with non-proliferation protocols agreed with Soviet Union. Testing of delivery vehicles was gradually wound down.

According to Reynolds, "At no stage did we envisage a separate bomb. The idea was that we would have an Australian bomb as part of a joint project." This changed as the empire bomb project came to an end. Ongoing efforts were made to acquire nuclear weapons from the US or Britain, and parallel efforts were made to bring Australia closer to an indigenous capability to develop nuclear weapons.

In 1962, the federal Cabinet approved an increase in the staff of the AAEC from 1950 to 1050 because, in the words of the minister of national development, "a body of nuclear scientists and engineer skilled in nuclear energy represents a positive asset which would be available at any time if the government decided to develop a nuclear defence potential."

The 1963 decision to buy F-111 bombers from the US was partly motivated by the capacity to modify F-111s to carry nuclear bombs if required; better still, their range of 2000 nautical miles made them suitable for strikes on Indonesia if such were needed to put an end to Sukarno's "adventurism".

The AAEC's beryllium research was wound down in the mid-1960s, but research into uranium enrichment was pursued from 1965 for both civil and military purposes - initially in secret in the basement of a building at Lucas Heights.

The plan to build a nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, announced in 1969 by Prime Minister John Gorton but abandoned in the early 1970s by his successors MacMahon and Whitlam, had a military subtext as Gorton later admitted.

US military alliance

Two of the most detailed recent analyses of Australia's historical pursuit of nuclear weapons are those of Jim Walsh, in the Fall (Spring) 1997 Nonproliferation Review, and Jacques Hymans, in the March 2000 Nonproliferation Review. Both Walsh and Hymans offer a problematic sinners-to-saints history, in which Australia renounces nuclear weapons and becomes an active participant in international disarmament and non-proliferation initiatives.

In reality, the cementing of the military alliance between the US and Australia in the 1970s signalled the end of any serious pursuit of nuclear weapons in Australia. And Australian governments in the past generation have indeed been active participants in international nuclear fora - but they have invariably attempted to stymie serious disarmament and non-proliferation initiatives at the behest of the US.

Reynolds is alert to the importance of the military-nuclear alliance with the US. He considers why South Africa did develop nuclear weapons, but Australia did not: "That Australia did not take the same path as South Africa after 1957 was due to the fact that collective security arrangements gave Canberra an option not enjoyed by Pretoria. The presence of British and American forces in Asia would provide a substitute for continental defence based on atomic weapons. In any case, Australian defence planners were still determined to effect an agreement that would give them access to an 'all-but' nuclear weapons technology and to 'off-the-shelf' tactical nuclear weapons. Collective security arrangements would allow the RAAF to train with the Americans and thereby receive limited intelligence on atomic warfare. The F-111 also provided a potential delivery system in a future conflict."

Another partial explanation for the different paths pursued by South Africa and Australia - this one not suggested by Reynolds - is public opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power in Australia. Specifically, public and union opposition may have been a decisive (though still only partial) reason for the abandonment of the Jervis Bay power reactor scheme. Had that reactor been built, it would have provided encouragement to the Australian 'bomb lobby'.

Anna Binnie questions claims that the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme was constructed to provide power for the development of nuclear weapons.

Newcastle University historian Wayne Reynolds has concocted an amazing conspiracy theory: the impetus behind the Snowy Mountains Scheme was to provide a secure source of power for the enrichment of uranium and production of heavy water so that Australia could produce its own atomic bombs. Reynolds also argued that the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) was set up so that Australia had a trained scientific workforce to produce plutonium for the bomb.

Reynolds takes this stance in his book Australia’s Bid for the Bomb. Reynolds is very well researched but does not seem to understand the principles of basic science and engineering.

During the Second World War it became apparent to Australia that it could no longer rely on Britain, its traditional ally. When the war broke out Australia could not even produce its own tanks, aircraft and assault vehicles. A manufacturing and industrial base with a skilled and trained workforce was needed that could be converted to war or defence manufacturing when the need arose.

This new manufacturing community would require electrical power to sustain it. Hydroelectricity and atomic energy could help provide these needs. Even though war was still raging, Prime Minister John Curtin looked ahead and set up a Department of Post-War Reconstruction. It was through this department that the Snowy Mountains Scheme would be established.

Curtin did not live to see this. He died in 1945 but his successor, Ben Chifley, continued the vision. The position of Minister for Post-War Reconstruction went to John Dedman, who was also Minister for Defence. As Dedman held both portfolios, the projects undertaken by the Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction could be interpreted as part of a defence agenda.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme

By the early 1940s a number of different proposals had been made by the state governments of Victoria and NSW on how best to manage their precious water resources. NSW wanted to divert the waters of the Snowy River into the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. Victoria, on the other hand, wanted the waters diverted into the Murray River for both irrigation and hydroelectric power. The Commonwealth wanted a hydroelectric plant as part of a national power grid that would be controlled by the Commonwealth, and was not interested in the water management issue.

Chifley, Curtin and Dr H. C. (Nugget) Coombs, Director of Post-War Reconstruction, had been impressed with the developments of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) project in the USA that President Franklin Roosevelt had established in 1933 as part of his economic “New Deal”. This helped to rejuvenate an area that had been severely depressed by providing jobs for a large workforce and producing a huge hydroelectric scheme. Taking this as their model, the Snowy Scheme was born. Incidentally, the power from the TVA had been used to produce enriched uranium at the Oak Ridge facility for the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs.

The problem of selling the Commonwealth scheme to the states remained. The breakthrough came when one of the senior public servants “studied the Act under which the Tennessee Authority had been set up and the lawsuits by which it was challenged. He found that one of the grounds on which it was held to be constitutional was that it was vital for defence” (Wigmore, 1968, p.142).

Now the politicians had their ploy. The Governor-General, Sir William McKell, advised Chifley “to go ahead with the scheme under the defence power, leaving it to any who opposed the move to put themselves in the position of seeking to obstruct a great national undertaking” (Wigmore, 1968, p.143). Accordingly, documentation from 1947 sees the Snowy Scheme as part of national defence. The states had been effectively silenced and forced to give over their powers to the Commonwealth.

The politicians at that time did not realise that, unlike the TVA, the power coming from the Snowy would not be produced at the same steady rate. The seasonal nature of the water flows and the seasonal demands for irrigation water do not lend themselves to constant power production. This variability would be magnified further by the regular cyclic variations of drought and flood, now known to be caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation that essentially governs the weather patterns in eastern Australia.

“The Snowy stations would be designed to generate large quantities of electricity for short periods” (Wigmore, 1968, p.135). Thus, power from the Snowy is used to top up the needs of both Melbourne and Sydney during peak periods. When the peak is over, the water is pumped back up to the storage dams. The Snowy is not, and was never, designed to be the primary power source for Melbourne and Sydney.

Heavy water production and uranium enrichment are both huge consumers of electrical power, and to locate two such high-energy-consuming plants in an area of limited power supplies would have been extremely unwise. The notion of nuclear power reactors for Australia was discussed approvingly during the 1940s and 1950s, but was never realised. Locating such a power station in the Snowy area could have been feasible and was seriously considered in the late 1960s during discussions about the siting of what eventually became known as the Jervis Bay Reactor Project.

The Australian Atomic Energy Commission

It is well established that in the late 1940s and 1950s Australia wanted to find another source of electrical power, especially for isolated areas where water and coal were in short supply. Atomic energy seemed to provide the solution, and it was to this end that the AAEC was established in 1953.

National defence was again used as one of the arguments for establishing the AAEC, and it is enshrined in its Act as one of its functions. The scientists working in the AAEC, however, did not see themselves in that role. Keith Adler, an early recruit to the AAEC and later its General Manager, told Australasian Science that “the initial program had been to build up what they called a cadre of experts. It was to be a training program to ready Australia for the advent of nuclear power.” All the research programs in the early days of the AAEC were consistent with this single aim.

Originally, a nuclear science group was established at the University of Melbourne with another group at CSIR (later to become the CSIRO). Later these two groups merged under Prof Leslie Martin’s “wing” as a nuclear science group within the Department of Supply (Moyal, 1975).

Many scientists from this original nuclear group were being trained in reactor technology at Harwell, the centre of Britain’s civil nuclear research. This training had come about as an offer Britain had made to all the Dominion nations in 1946 as “payment” for the development and supply of materials required for the nuclear program (Symonds, 1985, p.4). This small Australian nuclear group would later be joined by recruits to the newly formed AAEC.

In 1950 Sir Robert Menzies, who was Prime Minister for the second time, received a request from Britain to provide a location for testing its nuclear weapons. Menzies agreed but kept news of this agreement from his Cabinet colleagues, including the Minister of Supply, Howard Beale, whose department was providing the infrastructure for the tests. Beale’s Permanent Secretary, Jack Stevens, informed him of the tests “in confidence” (Beale, 1977, p.28). Most of the British tests were well and truly finished by the time the AAEC scientists returned from Harwell in 1958.

Nuclear Reactors Are Not All The Same

Reynolds (2001, p.58) suggests that Australia wanted to produce plutonium for military purposes in a water-cooled reactor and that this would be part of an Australian version of the US Manhattan Project. The reactor that Australia eventually built at Lucas Heights, then in open country south of Sydney, was HIFAR, which ran on enriched uranium fuel and used heavy water as a moderator.

The AAEC required a reactor to provide training facilities for scientists and act as an instrument for research. HIFAR was and is excellent for this purpose. If Australia had wanted to produce plutonium, HIFAR was the wrong type of reactor.

In order to produce plutonium, a reactor is needed that allows for the conversion of uranium-238 through neutron capture and subsequent beta decays into plutonium-239. However, not all neutrons colliding with a uranium-238 nucleus will allow this reaction to take place. Only neutrons with the “correct” energies will allow this to occur.

In general, reactors that can produce plutonium must have natural uranium (predominately uranium-238) as fuel, and graphite or pressurised heavy water as a moderator to slow down the neutrons. These types of reactors must also ensure that the amount of plutonium they produce greatly exceeds the amount used in the fission process that allows the nuclear reaction to continue.

Because there is a functioning reactor in Australia does not mean that plutonium is being produced. If Australia had ever developed a nuclear power reactor, then maybe we could have produced plutonium in sufficient quantities to provide the military with nuclear weapons. This never happened.

National Defence

During the immediate post-war and subsequent Cold War periods, expenditure on defence was regarded in a positive light and the Commonwealth government was willing to use the “national defence” argument to justify the establishment of a number of bodies and to subsume state powers. Scientists also used this argument to obtain funds for their own research projects.

Australia was blessed with one of the best scientific salesmen of his day, Marcus Oliphant, who not only had the ear of government but also had a good press following in Australia. He was sure that anything he said would be reported widely, and he exploited this brilliantly. Oliphant was essentially a man of peace, but if he could get money for his project by using the defence argument, then he would.

The press cuttings of Oliphant’s statements in the period 1946-52 located in the Australian Archives (A5954/69 2164/1) clearly demonstrate his change of style from dove to hawk and back again. To suggest that Oliphant wanted nuclear weapons in Australia maligns a great Australian and a man who worked tirelessly for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and so valued life that he was a life-long vegetarian (Cockburn & Ellyard, 1991, p.40).

Balance Needed

Archival material will probably reveal that Chifley and Menzies wanted nuclear weapons and confirm that the inception of both the Snowy Mountains Scheme and the AAEC were both justified in terms of national defence. Furthermore, Australian scientists have argued for the funding of their projects on the basis of national defence imperatives. However, this evidence does not mean that Australian scientists wanted to produce war toys, nor does it mean that there was a secret conspiracy to develop nuclear weapons.

Politicians are not known for their scientific expertise so trusting in documentation produced by them, or for them, can lead to false conclusions. An understanding of the science behind these developments and an appreciation of how humans interact with each other when it comes to getting something they want is likely to give a more balanced view of the past.

References

Beale, H. (1977) This Inch of Time. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Cockburn, S. & Ellyard, D. (1991) Oliphant: The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant. Axiom Books, Adelaide.

Moyal, A. (1975) The Australian Atomic Energy Commission: A case study in Australian Science and Government. Search 6(9), 365-384.

Reynolds, W. (2001) Australia’s Bid for the Bomb. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Symonds, J. (1985) A History of British Atomic Tests in Australia. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.

Wigmore, L. (1968) Struggle for the Snowy. Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

[Anna Binnie is a PhD Student at Macquarie University. Her thesis topic is a history of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission.]

I read with great interest Anna Binnie's feature "Australia's Atomic Conspiracy Theory", August 2001. While the feature was basically a review of the recent book by Wayne Reynolds "Australia's Bid for the Bomb", it also added further information on the origins of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

However, I must comment on some of the statements in the article. Yes Reynolds did make some mistakes of a technical nature in his book, but in criticising him for that, Ms Binnie should not fall into the same trap. It is not correct for her to say: "In general, reactors that can produce plutonium must have natural uranium (predominantly uranium-238) as fuel, and graphite or pressurised heavy water as a moderator to slow down the neutrons. These types of reactors must also ensure that the amount of plutonium they produce greatly exceeds the amount used in the fission process that allows the nuclear reaction to continue." She continued with: "Because there is a functioning reactor in Australia does not mean that plutonium is being produced."

There are so many mistakes in these statements that I hardly know where to begin. Ms Binnie seems to think that it is the U-238 which produces the fission energy whereas it is the 0.7 per cent of uranium-235 which is the fissile component. Further, the fuel does not have to be natural uranium to produce plutonium. For example, the pressurised water reactors so predominant around the world use fuel enriched to 3 per cent U-235 which is fissioned to release energy. The remaining 97 per cent of the fuel is U-238 and is available for conversion to plutonium, which is removed during the reprocessing of spent fuel. The fuel used in the Hifar reactor is enriched uranium in which, nowadays, the greater percentage is uranium-238. Again it is the U-235 which is fissioned but the remainder of the fuel must produce plutonium during operation, although Hifar would not be a sensible approach to production of plutonium.

Plutonium contributes about a third of the output of a thermal power reactor, and there is a very small contribution from the U-238. The amount of plutonium produced exceeds the amount used and the unused plutonium can be removed by reprocessing the spent fuel making it available for further use.

It is also incorrect to say that to produce plutonium the reactor must have a graphite or pressurised heavy water moderator. The heavy water moderator in for example Hifar or the Canadian Candu reactors is not pressurised. It is the heavy water coolant that is pressurised. The moderator can also be light water, as in the pressurised water reactors already mentioned and they produce plutonium. I am sure that Ms Binnie is aware that a fast breeder reactor does not have any moderator but produces large quantities of plutonium.

I wish Ms Binnie well with her thesis on the history of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, but she must be careful not to step outside her field in her work. During her research, she will come across the period 1967-1969 when AAEC engineers and scientists were seconded to Britain to investigate a natural uranium fuelled, heavy water moderated, boiling light water cooled reactor which might have been built in Australia (Jervis Bay). Fortunately, because of the characteristics of that type of reactor, the design did not proceed to production.

Alan Parkinson

[JG - see the September 2002 issue of Australasian Science for more on this topic. <www.control.com.au>]