British nuclear testing starts in Australia
Monte Bello Islands WA
As the deadly mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki slowly dispersed in the aftermath of World War II, Cold War storm clouds gathered in their place. Nuclear cooperation between Great Britain and the United States ceased with the McMahon Act of 1946 so Britain started developing its own nuclear arsenal as protection against the Soviet threat. In secret negotiations with the British government, Prime Minister Robert Menzies offered tracts of Australia for testing British nuclear weapons. The uninhabited Monte Bello Islands, 70 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, were chosen for the first test, Operation Hurricane in 1952. Earlier that year, agreement had been reached in Canberra for the commercial development of uranium mining in South Australia to feed British and American weapons programs. When Britain exploded its first A-bomb from an old river frigate moored in the Monte Bello Islands, Australia's role as midwife to Britain's attainment of nuclear power status was confirmed. A further 11 full-scale nuclear devices were exploded in Australia in the 1950s at three sites - the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga, with minor trials continuing at Maralinga until 1963.
In the mid-1980s as stories of disease amongst servicemen, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara proliferated, a Royal Commission of inquiry was called, and the full extent of the radioactive contamination of people and country resulting from the tests began to be understood. But as this clip shows, serious questions were being raised in the 1970s about ongoing radiation risk associated with the atomic tests of the 1950s.
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