Atomic Australia: 1944-1990
By Alice Cawte
New South Wales University Press, 1992. 170 pp., $29.95
Australia's Uranium Opportunities: How Her Scientists and Engineers Tried to Bring Her into the Nuclear Age but were Stymied by Politics
By Keith Alder
Sydney: P.M. Alder, 1996. 83 pp., $20.
Review by Jim Green
How close did Australia come to building nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s? Alice Cawte's Atomic Australia takes a critical look at the whole scope of Australia's nuclear industry, but her major contribution is detective work on the weapons issue.
Cawte draws on academic literature, newspaper reports and a considerable volume of unpublished archival material (cabinet submissions from the government's Defence Committee, various ministers, and Sir Phillip Baxter, chair of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission from 1953 to 1972). The archival research is particularly revealing.
There was sustained high-level interest in a nuclear weapons capability through the 1950s and 1960s, though it was generally not seen as an urgent matter, nor was their consensus.
The Menzies government mostly just wanted to keep its options open. To this end, it was willing to support civil nuclear projects in order to lower the barriers to nuclear weapons.
There was also considerable interest in the purchase of nuclear weapons from the US or the UK, or in the stationing of US nuclear weapons in Australia.
Nuclear cowboys such as Baxter sought to drum up roles for themselves by pushing for nuclear weapons — it was no coincidence that the strongest push came in the late 1960s, when the AAEC was at a loose end and its future insecure.
Fears of Asia
A second, more important driving force was ruling-class paranoia about Australia's position as an isolated outpost of imperialism. At various times this paranoia was focused on Japan, the Soviet Union, China and Indonesia.
Always there were nagging doubts as to whether the US and the UK would come to the rescue in the event of threats to Australia. Hence the sycophancy — the weapons tests, the US bases, Australian troops in Vietnam. And hence the interest in nuclear weapons.
On numerous occasions, nuclear cowboys and politicians argued for the introduction of nuclear power. Often it was argued that one reason for building a nuclear power plant was to lower the barriers to nuclear weapons. Plutonium could be separated from spent fuel from power reactors, and the expertise gained would be invaluable for a weapons program.
While generally supportive of the various proposals, the government continually deferred a decision, largely because of the immature state of the industry overseas and the abundance of fossil fuels in Australia.
The government's Defence Committee, which included the chiefs of the armed forces, approached the US about the possibility of stationing nuclear weapons in Australia. No dice. In 1958 an informal approach was made to buy bombers and tactical nuclear weapons from the UK. Again, no dice.
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. Better still, their range made them suitable for strikes on Indonesia if such were needed to put an end to Sukarno's "adventurism".
In 1965, the AAEC and the Department of Supply were commissioned to examine all aspects of nuclear weapons policy and the cost of establishing a nuclear weapons program in Australia.
The AAEC also began a centrifuge uranium enrichment program in 1965. For the first two years, this program was carried out in secret for fear that public knowledge would lead to allegations of intentions to build nuclear bombs.
Despite the glut in the uranium market overseas, the minister for national development announced in 1967 that uranium companies would henceforth have to keep half of their known reserves for Australian use. He publicly acknowledged that this decision reflected a desire to have a domestic uranium source in case it was needed for nuclear weapons.
Political backing
The momentum continued to build in the late 1960s. Baxter was still an influential advocate of nuclear weapons, as were some other nuclear scientists and administrators, including Australia's second nuclear knight, Sir Ernest Titterton.
The Democratic Labor Party, fiercely anticommunist, advocated a nuclear weapons capability in official policy statements. Sundry other politicians argued the case for nuclear weapons. The RSL advocated a weapons program, though equivocally at times, and there was some support within the military.
The intention to leave open the nuclear option was evident in the approach to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Prime Minister John Gorton, who had openly advocated nuclear weapons in the late 1950s, was determined not to sign.
When the United Nations General Assembly met in April 1968, the Australian position was one of obfuscation and rejection. A host of specious arguments were put forward, such as that signing the NPT would retard Australia's economic development. Back in Australia, the minister for national development admitted that a sticking point was a desire not to close off the weapons option.
'Peaceful' uses
In the late 1960s came the "peaceful" nuclear explosions fiasco. The AAEC and the government offered Australia as a guineapig for a US project to test massive nuclear explosions.
The plan was for five 200-kiloton explosions to create an artificial harbour on the coast of Western Australia (the Hiroshima bomb was 12-15 kilotons). Fortunately, that project was abandoned, and the AAEC's "Plowshare Committee" was disbanded soon after.
Nuclear power was back on the agenda in 1969. A plan was approved to build a power reactor at Jervis Bay on the NSW South Coast. The project was abandoned in 1971, though not before considerable preliminary work had been done and a number of tenders from overseas firms reviewed.
A wealth of circumstantial evidence suggests that the Jervis Bay project was motivated, in part, by a desire to bring Australia closer a nuclear weapons capability.
Overall, Cawte's analysis of the weapons issue is intriguing and convincing. Cabinet documents from 1962-66, released in the five years since Cawte's book, all confirm the general thrust of her arguments.
The book has, by and large, met with deafening silence from the nuclear industry, but there have also been some attacks. One such is that of Keith Alder in his book Australia's Uranium Opportunities (which is mostly focused on the AAEC's enrichment project).
Alder was centrally involved in much of the AAEC's work from the mid-1950s until 1982. He claims: "... there was never any planning or work done by the AAEC towards the development of nuclear weapons in Australia ... all of the Commission's own work was directed at all times to the peaceful uses of Atomic Energy."
In fact, all of the AAEC's work lowered the barriers to nuclear weapons to a greater or lesser degree, regardless of intentions. Here is Phillip Baxter arguing the point:
"Almost every action, every piece of research, technological development or industrial activity carried out in peaceful uses of atomic energy could also be looked upon as a step in the 'manufacture' of nuclear weapons. There is such a large overlap in the military and peaceful uses in these areas that they are virtually one."
Whether any research at the AAEC directly and deliberately related to weapons is an open question. If a decision was ever made to pursue a weapons program systematically — and it's unlikely that there was such a decision — it would have been in the late 1960s under Gorton. For the inside information, we'll have to wait a couple more years for the declassification of documents under the 30-year rule.
Alder's vision is for Australia to provide the world with "total nuclear fuel cycle services including reprocessing and waste disposal", and if the ignorant, politically motivated dogmatists have their way, Australia risks invasion from Asian countries in need of uranium. Baxter argued that last point many years ago, only to be shouted down by all and sundry.
The overall picture is clear enough. What is important is to draw the lessons out of this history.
One is the problem of nuclear junkies such as Baxter having a monopoly of expertise. Baxter had a much greater technical knowledge, and a good deal more political experience and clout, than the government ministers he manipulated and manoeuvred.
A second lesson concerns the implications of drifting towards a nuclear weapons capability through the pursuit of civil nuclear projects. Both these lessons are worth bearing in mind as nuclear debates flare up later this year.