On October 15, 1953, the British detonated their first land-based nuclear bomb in a test at Emu Field in the vast desert of central Australia. When we think of nuclear weapons and the Cold War, the conflict between the United States and the USSR is what most readily comes to mind. Mutually Assured Destruction was the policy, and literally everything was at stake for these two superpowers. But other nations were also dragged into the fray and had to react accordingly. Great Britain, situated between the two belligerents, found itself almost forced to create a nuclear arsenal to call its own.
From the very start of the nuclear age, which is largely considered to be the detonation of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Britain struggled with the question of how, if at all, they would participate in this new frontier of geopolitics. Many Britons believed that they could rely on the United States and the nuclear weapons it supplied to the Strategic Air Command, which was tasked with protecting western Europe from Soviet attack. Others argued that Britain should be in control of its own protection and should not be reliant on American interest. With the USSR capable of reaching New York City with its newest bombs, the sound logical argument was made that the United States would not risk having their homeland bombed by entering into a nuclear war to defend a Britain that was under attack by the USSR. And so it was resolved that Britain would need its own nuclear arsenal.
Britain didn’t have to start from scratch with their nuclear program. They had sent scientists to participate in the secret research of the Manhattan Project, although they were shut out of any research that contributed directly to the creation of American bombs. Following the conclusion of the war, the United States refused to release any nuclear information to other nations, including their allies. They still had a better understanding of the technology than most, and set a date of 1952 for testing their first bombs. This would put them significantly behind the United States, but only three years behind the USSR, who they were more worried about.
The first British bombs were ready for testing in early 1952. There wasn’t enough space in the relatively tiny England to carry out a nuclear test, and so they went to a place that was friendly, and so vast and desolate you could detonate a nuclear bomb there and no-one would even notice: Australia. The British detonated their first nuclear bomb off the northwest coast of the continent, after asking permission of course, in February of 1952. Ready to conduct more experiments, but without the support of the Royal Navy for continued detonations, they chose a land site in central south Australia. This is where, on October 15, 1953, they detonated their first land based bomb as a part of Operation Totem.
These tests were still very early stage and largely experimental. Operation Totem was specifically tasked with determining the optimal chemical makeup of the warhead, but would also study the behavior the radioactive residue, the mushroom cloud, as well as the damage inflicted by nuclear weapons on military equipment. This resulted in an interesting piece of folk history when a unmanned British Tank was placed 500 yards from the explosion and it survived well enough to be put back into service. Nicknamed The Atomic Tank, it was used by the British military for over 20 years after the test, with some of those spent in active combat. it shows how small these early nuclear devices were that a tank would function normally after withstanding the explosion just 500 yards from the detonation site. The test detonation on October 15 produced a yield of 10 kilotons. Bombs today, at least the ones the public are aware of, can achieve a destructive force 5,000 times as strong.
The British were successful in developing their own weapons, but practicality eventually triumphed over independence. With the climate changing dramatically, the United States decided it was in their best interest to share information on nuclear technology with their allies. In 1958, the U.S. and the U.K. entered into an official mutual defense pact, which is still in effect today. Britain still opted for a nuclear strategy focused on deterrence of an attack. At all times, there is at least one British submarine at sea somewhere in the world with instructions to retaliate in kind for any nuclear attacks against Britain.
Epilogue:
Australia really is the sort of place you could detonate an atomic bomb with no-one noticing. In the early summer of 1993, there was an unexplained seismic event recorded in Western Australia, accompanied by eye-witness reports of a fireball in the sky. While several possible explanations have been offered, including a meteorite or a mine explosion, none of them fully explain the sheer size of the explosion that happened. There is speculation, and it would be the most complete explanation for the event, that a group of Japanese terrorists, the same who had released deadly gas into the Tokyo subway, were developing and testing their own nuclear bomb. This has never been proven, however these terrorists have been known to hold property in the region. Regardless, it goes to show how inestimably huge and barren the Australian wilderness truly is. In his book In A Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson notes of the potentially nuclear event that Australia is a country “so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world’s first non-governmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed.”
