Abstract
Britain considered testing nuclear weapons in northern Manitoba but found the climate in Australia much more agreeable.
Canada's pristine, sub-arctic territory now famous as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” came close to becoming a British nuclear testing site in the early years of the Cold War.
Hudson Bay, northern Manitoba.
Britain eyed the area in northern Manitoba as a proving ground for its first operational nuclear bomb, the “Blue Danube,” a 25-kiloton weapon slightly larger than those used against Japan, according to declassified Canadian military documents. The Canadian government was a willing partner in the top-secret plan, which envisioned the detonation of 12 first- and second-generation atomic weapons near Churchill, Manitoba, between 1953 and 1959.
In the end, though, northern Canada's disagreeable climate was its saving grace. The British decided the proposed site was too cold and would be uncomfortable for their research scientists. Britain cast its gaze in stead upon Australia, where the warm climate and hospitable prime minister made for a more attractive testing location.
Polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba.
January 1952: William Penney (right) arrives at Emu Field in Australia to direct Britain's atomic tests.
The plan for Canada
The 20-page, top-secret “Technical Feasibility of Establishing an Atomic-Weapons Proving Ground in the Churchill Area,” was downgraded to “confidential” status in 1994, in cooperation with Britain. An informal declassification of the document later that summer by Canada's National Defence Directorate of History allowed the record to be opened, but it remained ignored and unexamined until earlier this year.
The Churchill plan was written in 1949–1950 by C. P. McNamara of Canada's Defence Research Board and William George (later Lord) Pen-ney, an official in Britain's Ministry of Supply. Penney had worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1945; in 1950 he became the head of Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment. He was knighted for his leadership in developing the British nuclear bomb and was sometimes called the Oppenheimer of Britain.
The plan they drafted called for testing as many as 12 atomic devices at or above ground level near Churchill. Ground zero was to be a site near the mouth of the Broad River, located 100 kilometers southeast of Churchill on Hudson Bay, now part of Wapusk National Park.
The experiments were to begin in the summer of 1953 and include tests of the weapon physics, blast effects, functioning, and ballistics of operational weapons. British soldiers and scientists would have moved to the area for the initial tests. At least 150 scientific and experimental officers, 50 scientific assistants, 50 technicians, and 100 industrial specialists were required for the experiments. All labor and construction would have been provided by Canada. The plan also considered making the grounds available for U.S. nuclear testing, although whether the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was interested is unknown.
At the time, Canada was a significant military power. It finished World War II with the world's fourth largest navy, and its well-equipped ground and air forces made the country a valuable, if unappreciated, military ally. In the 1950s, the tiny port town of Churchill had only 600 civilian residents, although some 6,000 Canadian and U.S. soldiers were stationed 8 kilometers east at Fort Churchill.
Churchill lies in a remote area about 1,600 kilometers north of the provincial capital of Winnipeg. The hundreds of polar bears that gather there each autumn have made it an international tourist destination. The area is also popular with whale watchers and scientists who are interested in arctic and sub-arctic botany, geology, and ecology.
It is a delicate ecosystem, and fallout from nuclear tests would have devastated the landscape. Radioactive particles would have blown southeast toward Toronto, Montreal, and New York, and drifted as far as Scandinavia. The 12 bomb sites would still be radioactive today, and people would be banned from the area that is now a national park.
Records indicate, however, that other sites in Canada were considered for Britain's nuclear proving grounds. Hudson Bay's Belcher Islands were ruled out not because of the abundance of arctic salmon and other wildlife, but because of the difficulty of establishing a permanent airstrip. Other sites considered but rejected early on include Port Nelson in Manitoba; Coral Harbor on Southampton Island and Eskimo Point (now Arviat) in Nunavut Territory; Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island; and Suffield, Alberta.
The nuclear-testing plan is the latest skeleton to come out of Canada's Cold War closet. In 1998, the country was shocked to discover the extent of U.S. nuclear deployments in Canada from 1963 to 1984. The revelation that Canada was prepared to sacrifice part of its territory to nuclear testing has evoked little reaction in the country–after all, it never happened–but some of the people who would have been most directly affected are not amused.
Mike Spence, Churchill's mayor, was appalled when he learned that the land near his prosperous town (population now 1,100) had nearly been a nuclear testing site for Britain. “They were going to do what?” asked Spence incredulously. “Is that how little they thought of us?” The 47-year-old Spence, who was born in Churchill, found it hard to believe. Yet nuclear testing was much less unbelievable in the context of the early 1950s.
In 1949, when the plan was apparently conceived, the Cold War was in full swing, and Canadians were being conditioned to hate and fear the communist menace. The world feared another world war, one that would be much more terrible than the previous two. That year alone, the world watched nervously as the Soviets blockaded Berlin, tightened their grip on Eastern Europe, and tested their first nuclear bomb. The People's Republic of China was born, and war clouds gathered over Korea.
And in 1950, the dangers of nuclear testing were still largely unknown. Las Vegas residents watched the Nevada tests from deck chairs by their swimming pools–the ground tremors and mushroom clouds that rose from the desert made for some pretty good entertainment in those days.
There is no way to know whether the Canadian government would have given the final go-ahead to implement the Churchill plan, but it can reasonably be assumed that approval would have been a mere formality. Penney and McNamara must have had at least top-level support for the investigation and planning stages.
This is not to say there wouldn't have been military opposition to the plan in Canada. When the British proposed in 1950 that the United States station atomic bombs in Canada for the use of the British Bomber Command, the Canadian chiefs of staff said no. Canada would not serve as a halfway house for nuclear weapons.
Only Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent could have granted approval for the testing site. No evidence has been uncovered to show that the elaborate proposal, which included detailed plans for roads, barracks, and other infrastructure, ever went to the ministerial level.
In any event, British attention eventually turned firmly in the direction of Australia, not least because of the open spaces, lack of population, distance from Soviet spies, and warm sunny skies and beaches.
Another factor may have been the inviting attitude of Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Evidence suggests that Menzies did not even consult his cabinet before approving the British request for testing rights. Judge James McClelland, who presided over the 1984–1985 Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into the effects of the tests, said that Menzies “just said yes.” The inquiry also discovered that Maralinga, one of several test sites used by the British, remains heavily radioactively contaminated, and that as a result, even more than 40 years after the tests, people in the area still face health hazards.
The fallout
Those who planned the Churchill tests knew they were playing with fire but seemed oblivious to the longterm consequences of nuclear testing.
October 3, 1952: The first British atomic test, off the coast of northwestern Australia.
Based on data from earlier U.S. nuclear tests, the scientists concluded that the area within 500 meters of ground zero would be “lethal for a day or two but a rapid decay of radioactivity will occur.” It would be at least one to two weeks before specially suited scientists could enter the area for even short durations. Each test would require a new ground zero, and none could be closer than 5 kilometers to another in successive years.
Penney and McNamara concluded that it would be inappropriate to test at or under water inside Canada. This method was reserved for Pacific islands. The science team noted that such tests would “precipitate on the ground or sea large quantities of highly contaminated water.”
The report emphasized the need for secrecy: “Every effort must be made to keep secret the nature of the trial before the event…. Once detonation has occurred, there will be little hope of keeping secret the fact that an atomic explosion has taken place. Some cover name must be invented to explain why men and equipment are being taken into the base.” (It is now known that several Soviet spies operated in the area, so the secret would have been kept only from the public, not from the Kremlin.)
In language that seems naïve and callous today, Penney and McNama-ra described all the land near Churchill as “valueless.” It was described as a “wasteland suitable only for hunting and trapping.” The authors also noted that because the prevailing winds came from the north and the site was south of the town, “no contamination of this inhabited area [Churchill] should result, nor will any source of drinking water be affected.”
McNamara and Penney concluded that besides the severely contaminated area at ground zero, a band of contamination would blow downwind, gradually fanning out and decreasing in intensity. They stated there would be “little risk of any serious contaminated fallout” beyond 50 kilometers. The scientists acknowledged that some contamination would occur up to 160 kilometers downwind, although winds from either the northwest or southwest “will not contaminate any area of any importance.” The team decided that no humans should be allowed inside an area from ground zero to 160 kilometers downwind, in a 20 degree arc to either side of the wind direction. “The slight fallout of contamination south and southeast of the Broad River,” McNamara continued, “will not affect the white whale fishing off the mouth of the Churchill River.”
But nuclear testing would have done serious, long-term damage to Churchill's environment. The watershed around the Broad River does not have good drainage; it is a region full of small lakes and swamps, sitting on permafrost. The relatively dry climate and ice of the far north would trap radioactivity for much longer than in wet climates. Radiation contamination in the area would have sat undisturbed for years.
1957: Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
The ecosystem of the far north is also very shallow, depending on only a few life forms. Radiation would have contaminated the moss, lichen, mushrooms, and other vegetation and then quickly entered the mammalian food chain.
After the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl failed in 1986, spewing radioactive particles into the sky, it took only two days before radiation turned up 1,600 kilometers to the north in Finland's reindeer. Thousands had to be killed. To this day, Finland extensively monitors both people and reindeer, as radiation contamination still exists in the moss and lichen eaten by the reindeer.
The best example of what it takes to clean up radioactivity in far northern terrain comes from the crash of a U.S. Air Force bomber. On January 21, 1968, a B-52 crashed seven miles from Thule, Greenland. The conventional explosives in the four Mk-28 thermonuclear weapons it carried detonated, dispersing radioactive debris over a large area. To clean it up, the U.S. military dug up more than 6,700 cubic meters of contaminated ice and snow, packed it in containers, and shipped it to the United States to be buried as low-level radioactive waste.
There is no evidence to indicate that Britain planned to remediate the Churchill test site in a similar way.
The bomb
The Blue Danube was the first operational British nuclear weapon, entering service in November 1953. It left service in 1962, replaced by smaller, more powerful weapons. In all, probably as few as 22 actual Blue Danube Mk-1 bombs were produced for the Royal Air Force bomber force by the time production ended in 1958.
The Blue Danube, a 1.52-meter diameter sphere, was essentially a lab-built, limited-production fission bomb that initially used plutonium but was later modified to use a composite plutonium-uranium core. It weighed more than 4.6 metric tons and measured some 7.3 meters in length. The weapon is variously reported to have a nuclear yield of 20 kilotons, 8–25 kilotons, or up to 40 kilotons, but was often referred to as a 25-kiloton weapon–the equivalent of 25,000 metric tons of TNT.
Unlucky Australia
Exactly what would have happened at Churchill had tests there gone forward cannot be known. But if the tests conducted Down Under are any indication, then a detailed picture emerges. Most of the Churchill tests were to have been conducted from the top of a tower, according to the declassified document; others would have been air dropped.
Of the first 12 British tests conducted in Australia from 1952 to 1957, six were tower tests; four were airdrops from Vickers Valiant bombers; one was a surface blast; and the first was just below the water.
Britain detonated its first nuclear test device, “Hurricane,” on October 3, 1952, in the waters off the Monte Bello Islands in northwestern Australia. The device was 2.7 meters underwater. It yielded 25 kilotons and threw up a tremendous amount of water that returned as fallout.
Britain conducted six tower tests at four sites in Australia. Fallout from tower tests can be minimized by exploding the nuclear device at a height that prevents the explosion's fireball from touching (and vaporizing) the ground. For the 25-kiloton Blue Danube bomb, the minimum tower height required to keep local fallout negligible would have been about 210 meters. The tests were instead conducted from 31-meter towers.
In most of the Blue Danube tests, the fireball touched the ground, vaporizing the soil and rock and leaving a crater. A crater vaporized from rock would have produced about 46,500 cubic meters of debris thrown into the air as fallout. In soil, it would have produced about 100,000 cubic meters. The fallout would be radioactive and capable of traveling thousands of kilometers.
Differences in the physics packages of the various devices led to wildly different yields. The smallest was a 1.5-kiloton surface blast in 1956 at Maralinga; the most powerful, 150 kilotons in May 1957. Airdrops of more powerful physics packages saw yields from 75 to 200 kilotons at altitudes of roughly 2,300 meters. The mushroom clouds from these tests ranged in height from 5 to 14.5 kilometers.
The 10-kiloton blast of Britain's second test in Australia, detonated on October 15, 1953, at Emu Field, created three times the expected fallout–creating a “black mist” that covered aboriginal areas. But Britain's fifth test, in June 1956, was the dirtiest. The 98-kiloton blast on a standard tower on one of the Monte Bello islands resulted in massive fallout across northern Australia. The amount of fallout and radiation produced was concealed from the Australian government for 30 years.
Although Northern Canadians were spared the direct effects of nuclear testing, they did not escape completely. Fallout from nuclear testing touches every corner of the planet. Some researchers believe everybody born before the 1963 ban on atmospheric testing has been exposed to fallout. In the context of the Cold War, and the relative naiveté regarding nuclear matters that was prevalent in the early 1950s, the proposal to test nuclear devices at Churchill seems less odd.
Inhabitants of northern Canada would have been the first to suffer from tests at Churchill, but by no means the last. The radiation poisoning of the far north would, of course, have spread far and wide. •