Батыс Аустралиядағы 1952 жылғы британ атом бомбасының сынағы

1952 British atomic bomb test in Western Australia

Operation Hurricane was the first test of a British atomic device. A plutonium implosion device was detonated on 3 October 1952 in Main Bay, Trimouille Island, in the Montebello Islands in Western Australia. With the success of Operation Hurricane, Britain became the third nuclear power, after the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, Britain commenced a nuclear weapons project, code named Tube Alloys, but the 1943 Quebec Agreement merged it with the American Manhattan Project. Several key British scientists worked on the Manhattan Project, but after the war the American government ended cooperation on nuclear weapons. In January 1947, a cabinet sub committee decided to resume British efforts to build nuclear weapons, in response to an apprehension of American isolationism and fears of Britain losing its great power status. The project was called High Explosive Research, and was directed by Lord Portal, with William Penney in charge of bomb design. Implicit in the decision to develop atomic bombs was the need to test them. The preferred site was the Pacific Proving Grounds in the US controlled Marshall Islands. As a fallback, sites in Canada and Australia were considered. The Admiralty suggested that the Montebello Islands might be suitable, so the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee, sent a request to the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies. The Australian government formally agreed to the islands being used as a nuclear test site in May 1951. In February 1952, Attlee's successor, Winston Churchill, announced in the House of Commons that the first British atomic bomb test would occur in Australia before the end of the year. A small fleet was assembled for Operation Hurricane under the command of Rear Admiral A. D. Torlesse; it included the escort carrier , which served as the flagship, and the LSTs Narvik, Zeebrugge and Tracker. Leonard Tyte from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston was appointed the technical director. The bomb for Operation Hurricane was assembled (without its radioactive components) at Foulness and taken to the frigate for transport to Australia. On reaching the Montebello Islands, the five Royal Navy ships were joined by eleven Royal Australian Navy ships, including the aircraft carrier To test the effects of a ship smuggled atomic bomb on a port (a threat of great concern to the British at the time), the bomb was exploded inside the hull of Plym, anchored off Trimouille Island. The explosion occurred below the water line and left a saucer shaped crater on the seabed deep and across.

The December 1938 discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann—and its explanation and naming by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch—raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created. During the Second World War, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium 235, and found that instead of tonnes, as everyone had assumed, as little as would suffice, which would explode with the power of thousands of tonnes of dynamite. In response, Britain initiated an atomic bomb project, codenamed Tube Alloys. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, and the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Quebec Agreement, which merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project to create a combined British, American and Canadian project. The British contribution to the Manhattan Project included assistance in the development of gaseous diffusion technology at the SAM Laboratories in New York, and the electromagnetic separation process at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. John Cockcroft became the director of the joint British Canadian Montreal Laboratory. A British mission to the Los Alamos Laboratory led by James Chadwick, and later Peierls, included scientists such as Geoffrey Taylor, James Tuck, Niels Bohr, William Penney, Frisch, Ernest Titterton, and Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a spy for the Soviet Union. As overall head of the British Mission, Chadwick forged a close and successful partnership with Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, and ensured that British participation was complete and wholehearted. With the end of the war the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States "became very much less special". The British government had trusted that America would share nuclear technology, which the British saw as a joint discovery, but the terms of the Quebec Agreement remained secret. Senior members of the United States Congress were horrified when they discovered that it gave the British a veto over the use of nuclear weapons. On 9 November 1945, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee, and the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, went to Washington, DC, to confer with Truman about future cooperation in nuclear weapons and nuclear power. They signed a Memorandum of Intention that replaced the Quebec Agreement. It made Canada a full partner, and reduced the obligation to obtain consent for the use of nuclear weapons to merely requiring consultation. The three leaders agreed that there would be full and effective cooperation on civil and military applications of atomic energy, but the British were soon disappointed; the Americans made it clear that cooperation was restricted to basic scientific research. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) ended technical cooperation. Its control of "restricted data" prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information. Attlee set up a cabinet sub committee, the Gen 75 Committee (known informally as the "Atomic Bomb Committee"), on 10 August 1945 to examine the feasibility of a nuclear weapons program. In October 1945, it accepted a recommendation that responsibility be placed within the Ministry of Supply. The Tube Alloys Directorate was transferred from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to the Ministry of Supply on 1 November 1945. To coordinate the effort, Lord Portal, the wartime Chief of the Air Staff, was appointed Controller of Production, Atomic Energy (CPAE), with direct access to the Prime Minister. An Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) was established at RAF Harwell, south of Oxford, under the directorship of Cockcroft. AERE moved to Aldermaston in 1952. Christopher Hinton agreed to oversee the design, construction and operation of the new atomic weapons facilities. These included a new uranium plant at Springfields in Lancashire, and nuclear reactors and plutonium processing facilities at Windscale in Cumbria. Hinton established his headquarters in a former Royal Ordnance Factory at Risley in Lancashire on 4 February 1946. In July 1946, the Chiefs of Staff Committee recommended that Britain acquire nuclear weapons. They estimated that 200 bombs would be required by 1957. Despite this, and the research and construction of production facilities that had already been approved, there was still no official decision to proceed with making atomic bombs. Portal submitted a proposal to do so at the 8 January 1947 meeting of the Gen 163 Committee, a subcommittee of the Gen 75 Committee, which agreed to proceed with the development of atomic bombs. It also endorsed his proposal to place Penney, now the Chief Superintendent Armament Research (CSAR) at Fort Halstead in Kent, in charge of the bomb development effort, which was codenamed High Explosive Research. Penney contended that "the discriminative test for a first class power is whether it has made an atomic bomb and we have either got to pass the test or suffer a serious loss of prestige both inside this country and internationally." Although the British government had committed to the development of an independent nuclear deterrent, it still hoped for a restoration of the nuclear Special Relationship with the Americans. It was therefore important that nothing be done that would jeopardise this.

To coordinate the test, codenamed "Operation Hurricane", the British government established a Hurricane Executive Committee chaired by the Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Edward Evans Lombe. It held its first meeting in May 1951. To deal with it, an Australian Hurricane Panel was created, chaired by the Australian Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, Captain Alan McNicoll. Its other members were Colonel John Wilton from the Australian Army, Group Captain Alister Murdoch from the RAAF and Charles Spry from Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Cassels or his representative was invited to attend its meetings. A pressing question was that of observers. Churchill decided to exclude the media and members of the UK parliament. As Canada was a party to the 1948 Modus Vivendi, Canadian scientists and technicians would have access to all technical data, but Australians would not. Penney was anxious to secure the services of Titterton, who had recently emigrated to Australia, as he had worked on the American Trinity and Crossroads tests. Menzies asked the vice chancellor of the Australian National University, Sir Douglas Copland, to release Titterton to work on Operation Hurricane. Cockcroft also wanted assistance from Leslie Martin, the Department of Defence's Science Advisor, who was also a professor of physics at the University of Melbourne, to work in the health physics area. The two men knew each other from their time at Cambridge University before the war. After some argument, Martin was accepted as an official observer, as was W. A. S. Butement, the Chief Scientist at the Department of Supply. The only other official observer was Solandt from Canada. An advance party of No. 5 Airfield Construction Squadron from RAAF Base Williamtown, New South Wales, moved to Onslow in August 1951 with heavy construction equipment, taking the train to Geraldton and then the road to Onslow. This was then transported to the Montebello Islands. A prefabricated hut was taken across by Karangai, along with equipment for establishing a meteorological station. Other materiel was moved from Onslow to the islands in lots in an ALC 40 landing craft manned by the Australian Army and towed by Karangai. This included two bulldozers, a grader, tip trucks, portable generators, water tanks and a mobile radio transceiver. The hut was erected, and the meteorological station henceforth manned by an RAAF officer and four assistants. Roads and landings were constructed, and camp sites established. The next stage of work began in February 1952, in the wake of the December decision to proceed with the test. A detachment of No. 5 Airfield Construction Squadron was flown to Onslow from RAAF Bankstown in two RAAF Dakota aircraft, and were then taken to the islands by the Bathurst class corvette Karangai fetched of Marston Mat from Darwin that was used for road works and hardstands. The SS Dorrigo brought in another three weeks later. A water supply was also developed. To bring water from the Fortescue River, a quantity of Victaulic coupling pipe was brought from the Department of Works in Sydney and the Woomera Rocket Range in South Australia. Because the pipe was laid around obstacles, this proved to be insufficient. No more pipe was in storage, so a firm in Melbourne was asked to make some. An order was placed on a Friday evening, and the pipe was shipped the following Thursday morning, making its way to the Fortescue River by road and rail. The system delivered up to per hour to a jetty on the Fortescue estuary, from which it was taken to the islands by the 120ft Motor Lighter MWL 251. The British assembled a small fleet for Operation Hurricane that included the escort carrier , which served as the flagship, and the LSTs Narvik, Zeebrugge and Tracker, under the command of Rear Admiral A. D. Torlesse. Leonard Tyte from the AERE was appointed the technical director. Campania had five aircraft embarked, three Westland WS 51 Dragonfly helicopters and two Supermarine Sea Otter amphibians. Between them, the LSTs carried five LCMs and twelve LCAs. The bomb, less its radioactive components, was assembled at Foulness, and then taken to the River class frigate on 5 June 1952 for transport to Australia. It took Campania and Plym eight weeks to make the voyage, as they sailed around the Cape of Good Hope instead of traversing the Suez Canal, because there was unrest in Egypt at the time. The Montebello Islands were reached on 8 August. Plym was anchored in of water, off Trimouille Island. Rough seas prevented much work being done between 10 and 14 August. It took about an hour and a half to get from Campania to H2, and travelling between Plym and Campania took between two and three hours. Even when a boat was on call it could take 45 minutes to respond. Boat availability soon became a problem with only five LCMs, leaving personnel waiting for one to arrive. The twelve smaller LCAs were also employed; although they could operate when the tides made waters too shallow for the pinnaces, their wooden bottoms were easily holed by coral outcrops. On 15 August, some men were transferred from Campania by one of its three Dragonfly helicopters, but the weather closed in and they could not be picked up again, having to find shelter on Tracker and Zeebrugge, which were moored in the lagoon. To get around these problems, tented camps were established for the scientists at H1 on Hermite Island and Cocoa Beach (also known as T2) on Trimouille Island. Scientific rehearsals were held on 12 and 13 September. This was followed by an operational rehearsal on 19 September, which included fully assembling the bomb, since the radioactive components had arrived the day before on a Sunderland. Penney arrived by air on 22 September. Everything was ready by 30 September, and the only remaining factor was the weather. This was unfavourable on 1 October but improved the following day, when Penney designated 3 October as the date for the test. The final countdown commenced at 07:45 local time on 3 October 1952. Plym was moored a few hundred metres west of T2 (approx 20°24'16"S, 115°34"E). The bomb was successfully detonated at 07:59:24 on 3 October 1952 local time, which was 23:59:24 on 2 October 1952 UTC, 00:59:24 on 3 October in London, and 07:59:24 on 3 October in Perth. The yield was estimated at All that was left of Plym was a "gluey black substance" that washed up on the shore of Trimouille Island. Derek Hickman, a Royal Engineer observing the blast aboard Zeebrugge, later said of Plym, "all that was left of her were a few fist sized pieces of metal that fell like rain, and the shape of the frigate scorched on the sea bed." The bomb had performed exactly as expected. Two Dragonfly helicopters flew in to gather a sample of contaminated seawater from the lagoon. Scientists in gas masks and protective gear visited points in pinnaces to collect samples and retrieve recordings. Tracker controlled this aspect, as it had the decontamination facilities. Air samples were collected by RAAF Avro Lincoln aircraft. Although the feared tidal surge had not occurred, radioactive contamination of the islands was widespread and severe. It was clear that had an atomic bomb exploded in a British port, it would have been a catastrophe worse than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Torlesse was supposed to accompany him, but in view of the degree of radioactive contamination, he felt he could not leave his command. He sent Captain D. P. Willan, the skipper of Narvik in his stead. The Royal Navy ships departed the Montebello Islands on 31 October. Most of the scientific staff were dropped off at Fremantle, and returned to Britain on RAF Transport Command aircraft. The rest returned on Campania, which arrived in the United Kingdom on 15 December. Hawkesbury continued to patrol the area until 15 January 1953.