Britain, Australia and the Bomb; The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath

New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Second Edition [stated]. First Printing [stated]. Trade Paperback. Good. xiv, 322 pages. Illustrations. Some cover wear noted. Includes List of Five Tables, 1 Figure, and 5 Maps; List of Photographs; List of Abbreviations. Foreword by Air Marshal the Lord Garden KCB. Preface; and List of Abbreviations. Chapters cover Atomic Policies and Policymakers; Why Australia?; Hurricane--1952; Totem--1953; A Pregnant Pause: 1953-56; Maralinga--A Permanent Proving Ground; Mosaic--1956; Buffalo--1956; 'There Must be Further Trials to Come'--Weapons Planning, 1956-57; Antler and After; Kittens, Rats and Vixens; The Maralinga Range after 1963; Health and Safety and the National Radiological Protection Board Studies; and In Retrospect. Also contains Appendix A: Memorandum of Arrangements between the United Kingdom and Australian Governments; Appendix B: Memorandum Respecting the Termination of the Memorandum of Arrangements between the United Kingdom and Australian Governments of 7 March 1956, concerning the Atomic Weapons Proving ground-Maralinga. This is followed by Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Britain, Australia and the Bomb tells the story of the unique partnership between the two countries to develop nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s. This new edition includes fresh evidence about the weapons under development, the effects of the tests on participants, and the recent clean-up of the testing range. Lorna Arnold, who lived to be 98, was the official historian of Britain's nuclear project and the author of landmark books on the Windscale reactor accident of 1957, on British nuclear testing in Australia and on the development of the hydrogen bomb. She brought to these controversial subjects the highest standards of official history writing, and as a result was able to command the respect of both opponents and supporters of the nuclear deterrent, at times when the two could agree on little else. Her views and habits were shaped in the wartime civil service, where she worked supporting high-level War Office committees, and then in the Foreign Office department that planned the postwar occupation of Germany. She went to Berlin in 1945 to put the plans into action, and then as a diplomat to Washington.
Her experiences taught her a profound respect for the best in British public service and a fierce intolerance of anything less than the best. This rigor she later applied to the people and events she wrote about as a historian, always seeing it as her job to place a clear and accurate story before the public rather than to serve the interests of the nuclear establishment. She was recruited to the civil service on the outbreak of war; there her shrewdness and administrative ability shone through, so that by the time she moved to occupation planning her staff included three majors (all men) and her deputy was the young writer Goronwy Rees. In the unstable Berlin of 1945, where she slept with a revolver under her pillow and was greeted by soldiers as "Miss Rainbow, sir!", she was UK secretary to the economic directorate, engaged in constant, difficult negotiations with the Russians, French and Americans. A short assignment to Washington in 1946 to discuss cost-sharing for the occupation turned into a full-time post at the embassy there. A chance encounter in Russell Square with a former Berlin colleague brought her back into the Atomic Energy Authority. First she worked in health and safety, and then she took a position managing records and supporting the official historian, Margaret Gowing. Her first published output was six chapters of Gowing's 1974 work, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-52, and then, as Gowing wound down her involvement, Arnold took wing. A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia (1987) addressed what was then a highly controversial subject with the fairness and clarity that would become her hallmark. Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident (1992) revealed her talent, as a non-scientist, for incorporating challenging science in a dramatic narrative, again while navigating highly charged debates about blame. Britain and the H-Bomb (2001), published when she was 85 and her sight was deteriorating, maintained her very highest standards. She was not only an astute exploiter of records: she had a remarkable gift for making people talk. Her books never lose track of the people among the policies and events.