Toxic Ashes of Empire: Australia’s Nuclear Legacy and the Global Reckoning

 

Hidden deep within the ochre wilderness of the Great Victoria Desert, Emu Field and Maralinga hold secrets that shimmer with radioactive concerns. Between 1953 and 1963, these South Australian sites hosted British nuclear tests.

These experiments reshaped atomic strategy and cast long shadows over 22,000 UK troops, 16,000 Australian personnel, and countless Indigenous communities.

My own father as a conscripted National Serviceman could easily have been sent as a khaki guinea pig to the Oz tests like thousands of others and trapped in secrecy and medical tests.

At Emu Field, the Totem I test unleashed the infamous “black mist,” drifting fallout across hundreds of kilometres and reportedly causing burns, blindness, and nausea in remote communities. Horrifyingly, unlike Maralinga—which saw partial remediation—Emu Field was never cleaned(!). The radioactive debris remains in situ, scattered across the scorched sand amidst silence.

Maralinga’s legacy is equally disturbing. Over 600(!) minor trials, including Vixen B, dispersed 3 kilograms of plutonium-239, enough to construct a nuclear warhead(!) and remain hazardous for 24,000 years. Budget constraints led to shallow trench burials rather than vitrification, prompting whistleblower outcry and ongoing concern. Some veterans compare their fate to Agent Orange victims: “an army still waiting to die, still waiting to be believed.”

ISIS booking their Qantas flights with an empty suitcase to Maralinga to go prospecting for WMD souvenirs as you read this?

Meanwhile, far from Enola Gay, Australia’s veterans received partial justice via Gold Cards and pensions, while France’s Morin Law yielded only two successful compensation claims for Algerians out of thousands potentially affected by nuclear testing in Reggane and In Ekker. Forms weren't translated(!) until decades later. Many survivors still lack digital access to apply. It’s a pattern mirrored globally: belated recognition, limited redress in a deny and delay closed loop. A bureaucratic fog deeper than the Black Mist of Emu Field.

As #VJ80 nears the global nuclear backdrop has evolved—but not necessarily improved. Israel’s ambiguity over its arsenal, along with repeated concerns over USA B-2 bomber raids targeting Iran's nukes research, keeps the Middle East on edge. As tensions flare, the ghosts of tests past return: uranium in the soil, leukaemia in the blood, plutonium in buried drums beneath remote deserts. 

Sellafield in UK, once a symbol of atomic optimism, now struggles with managing legacy waste as Europe's most toxic place. In Nevada, plutonium from underground tests still contaminates aquifers. AUKUS promises submarines and deterrence—yet offers no roadmap for its radioactive by-products: an astonishing oversight all the more grave given the scandal of Emu Field.

UK and Oz must surely be united in wanting proper 21C clean-up for the thousands of radioactive years ahead? And urging the same in Oceania with France and USA.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) remains stalled. 35 of the 44 Annex 2 nations have ratified; the U.S., China, Iran, Israel (supposedly without nukes), Egypt, India, Pakistan and North Korea have not. Russia withdrew its ratification in 2023, citing American inaction. Until all 44 ratify, the treaty languishes, and nuclear testing remains technically legal. 

And, despite the blinding flash of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, East Asia remains a nuclear flashpoint with only North Korea continuing tests after 2000.

But from the radioactive trenches of Chernobyl, where Russian troops reportedly dug trenches into contaminated soil during their 2022 occupation, to the chemical weapons deployed in Ukraine—including banned choking tear gas agents like chloropicrin dropped from drones—the legacy of toxic warfare continues to haunt both battlefields and bureaucracies and WMD seem to be breaking free from their chains with a vengeance. 

The Salisbury Novichok attack in 2018, targeting Putin dissident Sergei Skripal, underscored how chemical agents and WMD have crossed from Cold War arsenals into modern urban terror. 

And in the UK, scandals like the Infected blood inquiry, Grenfell Tower fire, and the Post Office Horizon case (Bates v Post Office/Fujitsu) have exposed woeful systemic failures in accountability, echoing the slow justice faced by nuclear veterans. 

France’s Morin Law and Australia’s Gold Card scheme offer partial redress for test victims, and are surely obvious templates for UK law yet many still await recognition. 

In Da Nang, Vietnam, the clean-up of Agent Orange dioxin hotspots and on USAF Oceania airbases, remains a decades-long struggle, is reminding us that environmental remediation is not just technical—it’s moral. Especially when chemical or biological weapons are the Poor Man's Nukes, quick and easy and cheap to build and use with lingering effects

A global clean-up taskforce, spanning nuclear, chemical, and industrial legacies, is no longer optional. It’s the overdue promise of “never again.”

As a priority UK must:

* inscribe a Morin Law for compensation for the remaining 1,500 khaki cancer victims and their families

* release all medical protocols and data from the tests

* establish a UK-Oz clean-up force for Emu Field and Maralinga with more than warm words for the Aborigines - should a cannister of Emu Field soil be placed in the Canberra parliament or town centre to expedite clean up?

* establish 21C protocols for AUKUS waste with monthly reporting in London and Canberra

* link said clean-up group (Task Force Geraldton?) with France and USA in Oceania - and Nevada and Algeria

* review the Commonwealth India and Pakistan tests sites - left as wasteland as Emu Field?

* urge ratification by the CTBT 8 and an end to North Korea nukes tests (6 tests 2006-17) as key steps to nuke reductions and disarmament: 5k nukes held by each of USA and Russia (just 1,700 deployed) surely overkill in 21C - a strategic excess risking a Nuclear Winter that would make Climate Change look like a Sunday picnic

* UK 225 nukes and France 290 bombs surely ripe for reduction and cost/risk sharing to under 100 each and end airforce role in delivering nukes - by RAF and USAF in NATO

* develop a remit for all WMD pollution eg Agent Orange, Iraq chemical attack waste

* sign the SEANWFZ 1995 Bangkok Treaty with France and USA, as invited, with Russia and China already signatories with ASEAN10 - as the only nuclear-free zone not yet ratified

* develop an EU force for Ukraine, Sellafield and MENA contamination clean up - hastily dug trenches as Maralinga best?

* develop a 21C state of the art clean up system for EU nuclear waste as civil reactors go offline, as dangerous and polluting and expensive, as in Germany and East Kent's Dungeness. And French, UK and Russian warheads (and USA warheads in Benelux etc) rust in warehouses - a Nuclear Cathedral if you will is required 

To leave Emu Field as a nuclear wasteland shows astonishing failure by the oversight of UN inspectors.

And the Rainbow Warrior bombing in NZ in 1985 by France, designed to silence Greenpeace anti-nuclear activism in the Pacific, to the birth defects among Marshall Islanders shows the cost of secrecy and failure is inscribed across Asia and Oceania not only in history books but in bodies and soil for generations. 

Indigenous communities in Australia and Polynesia weren’t just collateral damage—they were frontline victims, along with UK, USA, Oz, and French troops, stripped of agency, and silenced by geopolitics and bureaucratic delay.

We cannot afford another Emu Field. Another Maralinga. Another Chernobyl. Another Sellafield. A line has been drawn in the nuclear sand.