Wayne Reynolds

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

In 2004, the year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Stefan Halper, a senior diplomat who had served Republican administrations from Nixon to Reagan, published America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, a celebrated and scathing critique of the neo-conservative influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy. It was different after World War II, thought Halper, when US forces were welcomed as liberators. The occupations of Germany and Japan became models of what could be achieved. It is a theme that has found some resonance in the Obama administration.

Andrew Rotter does not usually write about nuclear weapons. The Colgate University Charles A. Dana Professor of History is known for his works on twentieth-century American diplomatic history. He was approached, ‘out of the blue’, by David Reynolds in the summer of 2001, just before the attack on the Twin Towers. Reynolds, well known for his writings on the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the two English-speaking powers on either side of the Atlantic, was advising Oxford University Press on its series of the significant events of the twentieth century. Few events were more significant than the use of a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima in August 1945.

This is a timely book. Alan Parkinson argues that the Howard government, which is on the verge of committing Australia to a future in which nuclear power will play a major role, cannot be trusted with the implementation of such an undertaking. A key part of a nuclear programme will be the disposal of nuclear waste, including high-level toxic wastes which will have to be encased in safe storage for thousands of years. Yet the government, which advocates this future, has proved to be singularly unsuccessful in cleaning up the more modest problems from the past – the ongoing saga of the clean-up of the Maralinga test site.

Beyond Belief is yet another account of the atomic tests that were conducted in Australia between 1952 and 1962. It does not deal with nuclear strategy, the technical aspects of nuclear weapons or their delivery systems. It is weak on secondary sources, and there is no reference to archival records. The absence of footnoting makes it of limited use for detailed scholarship. It relies to a great extent on the 1984-85 McClelland Royal Commission for a discussion of the reasons behind the bomb tests, the so-called ‘Black Mist’ incident, the undeclared use of Cobalt in the trials and the poor oversight of the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Commission. The section of the book, based on the writing of Alan Parkinson, dealing with the problems in cleaning up the test sites is useful, but hardly new.

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb is one of the  great ‘what ifs’ of Australian history. Until now it has also been one of the greatest unknowns. According to Historian Wayne Reynolds, a convenient fiction has arisen which holds that all that really happened was that the Anglophile Menzies government allowed Britain to test its bombs at Maralinga to no great effect, except a legacy of radiation poisoning and contamination. The truth, he says, is much more complex, interesting and profound.

In his foreword to Doc Evatt, Jim Hagan claims that this is the fourth full-length biography of Dr. H.V. Evatt and suggests that only one other Australian politician has scored as many. Leaving aside the fact that Allan Dalziel never pretended that his book, Evatt the Enigma, was anything more than a profile of the man he worked with for twenty years, these assertions create the misleading impression that a substantial body of literature on Evatt exists. Academics have long lamented the lack of a comprehensive and scholarly biography of one of Australia’s most important and complex judicial and political figures. The very recent appearance of Peter Crockett’s Evatt: A life, characterised by wide-ranging research but a crude psychoanalytical approach, chronic disorganisation, a weakness in the analysis of international affairs, and a lack of historical perspective, disappointed in many ways.