| http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/16/world/world8.html
Political H-bomb: how NZ rejected British tests New Zealand turned down a request from Britain to test its first H-bomb on an island less than 1,000 kilometres from Auckland, its biggest city, a historian has revealed. Mr John Crawford, the New Zealand Defence Force official historian, said British Prime Minister Anthony Eden approached his counterpart Sid Holland in May 1955 for permission to explode a device in the atmosphere over the sub-tropical Kermadec Islands. "The existing sites in Australia, used for atomic tests, could not be used because the Government of Sir Robert Menzies had ruled out the testing of thermonuclear weapons on or near the Australian mainland," he said. Mr Crawford, who heads a Defence Ministry inquiry into a claim that five New Zealand officers were guinea pigs in atomic tests in Australia, stumbled on the story during earlier research. Holland was "rather disturbed" by the proposal, despite Eden's insistence that wind patterns on the islands, north-east of the New Zealand mainland, rendered the site "completely safe". He consulted scientist Ernest Marsden who told him that, following unfavourable public reaction to a 1954 plan to explode an H-bomb in Antarctica, there was likely to be a "howl" of protest over using the Kermadec Islands. In July 1955 Holland told Sir Geoffrey Scoones, the British High Commissioner, that the use of the Kermadecs would be a "political H-bomb". No nuclear testing was ever carried out on New Zealand territory. Wellington and Canberra have called for details of the experiments after claims the British used servicemen as guinea pigs to help monitor the effects of nuclear fallout on combat troops. Two Kiwi veterans of Britain's nuclear tests in the 1950s recalled yesterday being ordered to walk and crawl through an Australian desert shortly after authorities set off a nuclear bomb there. The Telegraph, London; New Zealand Press Association |
