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Read more about the article Radioactive bomber at RAAF Williamtown
A Lincoln bomber at an airshow at Williamtown RAAF base. This is presumably not the same plane as the one referred to in this article.

Radioactive bomber at RAAF Williamtown

In the 1950s Britain was upset that the USA wouldn't share its atomic bomb secrets. The Brits decided to build their own bombs and they chose to test them in Australia. Nobody will ever know how much sickness and premature death of Australians in the years that followed can be attributed to exposure to radiation and to lingering fallout from the tests. Much negligence and carelessness appears to have surrounded the exercise. The story of RAAF and other aircraft deliberately flown through radioactive mushroom clouds immediately after the atomic explosions is just one example. Sometime in…

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Growing up under the shadow of the Bomb

Nuclear war loomed over my youth the way climate change looms over that of my children’s generation. Hitting my teens in middle class white Australian society in the 1970s, I was acutely aware that the USA and the USSR were engaged in a tense Cold War and had built up vast arsenals of atomic and other weapons, arriving at the point where neither side could make a first strike against the other on account of what was called MAD – “mutually assured destruction”. We had the destruction of the environment to worry about too, but were…

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