An ephemeral artefact of British nuclear testing - the "special souvenir edition" of an internal newspaper produced by the Royal Army Education Corps, stationed on Kiritimati (then known as Christmas Island), during the first major British atomic tests in the Kiribati Islands of the South Pacific. These two explosions were the Grapple 1 "Short Granite" test of 0.3 megatons on 15th May 1957, and the Grapple 2 "Orange Herald" 0.72 megaton test two weeks later on May 31st.
Having participated in the Manhattan Project at the start of the Cold War, Britain was keen to join the nuclear age. "In the late 1950s, nearly 14,000 British military personnel and scientific staff travelled to the British Gilbert and Ellis Island Colony (GEIC) in the central Pacific to support the United Kingdom's hydrogen bomb testing program. In this military deployment, codenamed Operation Grapple, the British personnel were joined by hundreds of NZ sailors, Gilbertese labourers, and Fijian troops. Many witnessed the nine atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at Malden Island and Christmas (Kiritimati) Island between May 1957 and September 1958" (Maclellan, 1).
Issues of the programme's newspaper, like the present example, were produced in editions of around 2500 copies to serve these operations personnel. This special issue was produced immediately after the first test, and the content includes what must be some of the most immediate published accounts of the experiments. For example: "A flash, stark and blinding, high in the Pacific Sky, signalled to the world today Britain's emergence as a top-ranking power of the nuclear age. No one saw it! No human eye could survive the hellish glare of white-hot air brought to incandescence by the fantastic heat. But those who were present on this historic occasion, backs turned to the explosion nearly thirty miles away, could sense the brilliant intensity of the flash through closed eyelids. Even through thick clothing a flush of warmth penetrated to the body." Indeed, the issue also boasts at being the "only English paper to carry the news under a 15 May dateline", with the eye-witness account written by the Mid-Pacific News observer on HMS Warrior signalled back to the Joint Operations Centre where the paper's editor waited to slot it into the special issue. The rest of the paper's content contains interviews with the task force commander Air Vice Marshall W.E. Oulton and Scientific Director W.R.J. Cook as well as features on the Valiant 818 which dropped the bomb, and other aircraft involved in the operation.
Both veterans of Operation Grapple and the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands on which the tests were conducted would claim detrimental health impacts from the radiation exposure in the decades to come. Little compensation has ever been awarded against these claims. The horrifying aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Cold War arms race projects like the present, would equally inspire global counter campaigns for nuclear disarmament in the decades which followed.
These publications are rare. The Imperial War Museum hold three issues, the present plus numbers 243, 31st March 1957 & 245, 3 June 1957. The National Library of Scotland lists the present issue also, included in a broken run: "Christmas Magazine [1956]; no. 154,211,229,234,262,280, 1957". Remarkably, OCLC records no copies in North America or Australia. None found through Rare book Hub.
Maclellan, N. Grappling with the Bomb: Britain's Pacific H-bomb tests. (Canberra, ANU Press, 2017).
