Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests, by Nic Maclellan

Abstract

Some sixty years after Britain conducted a series of thermo-nuclear weapons tests in the British colony of Gilbert and Ellice Islands (today’s Republic of Kiribati), the legacy of these trials, especially their environmental and human health effects, remains a source of controversy. Alluding in its title to the code-name of these nine tests, Operation Grapple, which the British government carried out on Christmas Island and Malden Island in 1957 and 1958, Nic Maclellan’s book offers a fresh look at this important chapter in nuclear history. His study takes an unconventional approach: not only does its author reveal in the introduction his activist motivation behind the project, but he also approaches the topic through a series of historical actors who were, in different capacities, involved in the thermonuclear trials. Alongside members of the local populations affected by, and soldiers or civil servants taking part in, these hydrogen bomb tests, Maclellan tells the story of Operation Grapple through the eyes of the British commander of Operation Grapple (Wilfred Oulten), the (former) British prime ministers Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan and the United States President John F. Kennedy, who arranged for Christmas Island to be used for United States thermonuclear testing in the early 1960s.