[CTRL] Nuclear Bomb Tested In Aussie Rainforest?

[William Shannon]

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/newsdaily/s312457.htm Nuclear bomb may have been tested in Australian rainforest Declassified Australian government documents reportedly suggest a nuclear bomb may have been detonated in a tropical rainforest in northern Queensland at the height of the Cold War. The documents are reported in the latest edition of New Scientist magazine. They show that Britain, the United States and Australia set off a 50-tonne bomb in the rainforest at Iron Range in north Queensland in 1963 as part of a secret military experiment codenamed Operation Blowdown. Its detonation was designed to test how the rainforest would react to such an impact. But while the Australian documents describe the blast as testing the effect of a nuclear explosion, the British government says it was a conventional bomb designed to simulate an air-detonated nuclear device. However, declassified records in the National Archives of Australia describe Operation Blowdown as "an investigation into the effect of nuclear explosions in a tropical forest". (06:54:57 AEST)