http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steveseymour/nuke/army.html
Bali Micro Nuke - Army Officer Reported Accurate Details
Then the Australian Government demanded that his report be removed!
Copyright Joe Vialls, 5 November 2002
Australian Army officer Rodney Cox was less than fifty meters from ground zero when the bomb exploded, but survived presumably because he was in the "null zone" below the rising diagonal blast vector from the buried weapon. Captain Cox was then put in command of operations to evacuate the injured. He tells a harrowing tale, with some of his most chilling and revealing statements including, "“Then the power cut... all the power went out. I didn’t think bomb, I didn’t think anything at that stage. And then, probably, I’d say two seconds later... not even two seconds later, there was just the huge flash, and I was just covered in glass, put on the ground, and it just started ... it was like hell on earth.”
By stating that the power cut preceded the flash, Captain Cox unwittingly confirmed the critical nuclear identity of the weapon. We know that the small bomb in Paddy's bar ten seconds earlier caused only localized damage, and we now know that all of the electrical circuits in Kuta Beach were disrupted by the Source Region Electromagnetic Pulse [SREMP] emitted by the micro nuke at the point of criticality. The pulse travels through all mediums at the speed of light, and Cox noted the power cut immediately before witnessing the "huge flash" of the fireball as it burst up through the road surface. Captain Cox's recollections were printed on the front page of the Australian Army Newspaper, which in turn was placed on the Australian Army web site.
This did not please the Australian Government [for obvious reasons], and reliable sources state that the Army was ordered to remove the web page on ministerial orders, which it did. Then apparently less than 12 hours later a very senior officer countermanded the order, and insisted the page be restored. It was... Not being sure who will ultimately win this battle of the titans, I have reproduced this important story below, with correct credits and a link to the Army web site. If in the end the politicians win, there will always be a copy of the story here to fall back on.
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Hell on Earth
‘It was an absolute war zone, it was just out of control’
One man’s story of how he and other soldiers in Bali leapt into the devastation
By Cpl Jonathan Garland
AN AUSTRALIAN soldier standing less than 50m from the bomb that exploded outside the Sari nightclub in Bali escaped unhurt.
Capt Rodney Cocks, a UNMO in East Timor, was enjoying his last night of leave before flying out of Indonesia the next morning.
He had just left his companions, a New Zealand, a Portuguese and a British national, also uniformed personnel serving in East Timor, inside nearby Paddy’s to walk to the Internet café a short distance away.
“I got about 30m down the street and then I heard one blast and I thought, ‘What was that?’,” he said.
[There was a ten-second separation between the explosion at Paddy's Bar and the micro-nuke, Ed]
“Then the power cut... all the power went out. I didn’t think bomb, I didn’t think anything at that stage.
“And then, probably, I’d say two seconds later... not even two seconds later, there was just the huge flash, and I was just covered in glass, put on the ground, and it just started ... it was like hell on earth.”
As he picked himself up and shook off the shards of glass that covered him, he saw flames from the blast and the devastated buildings climbing 50m into the air.
He recognised the second explosion as a bomb but was staggered at the amount of damage caused in the blast.
“I’ve done demolitions courses with the Army and it was bigger than anything I’ve ever blown up in my time, and I’ve done a bit.
“I was very lucky. I think I got a few cuts on my feet but nothing major. I was wearing shorts, T-shirt and thongs at the time. I consider myself one of the luckiest people alive, I really do.”
Prompted by his military training, his first reaction was to find the friends he had left in the bar and evacuate them and as many others as possible.
“By the time I picked myself up there were already people moving out away from the scene.
“I picked one girl up there - she had burns all over her body, so I grabbed her.
“I later heard she’d been assessed as having burns to 95 per cent of her body and that she hadn’t survived her injuries.
“We regrouped, got our people, helped the people we could, which, you know, was just bloody impossible, there were just so many people injured.”
“My main concern at this time was the girl I had in my arms, who was the one who had all the burns.”
The group took some of the injured back to their hotel and organised the hotel truck to take them to hospital, before going back to the scene of the explosion.
“I grabbed my phone, my head torch, my passport and my Army ID. The other guys did as well.
“From there... we started treating other people. At that stage I came across an Australian Army sergeant from 1RAR, he was on leave from Butterworth.
“He was pretty badly injured and we got him off to hospital and later evacced back to Townsville.”
Capt Cocks made contact with his family, telling them there had been an incident and that he was uninjured, before calling his headquarters.
They woke the force commander, who gave orders that Capt Cocks was to remain in Bali to render assistance where possible and to account for UN personnel.
“I was told to cancel my flight out the next morning and that I was the man on the ground.
“I had ambassadors calling my phone, all the UN crew, the Portuguese commanders, and I was just dealing things out from there.”
Capt Cocks said there were about 12 hospitals treating blast victims and he visited all of them several times searching for personnel.
“Initially no-one really knew how many people were here, so I had to go to all the hospitals trying to find out did we have any people there, how many injured we had - ADF, PKF, UN police, the whole lot.
“That was just an absolute nightmare. There’s just bodies everywhere, blood everywhere, just death and destruction everywhere and just so many Australians ...”
He was taken to the morgue at Denpasar General Hospital, where he searched the dead to locate missing soldiers.
“The bodies were just... the floor was littered with burnt corpses. It was just awful... some of these bodies you couldn’t tell, you know, whether they were male or female, young, old, Indonesian, Australian...”
He returned to the scene of the blast the next morning, trying to locate missing personnel, and was shocked at the devastation he saw.
“It was an absolute war zone, it was just out of control. I was outside the Sari club, where the blast was ... I reckon this hole would have been about probably a metre and a half deep and three metres wide.
“You need a lot of bang to get through and make that sort of hole. That second bomb was huge.
“By that stage they’d already started pulling the bodies out and... there were nearly as many bodies as I saw that night in the morgue... probably even more, sitting on the footpath outside the Sari club.”
Capt Cocks then went back to the hospital searching for the missing personnel among those being evacuated to Australia by Hercules.
Capt Cocks said he couldn’t believe how lucky he had been to escape injury in the explosion.
“The other thing that’ll stick with me is the tragedy of the people I saw that... I could well have been in their place.
“The dead and the injured at the hospital... they were just guys like me. They’re young Australians having a good time out.
“My card didn’t get drawn, which my family and I are so thankful for, but a lot did.”
