SCIENTISTS AT TEST SITE

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26854, 6 October 1952, Page 7

SCIENTISTS AT TEST SITE

HOUSING IN SPECIAL SHELTERS (Rec. IQ p.m.) LONDON, October 5. A London newspaper, the “Sunday Dispatch,” said today -that two Home Office scientists deliberately posted themselves within a few thousand .yards of the atomic weapon explosion in the Montebello Islands on Friday *nd lived to tell the story. Questioned on the report, a Home Office spokesman tqld Reuter that he was ‘'amazed at the report, which must have come from Australia.” The spokesman said: “Two of our scientists went to Australia. I do not know what part they played in the test.” The “Sunday Dispatch" report said the two men, whose name? were being kept secret, would be the first scientists to report to the British Government. It said: “Never before have human beings been so close to a bursting atom bomb and survived the tremendous blast unscathed. They were housed in specially-constructed atomic air-raid shelters which had been designed by a group of civil defence experts working in close co-oueratipn with the atomic scientists at Harwell. “Tt is understood that a group of 10 or 1? different types of shelters was built around the point of the bomb’s explosion. The others contained animals and special equipment for measuring the atomic radiation that passed through the shelter walls."