Emu Field, South Australia
locality in South Australia
Emu Field (also Emu Junction or simply Emu) is the site of Operation Totem, a pair of nuclear tests conducted by the British Government in South Australia during October 1953.
The site was surveyed by Len Beadell in 1952. A village and airstrip were constructed for the subsequent testing program. The site was supported from the RAAF Woomera Range Complex.
Two British nuclear weapon tests were conducted at the site. Totem I was detonated on 15 October 1953 and Totem II was detonated on 27 October 1953. The devices were both sited on towers and yielded 9 kilotons and 7 kilotons respectively. The site was also used in September–October 1953 for some of the Kitten series of tests, which were conventional (rather than nuclear) explosions used to evaluate neutron initiators.
It was later found that the radioactive cloud from the first detonation did not disperse as expected, and travelled north-east over the Australian continent.
The site at Emu Field was unsafe for further testing due to contamination by nuclear radiation, and the search for another location led to the survey of Maralinga, where a further series of atomic tests was conducted in 1956.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Emu Field, South Australia” as locality in South Australia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q14935706. Authority coordinates are -28.698, 132.371. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1952 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emu Field, South Australia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.