e-mail Paul Lewis on paul@deadline.demon.co.uk
A few minutes before nine o'clock in the morning of October 3, 1952, the Royal Navy vessel HMS Tracker was standing off the northwest coast of Australia, a few miles west of Trimouille, one of the Monte Bello islands. It was the climax of Operation Hurricane. Hugh Highton was one of Tracker's stokers. But his superiors told him he had more important things to do than tend the engines.
"We were ordered to parade up on deck. All I had on was a pair of shorts, sandals and a hat. No shirt. We were told to turn our backs and then I shut my eyes and put my hands over them. Like this."
He clenches his fists and puts the backs of his hands hard into his eye sockets.
"We knew it was going to be an explosion. We were never told it was an atom bomb though it had come through the grapevine. They started the countdown and there was this flash and I could see right through my hands, the bones in them, it was like an x-ray of my hands, even though my eyes were shut. Then there was more like a roar, a rumble than a bang. And then we turned round and opened our eyes and just after there was this hot wind and you could feel it like grit hitting your body. The ship rocked slightly. And that was it."
Britain's first atomic bomb test was over. By modern standards it was a small enough device - an A-bomb with a thousandth the explosive power of some of the later H-bombs. But what those early weapons lacked in force, they made up for in the dirty, radioactive nature of their debris. Hugh's diseases read like a casualty intake sheet - bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, angina, osteoarthritis, hiatus hernia, diverticulitis. He is 69. Was the bomb the cause?
"I don't know. They won’t tell you. But no-one else in my family has any of these things."
Peter Fletcher - currently vice-chairman of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association - was also at Monte Bello islands in 1952, on board HMS Zeebrugge. He wore a shirt. But he didn’t close his eyes.
"The sky lit up, like double daylight. Then we were told to turn round, and we saw the black cloud. Then the sound of the explosion. It wasn't just a bang, it seemed to echo and echo. Then we were hit by this hot wind, in our faces."
Peter is 63 but looks ten years older. He has leukaemia and his lungs are as bad as those of a miner who has been down the pits all his life. He spends 16 hours a day on oxygen. He puts his diseases down to that one exposure to a nuclear weapon.
"At the time you didn’t ask why you were sent to parade and watch it. In the forces you just do what you’re told. We saw it and then got on with our lives."
But now we do know why those men were ordered to stand in the line of fire of the most powerful weapon mankind had then invented. In a report to the military Chiefs of Staff marked Top Secret but released recently through the Public Record Office, a note dated 14 February 1951 and headed 'Atomic Weapon Trials' says
"The Army must discover the detailed effects of various types of explosion on equipment, stores, and men with and without various types of protection."
The scientists and other personnel wore protective suits and kept out of the way of the blast. Those tested 'without protection', apart from thin tropical clothing were the troops, many of them national servicemen.
When I went to meet Peter at his St Helens home and four of his comrades who had witnessed nuclear tests or cleared up after them I expected to hear about their diseases. It was an even longer list than I had feared.
Chris Rowlands, who stood about eight miles from three nuclear tests in South Australia's Great Victoria Desert wearing just a shirt, slacks and plimsolls, has ischaemic heart disease and deteriorating discs in his spine, the first place hit by the flash of the explosion. Bob Parkinson who spent nearly 12 months clearing up after nuclear explosions at Christmas island, has a mysterious and undiagnosed bowel disease. And Sid Harris, an RAF corporal, who served on Christmas Island after the tests, and remembers their tent village being soaked every day with DDT from a crop-spraying aircraft to control the flies, has acute heart disease, swelling of his sinuses, and arthritis in his hips and knees.
But what I did not expect was to hear about the medical problems of their children. Like Peter's 43-year-old daughter Pauline.
"She never had any children. Recently she had a hysterectomy and the doctor said her womb was all sort of glued together. She could never have had a child."
And Sid's sons
"Trevor died when he was 12 of a very rare bone and brain disease. Colin, he had bowel cancer at 34. He's in remission now, touch wood, after an operation and chemotherapy. My eldest, thank God he's OK."
And Hugh's children
"Colin, he's 41 and has deformed toes. He has operations but they just come back the same. Raymond he's the eldest, had asthma since he was a baby and now has ME [myalgic encephalomyelitis]. And Angela, she's 38 but has had to retire because of spondylitis [inflammation of the spine] in her back." And it does not stop there. "Angela's youngest daughter Emma, she's 6 now and has bowel trouble. She may need an operation. Her other children are OK. Well, apart from the fact they all have asthma."
Bowel cancer, bone deformities, lung disease, arthritis, heart trouble - there seems to be a pattern of illness that descends the generations. But it is almost impossible to prove that exposure to nuclear tests - or powerful organo-phoshpate insecticides - actually caused the diseases which these men and their children exhibit. Certainly the Government and the Ministry of Defence do not accept any link at all. In 1993 the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) published a study which followed up more than 21,000 men who had, according to Ministry of Defence records, been involved in the nuclear tests. The report compared them with a similar group of men who had not participated and studied how many of each group died and what of. The report concluded from the figures that there may be a small possibility that the test participants had a slightly higher chance of developing leukaemia. But that apart, the conclusion was clear
"participation in the nuclear weapon testing programme has not had a detectable effect on the participants' expectation of life nor on their risk of developing cancer or other diseases."
This report has been used by successive governments to refuse any pension or compensation to the thousands of surviving veterans who witnessed nuclear tests. Sheila Gray, secretary of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, describes this report as her 'bete noire'. Her husband Frank was a Royal Marine whose open landing craft was just two miles from the Monte Bello detonation. When he died in 1992 he had four serious heart conditions, a rare eye disease which is only caused by radiation, severe arthritis and crumbling bones. He was 62. She is dismissive of the NRPB report. She says the records it used were inaccurate, that it added in 5000 men who had only been at the test sites before the detonations, that the control group were not checked for their own exposure to radiation, that it only looked at cancers which caused death, and that it only looked at data after 1971 when many of the veterans would already have died and up to 1990 when some would still not show the effects. She dismisses it as 'a scientific curiosity'.
"We know that our men are being harmed, we know that our children have been genetically damaged and our grandchildren have been damaged. I’ll give you one astounding fact. In the normal population, one child in 100000 has adrenal cancer - in our group it is four in 2500. You can see the similarities with the Chernobyl men, with the New Zealand men, the Fijians. But New Zealand and the USA have both accepted it and are paying pensions to their test veterans."
A major study, independent of the Government and the Ministry of Defence, is begin carried out at the University of Dundee Medical School. Sue Roff is in charge of it. She has analysed the medical circumstances of about 1500 test veterans, a third of them already dead.
"The average age of death was just under 56 years. And around two thirds died of cancer, which is more than twice the going rate for the male population of Britain. Moreover those cancers are the same types as the US government accepts as radiogenic [caused by radiation] and looks for when it compensates its nuclear test veterans."
And among the living, her findings were equally stark.
"Out of every five, one says they are healthy, two say they are seriously ill and two say they are worried about their health. When I codify their illnesses I get a pattern which I believe is a pre-cancerous syndrome that will eventually turn into cancers of the blood and bone marrow."The men typically suffer from three kinds of illness
In addition the men look prematurely aged. She could have been describing the small sample of five nuclear test veterans whom I met in St Helens.
The Government does not accept Sue Roff's work and stands firmly behind the conclusions of the NRPB study. That makes it almost impossible for nuclear test veterans to get a war disablement pension. With the single exception of the blood cancer leukaemia, the Department of Social Security simply does not accept the link between the diseases they have now and their exposure to the nuclear weapon tests. Only around a dozen veterans and their widows get a war disablement pension - out of the thousands who witnessed the events.
Peter Fletcher is modest in his demands for the surviving test veterans and widows.
"I don't want compensation. I hate the word. Look. We didn’t get wounded in battle, lose legs or eyes. We were sent to a hot tropical island and made to witness one nuclear test. We just want the Government to give us the benefit of the doubt about the cause of the diseases we now have, assess our disability and give us a war pension."
It would cost little enough. Even if all the surviving men who witnessed Britain's 21 atmospheric nuclear tests and the widows of the rest were given a war disablement pension and their average disability was assessed at 50pc, it would cost barely £50 million a year. That is small change out of an annual budget for war pensions of more than £1 billion. The same documents which reveal that the men were exposed simply as a test to see if nuclear weapons affected the fighting ability of men on the ground also show that the issue of compensation was considered in the 1950s. Rear Admiral Torlisse warned in September 1951 that "ill effects may be long delayed" and went on "I do feel that some formula might be accepted by Ministries which would dispose any tribunal in favour of a claimant ex-'Hurricane'."
Veterans however, have found successive governments since the war determined not to act on that 47-year-old recommendation or admit that the tests caused any damage to those who were ordered to witness them. Hopes were raised in 1990 when 218 MPs voted to support an amendment to Social Security law proposed by Bob Clay, then the MP for Sunderland North. It would have given a war disablement pension to anyone who had been exposed to a nuclear test and who now had a cancer which radiation is known to cause. The amendment was defeated and the Conservative Government continued to ignore calls for compensation. But when the new Labour Government was elected in 1997, hopes grew again. Peter Fletcher was made an MBE. Most of those voting for the change in 1990 were labour MPs. Thirty-eight of them are now Government Ministers and no fewer than 17 of the 22 members of the present Cabinet voted for the change - including Prime Minister Tony Blair, Defence Secretary George Robertson, and Social Security Secretary Alastair Darling. Sheila Gray told me how she felt when Labour came to power in May 1997.
"We were very hopeful because from the very beginning the Labour Party were firmly behind us. Everything we asked them to do they did, asking questions and so on but now it seems they were just using us as a weapon to oppose the Government."
Her bitterness is understandable. When Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked last year if he would give test veterans the compensation he had voted for in 1990 he replied
"Some ex-servicemen who were present at the atmospheric nuclear tests are ill....However, I am bound to repeat that there is no evidence of excessive illness or mortality amongst all of the veterans as a group that could be linked to exposure to radiation as a result of their participation in the tests. You fairly draw attention to my support for Bob Clay's amendment back in 1990. However, I have to say that, on the basis of full access to all relevant documentation, much of it now in the public domain, it is clear that very few of those present at the tests would have received a measurable radiation dose."
The veterans are now part way through a long struggle in Europe to make the British Government accept their claims. Currently they are asking the European Court of Human Rights to review its decision in June 1998 which rejected claims for compensation by two test veterans. They claim the 5-4 decision was based on false information from the British Government.
November 1998
Margaret Beckett (Leader of House of Commons)
Tony Blair (Prime Minister)
David Blunkett (Education and Employment)
Nick Brown (Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food)
Robin Cook (Foreign Secretary)
Jack Cunningham (Duchy of Lancaster)
Alastair Darling (Social Security)
Ron Davies (Welsh Secretary)
Donald Dewar (Scottish Secretary)
Frank Dobson (Health)
Mo Mowlam (Northern Ireland)
John Prescott (Deputy Prime Minister)
George Roberston (Defence)
Clare Short (International Development)
Chris Smith (Culture, Media, and Sport)
Jack Straw (Home Secretary)
Ann Taylor (Chief Whip).
Anyone who was involved in any way with Britain's nuclear tests and who wants to join the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association should contact Peter Fletcher MBE, 'Monte Bello', 134 Clipsley Lane, Haydock, St. Helens, Lancashire WA11 0UB
e-mail Paul Lewis on paul@deadline.demon.co.uk