Clouds of Deceit (15 page)

Menaul believes the British tests harmed no one. How reliable this view is can be gauged from what he says about the American nuclear tests. The tests in Nevada in 1955, he says, ‘provided visitors and local inhabitants with a spectacular and interesting display to distract their attention from the more fleshy entertainments to be had in the enchanting city of Las Vegas.' Fortunately, he goes on to explain, they were conducted - just like the British tests - under regulations ‘designed to protect life and property from the effects of nuclear weapons and make testing on the American mainland
safe and effective.'
(My italics.)

In its issue of 13 January 1984, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
printed a paper on the incidence of cancer ‘in an Area of Radioactive Fallout Downwind From the Nevada Test Site'. Its author, Carl J. Johnson, reports five times as many cases of leukaemia as would have been expected in the period between 1958 and 1966. The excess persisted in the later period studied, 1972 to 1980. There were also excess cases of thyroid cancer - which is caused by radioactive iodine - and of breast cancer.

‘There were more cancers of the gastrointestinal tract than expected,' the paper says. ‘There was an excess of melanoma, bone cancer and brain tumours. A subgroup with a history of acute fallout effects had a higher cancer incidence. That these cases can be associated with radiation exposures is supported by a comparison between groups of the ratio of cancers of more radiosensitive organs with all other types of cancer.'

The paper, which was published only after very careful independent scrutiny of its methodology and results, is hardly a tribute to the ‘safety' of the American mainland tests. But Menaul is very good at looking on the bright side. Later in his book, he recognizes the hazards caused by the US tests at Bikini in 1954 – when numerous Pacific islanders got high doses of radiation – but goes on to say that ‘in fairness to the Americans, it must be said that valuable information resulting from their tests was made known to the world by the American Atomic Energy Authority.'

Attendance at the British bomb tests was, as far as Menaul was concerned, a privilege. ‘Those who were lucky enough to have taken part in these historic events had a unique experience and a greater understanding of the importance of nuclear deterrence in maintaining world peace,' he writes at the end of a chapter on the British tests. His book is dedicated to ‘the men and women of all three Services who loyally carry out their duties despite scant recognition from their political masters, and all too often in the face of ill-informed criticism from a small but vocal minority who appear to owe allegiance to authorities beyond our shores.'

Comment from declassified US document on officers' approach to radiation risks

During the 1950s, opposition to the atom bomb and H-bomb tests focused on one specific medical issue: the claim that fallout from tests conducted in the atmosphere posed a threat to people throughout the world. On one side of the argument were ranged people like Edward Teller, who was known as the father of the American hydrogen bomb, and Lord Cherwell; on the other, an alliance of scientists embracing Linus Pauling in the US and Andrei Sakharov in Russia.

Teller claimed world-wide fallout ‘is as dangerous as being an ounce overweight or smoking one cigarette every two months'. Sakharov claimed the victims of fallout had already, by 1958, reached almost one million and would rise by up to 300,000 more for every year the testing continued. Cherwell simply thundered that the tests would harm no one.

Today, few people would take Cherwell's position. Even the conservative Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington recognizes some damage. In 1979, Robert E. Alexander, of its Office of Standards Development, estimated the long-term effects of atmospheric weapons testing at between 29,000 and 72,000 deaths from cancer and 168,000 genetic effects. Dr Rosalie Bertell, an American radiation expert, claims the production and testing of nuclear weapons up to 1984 had already killed or damaged 13 million people.

But even if pessimistic estimates are correct, the effects are difficult to measure when spread across the population of the world, with all the problems of discrepancies in the efficiency of diagnosis and registration of disease in different countries. The effects are much more likely to show up - in the form of a higher-
than-predicted incidence of radiation-linked diseases - in a relatively small population known to have been close to one or more nuclear explosions.

The bomb test veterans - servicemen and civilians who took part in the British tests - are just such a population. It is clear that, at the time of the tests, few of the men themselves recognized the risk. They gave the matter little thought, or trusted to the superior knowledge of the people running the tests. The other group of people who were at risk, the aboriginal population of Australia, was even less in a position to realize the danger or do anything about it.

Britain's last atom bomb tests took place in Australia in 1957, its final H-bomb test in the Pacific in 1958. That year, Britain, the USSR and the US agreed to a voluntary suspension of tests in the atmosphere. The agreement broke down in 1961, but Britain did not resume atmospheric testing of full-scale weapons. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty came into effect. That year also marked the last in a series of experiments, running into hundreds, which Britain conducted in Australia in connection with the nuclear weapons programme.

1963 did not bring with it the end of Britain's involvement with the testing range at Maralinga, in the South Australian desert. In 1967, when the tests had become a closed chapter in history for most people in the UK, the British were hauled back to Australia to clear up the mess they had left behind at Maralinga, including at least twenty kilograms of plutonium and traces of beryllium, a highly toxic substance. That exercise, code-named Operation Brumby and described in a key secret document known as the Pearce Report, was to play a vital role in the fight for a full investigation into what happened at the tests when the first allegations of illness were made years later.

Many radiation-linked diseases take years to develop. In the 1970s, veterans in Britain and Australia began to suspect that a surprising number of them were suffering from diseases like cancer, cataracts and skin diseases. Events followed a similar pattern in both countries, although the campaign started later in Britain. In the US, the same thing was happening: former US servicemen who had taken part in tests at Nevada and in the
Pacific, as well as those who visited the devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, noticed high levels of disease and linked them with their experience. In the Pacific, islanders who had suffered years of French and American weapons testing started to campaign for compensation for their devastated territory.

The campaigns each began in the same quiet way. Men who were at nuclear tests tried to find out more about their illnesses and the tests themselves, coming up against official denials of any connection, and against the wall of secrecy which surrounds nuclear weapons. They went to the media for help; publicity brought forward more people with similar tales to tell. They formed veterans' associations to fight the particular problems in each country: in the US and Britain, legislation which prevents former servicemen suing the state for injuries received during their service; in Australia, stringent cash limits on the amount of compensation that could be awarded.

They also demanded large-scale, independent surveys of their health to establish whether their claims of high rates of illness were correct. The studies done so far in Australia and the US have been inconclusive, because they missed out some of the participants. In Britain, the government set up a study by the National Radiological Protection Board; it has been fraught with problems, heavily criticized, and is nowhere near its final report at the time of writing. The study will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter.

In Australia, one of the first cases to gain public attention was that of Warrant Officer William Jones, who died of bone cancer in 1966. His widow, Peggy, first started trying to get compensation for herself and her children in 1968, two years after her husband's death. William Jones had served in the Australian army at Emu Field in 1953, during the Totem series of British tests.

He had been told to leave a Centurion tank close to where the weapon was to be detonated; after the explosion, he was sent into the area to bring the tank back. The tank would not start and Jones stayed beside it for two days until spare parts could be brought. He then drove it back to an army base in Victoria.

Jones tried to get compensation before his death but failed. Peggy Jones was finally awarded compensation, under the Compensation (Australian Government Employees) Act, in 1974 – Aust. $8,600 and small weekly payments for each of her four children. Although the award was tiny, the important point was that the Commissioner for Employees' Compensation who heard the case decided that Jones had contracted his illness because of the nature of his employment with the army.

In 1980, Lance Edwards, a former RAAF radio operator, went on Australian television to describe how he had become contaminated flying through the atomic cloud at Emu Field in 1953. Edwards's story of how he had to shower thirteen times to get rid of the contamination was alarming, but no one knew at that time just how badly contaminated the Lincolns had been - it would not become clear until the publication of a damning Australian report on the tests, the Kerr Report, in 1984.

Nevertheless, Edwards's illness - cancer of the thyroid, an organ known to be sensitive to radiation - was accepted by the Australian government as a ‘disease due to the nature of his employment', just as William Jones's cancer had been. Edwards was one of the lucky ones: by 1983, less than a dozen of the hundred or so cases brought under this compensation system had been successful. The largest award was Aust. $30,000. Relying on the Australian courts, rather than the compensation system for workmen, proved no better. The only cases to be won have been brought by widows; no survivor of the tests has yet won a case in court.

The Australian Nuclear Veterans' Association was set up, with headquarters in Brisbane, to coordinate the men's fight. In 1980, it drew up a list of demands; the key items were calls for compensation and a demand for the setting-up of a register of all the people who believed their health had been affected by nuclear weapons. The Conservative government's reaction was to refuse to release names to ANVA for such a register.

Ex-servicemen were not the only people in Australia who were becoming worried about the effects of the tests. In 1980, the council in South Australia which represents aborigines told the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs that some of the
Pitjantjatjara people could have been injured by radiation from the British bombs exploded in South Australia. In particular, an aborigine called Yami Lester described a black mist which passed over Wallatinna Station after an explosion just over 100 miles away at Emu Field in 1953. A number of aborigines became very ill, he said, particularly the very young and very old; he himself later went blind.

The Australian government responded to all these allegations and court cases by asking the Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Committee to examine the available evidence on the tests. This they did in the report already mentioned, AIRAC 9, which was published in January 1983. Its conclusions were comforting. ‘The measures taken to protect the public, and the personnel involved in the nuclear test programs, from radiation injury attributable to the tests were well planned and almost certainly were effective,' it said.

It could not have been published at a worse time. Events were taking place in Britain which would undermine AIRAC's cheerful conclusions to the point where a full-scale Royal Commission would be considered necessary by the Australian government. What was happening in Britain was much the same as had already occurred in Australia, but with this difference: the British government had run the tests, and scraps of documentary evidence were to be found in Britain which were not available in Australia.

Some British veterans began to suspect a connection with the bomb tests as soon as their diseases were diagnosed. At the end of 1982, the BBC's
Nationwide
programme publicized the claims of men who had participated in the hydrogen bomb tests at Christmas Island. In January 1983, Channel Four showed a programme on Maralinga which included footage from an Australian film,
Backs to the Blast,
in which Australian veterans talked about their experience.

I took up the story in the
Sunday Times,
as did David Leigh and Paul Lashmar in the
Observer.
Starting in January 1983, I wrote eight stories in the
Sunday Times
about the veterans. They included the revelation that an Australian responsible for monitoring radiation exposure at Maralinga had admitted that
essential pieces of equipment had failed to work and consequently he had made up records of radiation exposure. Lady Connor, widow of the
Daily Mirror
columnist, Cassandra, told the
Sunday Times
she believed her husband's death could be connected with a hydrogen-bomb test he had observed at Christmas Island.

The articles attracted many letters; some were from men who wanted to contact a veterans' organization in Britain, some from people who just wanted to tell someone about their experiences. One man wrote from Devon to say how pleased he was that the claims of the veterans were at last being taken seriously. ‘I have often wondered if any of my ailments over the years had anything to do with the H-bomb test,' he wrote. ‘I even asked a doctor and I was scoffed at.' He described a skin irritation which started soon after the test, when he was twenty-two, and persisted to the time of writing. ‘I used to wear white cotton gloves when I went to bed but this didn't stop me from scratching my face and chest until they bled.'