Clouds of Deceit (24 page)

Frank Cook, the Labour MP for Stockton North, summed up the feelings of many veterans when he spoke in a debate on the tests in the House of Commons in December 1984. Cook expressed his disappointment that the NRPB had nothing to report by then.

Instead of commissioning a statistical survey, the British government should have set up a Royal Commission into the tests, he said. ‘Ultimately, the people who were in the front line will die out the longer this goes on,' he said. ‘We have a responsibility not only to them but to the generations after them.'

As well as a proper investigation into what happened at the tests, many of the veterans also want compensation. Men who have suffered chronic illnesses, and the wives and children of men who have died, feel the least the British government can do is give them cash payments or pensions. So far, their attempts to prise money from the government have achieved minimal success.

The major obstacle is the Crown Proceedings Act 1947. Section 10 bars servicemen from bringing claims for compensation against the government for injuries received during their period of service. The thinking behind it is obvious: the government simply could not cope if every serviceman injured during a war was subsequently entitled to demand large amounts of cash from the state. But the veterans say their case is different - that what happened to them had not been envisaged by the people who drafted the Act. The government has shown no sympathy towards this line of argument.

The veterans are in the process of mounting a court challenge to the Act and they are also preparing cases on behalf of civilians who took part in the tests and who are not covered by the prohibition in the Act. Such actions are inevitably costly, and
the British Nuclear Tests Veterans' Association is still trying to raise money to pay for them.

In the meantime, they are trying to devise other ways to gain official recognition that they have been affected by radiation. Open verdicts have been recorded at inquests on a handful of veterans who have died of diseases that could be linked with radiation, but the most important attempt to use an inquest as a forum for the men's claims proved unsuccessful.

In April 1985, an inquest jury returned a verdict of natural causes on the death of Kenneth Measures, a former chief petty officer in the navy, who suffered a rare form of lung cancer after taking part in the first British hydrogen bomb test at Malden Island in 1957. The veterans had hoped for a verdict of unlawful killing.

Coroners' courts have come in for much criticism in recent years and, in retrospect, it seems a little optimistic of the veterans to believe that inquests might provide a useful alternative route to justice. But the veterans have scored one major success elsewhere, with a ruling at a pensions tribunal which does appear to undermine the government's insistence that absolutely no one has been harmed by radiation.

Mick Saffrey, an RAF radio operator who spent several months at Christmas Island after the 1958 tests, applied to the DHSS for a war pension in 1980 on the grounds that he had suffered cataracts and gone blind as a result of radiation. When his application was turned down, he appealed. On 26 July 1984, a DHSS pensions tribunal ruled that he should receive compensation. The form of the award - whether it will be a pension or a lump sum - has not been decided at the time of writing.

Saffrey's eyesight has been partially restored after an operation. He also suffers from a low sperm count, which could be attributable to radiation. The pensions tribunal ruled that even if it ignored the evidence of the sperm count, ‘we feel that we are left unsure that the cataracts were not caused by Christmas Island radiation. It follows from this that the appeal must be allowed, on the basis that the disability is attributable to service.'

After the successful appeal Saffrey said that he was convinced his condition had been caused by radiation. ‘These things were
exploded over the water and we used the same water to wash in,' he said. ‘I never once saw a sign on Christmas Island saying you couldn't go anywhere. We used to wander all over the place, as we had nothing else to do.'

The Ministry of Defence denies that the Saffrey case makes any difference at all to its claim that no one has been injured by the tests. The tribunal had not ruled that radiation
caused
his condition, a spokesman told me, only that it
might
have done. Nevertheless, the British Nuclear Tests Veterans' Association believes the case is the first chink in the government's armour and intends to go on fighting on as many fronts as possible for the compensation it believes should be paid to many of its 1,300 members.

That the wind of change is blowing in their direction is in little doubt. Already, the Canadian government has earmarked the equivalent of £17 million to pay compensation to veterans who took part in nuclear tests - Canada did not mount atom bomb tests but its servicemen were present at those staged by other countries, just as the Australians were.

There is one more thing that many of the veterans want, and that is an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. Their concern is a timely reminder that Britain's final test in the atmosphere, on 23 September 1958, did not mark the end but only a change in Britain's weapons-testing programme.

With an atmospheric test ban treaty a near certainty in the foreseeable future, the nuclear powers were already looking for alternative ways of testing bombs. The obvious place to put the tests was underground. Britain's thoughts inevitably turned to its accommodating ally, Australia; for a time, the British were scouting round for a suitable Australian mountain in which they could drill a hole and blow up a bomb.

Fortunately for Australia, the plan came to nothing. The first joint British and American bomb test took place at the Nevada test site in the US on 1 March 1962. The test, code-named Pampas, took place 1,200 feet underground. Immediately after the explosion, two small clouds escaped from the ground and floated away.

Leaks of this sort from underground tests in Nevada have become a regular occurrence. Inhabitants of Cedar City, Utah, who live downwind from the Nevada test site, have formed an organization to campaign for an end to nuclear tests; they say forty-three underground tests have leaked radiation, endangering communities close to the site.

In fact, there have been far more nuclear tests since the Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963 than took place before it. By June 1976, official figures show that the US alone had tested a staggering 588 nuclear weapons; only 183 of these were detonated in the atmosphere before the signing of the treaty.

During the 1970s, the US actually stepped up its testing programme. The figures rose from around eight underground nuclear tests in 1972 to sixteen in 1975. Russian tests recently declined in number; they went down from twenty in 1978 to four in 1982.

Britain's nuclear test programme has never been in the same league as that of Russia or the US. But it has carried steadily on: one Anglo-American test in Nevada in 1979, three in 1980. Details are scant; the joint test carried out at Nevada on 25 April 1982 was between 20 and 150 kilotons, the official American statement announced uninformatively.

Nuclear testing is not an episode in our past, as peculiar to the 1950s as the beatniks and James Dean. Britain is, on paper, committed to working towards a complete test ban treaty. In fact, since they started in 1977, the talks have been bogged down in arguments over how to ensure the other side is not breaking the treaty.

In 1939, when the splitting of the atom coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, the scientific world was infected with the contagion of secrecy. That development, which flew in the face of a long tradition of sharing information about scientific discoveries, concentrated the fruits of an international and rather haphazard quest for knowledge in the hands of one country, the US, which tried to exploit its position of superior knowledge for its own gain.

America's shortsighted attempt to gain advantage through its almost accidental possession of the bomb produced the
atmosphere of distrust which led to the arms race. An agreement to end nuclear tests, because it would require a degree of trust between the signatories, would be a first step towards reversing the baleful situation which has existed since the Second World War. That such a step has not been taken is a measure of how little the contagion of secrecy and distrust has loosened its grip in the forty years since it first took hold.

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This book is dedicated to the victims
of nuclear testing all over the world

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