The fallout of nuclear testing

Hi everyone, 

A quick warning before we go on – today’s edition includes mentions of tests on the bodies of children and stillborn babies, without their families’ knowledge or consent, as well as the lingering effects of exposure to nuclear radiation. It’s a tough one, even if there is good news and real change at the end of the story, so take care of yourself – if you want to skip this one, I’ll see you next week. 

Alan Owen was 12 and watching TV with his family in their living room in Cheltenham, in the west of England, when he found out. The programme, Panorama: Cloud Over Christmas Island, told the story of the UK government’s testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. 

The UK became the world’s third nuclear power in 1952 and a few years later began developing more powerful thermonuclear devices. But building a bomb a hundred times more powerful than those that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t enough; if the UK wanted to prove itself a power on equal footing with the US and USSR, the device had to work. It had to be tested. 

Hundreds of UK conscripts, doing their National Service, were shipped out to Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, to build airstrips and cabins. In footage from the Pacific island, young men with short, smart haircuts carried out tasks in the bright sunshine and white sands. 

“Oh, that was me,” Alan’s dad, James, said. Alan and his siblings laughed and told him not to be silly. But their mum said their dad was telling the truth.

James told them that he’d witnessed 24 nuclear detonations in 78 days. 

I couldn’t believe this was how Alan found out, but he understands why it happened this way. These men were often just 18 or 19 when they were conscripted and they signed the Official Secrets Act. When they returned to normal life, they often didn’t tell anyone what they’d been doing or what they’d seen. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say this conversation changed the course of Alan’s life. I spoke to him, 40 years later, to hear how. 

“One of the first things we did when we started was to ask the community what they wanted us to do. We said, ‘If we’re going to help you, we are going to help you do what you want to do.’ At one UK reunion, a veteran stood up and said, ‘I want a medal. I want some recognition for what I did.’ The UK had never recognised them at all, so we went for the medal, which came in 2022. 

Now we’ve got more than 5,000 people that have received that medal worldwide, which is great. That was our first step to making sure these guys are never forgotten. We’re trying to get the legacy of the testing programme into the world, yet so many people don’t even know that Britain tested nuclear weapons.

Now we’re moving on to why the UK government is the only nuclear superpower not to have any form of compensation or to officially apologise to their veterans. France, China, Russia and even the Isle of Man have apologised to their nuclear test veterans but the UK seems to deny and say, ‘No, there was no harm.’ 

Britain’s nuclear testing programme ran from 1952 to 1991. In 1952, the testing was at the Montebello Islands, which are off the coast of Western Australia. 

Later, there were tests in Maralinga and Emu Field, on the mainland in South Australia. These were sacred lands, home to generations of Aboriginal people, and the testing programme paid no respect to them whatsoever. Eventually, because of mounting pressure, the Australian government said they could not detonate any more bombs on the mainland. 

So, Britain moved to Kiritimati ~ also known as Christmas Island, and not to be confused with any of the other Christmas Islands that are all much closer to Australia.~ If you look it up it’s a dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away from Hawai’i. It was 1957/58 when Britain did its biggest tests there. 

I’ve got a friend in Wales, he was a baker on the island. You’ve got to realise that he’d never been out of his village. He said, ‘I lived in Wales. It’s 1957. We haven't got everything that we've got now, all the links and the motorways.’ He hadn't been very far.

He gets conscripted, does his basic training. So he’s away from home for the first time, and then they take him from basic training to Kiritimati, via America. He said that you land on this island, beautiful blue sea, beautiful sand, it’s extremely hot. You couldn’t be further away from Wales. That was like a mind-blowing experience for them, that this place even existed. They don’t even know where it was. 

And it wasn’t very big, it’s only 30 or so miles long. So they did their work and their time on the island, but they were also swimming in the lagoons, catching fish and eating the fish. Surrounded by land crabs the size of dinner plates and these strange birds that they’ve never seen before. 

We have one veteran who said, ‘I was on the island and I enjoyed it. It was great. I played football, we were drinking, smoking.’ It was great, he said, until they set that first bomb off. And then he watched in horror. ‘You were 15 miles away and you’re sat with your back to the explosion. And it goes off and you hear it and turn around and see this mushroom cloud going up and up and up and up.’

In 1962, the treaty that would ban atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was approaching, so Britain lent Kiritimati to the USA. It also supplied some servicemen – one of them being my father. The Americans detonated 24 weapons in 78 days there as they needed to get their testing done. 

Britain signed up to the ban treaty, which banned all test detonations apart from those done underground. Britain continued to test in underground shafts in the Nevada desert until 1991. 

In terms of the harm to veterans, the UK government ordered an epidemiological study on cancers in 1988 that concluded that there weren’t elevated levels of cancer, apart from leukemia and multiple myeloma in certain areas. We’ve since found out that, although this was meant to be an independent study, the Ministry of Defence rewrote the conclusion. 

We have to remember that these were young men of 18/19 in the 1950s. So they are now in their 80s – the ones that are left. Unfortunately, the veterans that suffered the most, that should have been investigated, treated, are gone. They’re the ones that were washing down the aircraft, flying through the mushroom cloud collecting samples – all of these sorts of highly dangerous exercises, at least compared to somebody that was just, say, creating the runway. 

Now we’re working on missing medical records. A lot of the veterans have their medical records missing from their file, or redacted. My father died in 1994. He was a nuclear test veteran. I've tried to get his medical records because I've had health problems myself and so’s my son. The Ministry of Defence has denied me access to them, even after I submitted a freedom of information request, saying I’m not entitled because of confidentiality issues.  

One woman, Jane O’Connor, fought for her father’s medical records. She got the Information Commissioner’s Office involved and went to court twice. Now she’s got the unredacted medical records but there are still two entries that are missing. That was a two-year process.

〜 Lucy here: the Information Commissioner’s Office is the body that regulates and upholds your rights to information – such as those under the Freedom of Information Act I mentioned last week. 〜

Having access to their medical records could have helped the veterans and their families, including getting them access to war pensions that some have been denied. 

We want to understand what’s happened with record-taking around the testing. We now know that a database was created because there was litigation by the test veterans around radiological illnesses, which was denied. It contains over 22,000 documents relating to nuclear testing, and has been restricted under National Security. 

There were also other things done afterwards by the UK government, for example, taking part in a programme called Project Sunshine. 

〜 A word on Project Sunshine – and I’ll reiterate the trigger warning above. According to US papers declassified in the early 2000s, scientists from the UK Atomic Energy Authority removed bones during post mortems from ordinary people and sent them to the US to test for radioactive material – an effect of nuclear fall out. Another vast set of tests conducted here in the UK included testing the bones of children and stillborn babies, without the consent of parents. 

The Redfern Inquiry, published in 2010, examined the projects responsible and found “in many cases, families have been wronged.” The government at the time apologised to the families of those involved, adding: “the events described in the inquiry should never have happened in the first place.” 〜

There’s a lot more to come out and a lot more to do. 

The media attention and the support that the Daily Mirror gave us in our #lookmeintheeye campaign for the medal, including the reporter Susie Boniface and the editor at the time, was massive.

GB News has supported us quite a lot too, including for our annual reunion. We’ve also had lots of support from various MPs.

Mostly though, the guys that you talk to now, they want an apology. For Keir Starmer to stand up and say: “What we did to you was wrong, and it should never have happened”. That’s all they want.”

〜 Responding to a June 2023 parliamentary question, Dr Andrew Murrison MP said on behalf of the Ministry of Defence: “Since the 1980’s, the Ministry of Defence has commissioned and published four independently-conducted and analysed longitudinal studies of 20,000 nuclear test veterans… The results of these studies have consistently demonstrated that cancer and mortality rates for the nuclear test veterans are similar to those serving contemporaneously in the UK Armed Forces who did not participate in the testing programme, and lower than for the general population.

Any veteran, including those of the nuclear tests, who believes they have suffered ill-health due to service has the right to apply for no-fault compensation under the War Pension Scheme if they served before 6 April 2005.” 〜 

Every issue of The Spark is a learning experience for me. I love talking to people to hear about the role journalism has played in changing their lives and the wider world for the better. 

But talking to Alan for this issue, I was aghast. The injustices faced by the people affected by these nuclear tests is not widely known, and the experiences he relayed to me have really stuck with me. (You can read the Mirror’s thorough coverage here.) 

The path to justice is never straight nor easy, but when survivors are reaching the end of their lives, the calls for recognition, compensation and compassion are even more urgent. 

Thanks for reading. See you next time!