The image is one that defined the 1950s and the subsequent 40 years of Cold War nuclear brinkmanship: the servicemen who observed the atomic plumes rising with deadly beauty above the test explosions over the atolls of the South Pacific. The men, dressed in flimsy white protective garments, shielded their eyes with their hands. And when the bomb exploded, with a flash brighter than a thousand suns, the men saw straight through their hands — through bones, blood and skin — to witness the pollution of the world with strontium-90.
Fifty years later, those explosions are killing them with painful cancers. More than a thousand British veterans who were exposed to Britain’s nuclear tests in the 1950s are now succumbing to the malignancies engendered by the deadly blasts at a rate of three a month. This month the remaining survivors will go to the Supreme Court in a final effort to challenge an attempt by a recalcitrant Ministry of Defence to throw out their claims for compensation.
No other country has treated the unwitting victims of its nuclear ambitions with such cavalier disdain. The United States, Russia, France and China have set up funds to pay for the medical care of their atomic veterans, accepting, by way of financial restitution, responsibility for the subsequent years of pain and disability that they suffered. Britain, alone, has balked at such a settlement. To press their case, the former servicemen set up the British Nuclear Veterans Test Association and began litigation. A test case brought by 10 veterans against the MoD was last year thrown out by the Court of Appeal, which ruled that time had run out for all but one of the claimants to make their case (see page 8).
Accepting responsibility for unforeseen hazards of combat is not something that governments do lightly. Few knew at the time when atomic weapons promised a reliable defence against the grasping ambitions of communism how long-term and lingering were the effects of nuclear fall-out. Radiation was a danger that showed its full deadly effects only when men and women thought to have survived the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to die of inevitable cancers years later. Other weapons have also produced unforeseen hazards. Agent Orange was liberally sprayed over the forests of Vietnam some 45 years ago; it is still quietly killing those it contaminated. And many of the troops who fought in the first Gulf War are still battling to convince sceptics that they have suffered a painful and deadly syndrome whose provenance has proved hard to track down.
The MoD has expressed “tremendous sympathy” for any veteran of the atomic tests who is now ill. But it insists that there is no proven causal connection between the illnesses and attendance at the tests. It suggests that veterans should apply for a war pension, rather than compensation — but even then ministry lawyers are quibbling about the link between the trials and ill-health.
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This is a squalid record of insensitive, pettyfogging bureaucracy. The total sum involved, around £30 million for veterans and their dependents, is not huge. The tests were the cornerstone of Britain’s nuclear policy and the men’s health was sacrificed, if not intentionally, to assure this country’s defence. Their distress is obvious. Legalistic denials are a dishonourable way to treat these men.