Documents just released show the UK Government not only ignored advice but deliberately denied thousands of soldiers and civilians involved with nuclear testing in Australia in the 1950s to be monitored or tested for radiation exposure. Sue Rabbitt Roff reports from London.
In the death throes of the Tory government, the UK Ministry of Defence released more than two thousand pages of records relating to nuclear test veterans from the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Merlin database in response to Freedom of Information applications.
The released documents ‘include technical reports and general correspondence between government offices discussing the necessity of carrying out precautionary testing on service personnel and civilians attending nuclear tests.’ It is a damning powder keg of cross-corroborating primary documents about how to avoid that necessity throughout the 1950s.
In August 2024 – six weeks after the Starmer Labour government came to power in a landside – another 500 pages were published online from the UK Ministry of Defence.
These primary documents from all levels of the Australian and UK armed services, scientists and other civilians corroborate a horrifying litany of cockups and coverups by the AWE and the Ministry of Defence that relied on its technical advice.
According to Oli Troen, a lawyer representing the veterans, “The revelation of documentation released from the AWE over the summer this year, which shows that MoD and AWE departments were incapable of carrying out orders, raises grave concerns that we had suspected. We have asked the MoD to tell the truth one way or the other – whether these orders were followed, if there was an outbreak of “mass insubordination”, or if they were lost or destroyed.”
All of these outcomes constitute negligence and should lead to compensation and an apology for decades of suffering.
One of the veterans, John Morris, who witnessed the tests and lost a son, is calling on PM Keir Starmer to “meet with us.”
All I want is to meet him and get a pathway forward. They have let me down for 70 years.
Contemptuous behaviour
The documents reveal the contempt with which some senior UK officers and their medical advisors regarded the calls for pre-deployment blood counts for personnel required to ‘participate’ in the tests in Australia and off Christmas Island. They also show the almost total failure to provide post-test monitoring of all participants despite the clear statement in the 1950 International Recommendations on Radiological Protection (from ICRP) that there should be regular monitoring before, during, and after possible exposure to radiation.
Most extraordinary is the evidence of how the AWRE scientists apparently misunderstood the nature of fallout in the proximity of the detonation sites. They seemed to know less than Daniel Lang reported in The New Yorker in July 1955 or Nevil Shute in his 1957 novel On the Beach.
Despite having worked closely on the Manhattan Project to develop the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Scientific Director Professor William Penney and his former junior colleague Professor Ernest Titterton, who became Prime Minister Menzies’ advisor on the Atomic Weapons Safety Committee ignored what was well known about the nature of radioactive fallout. They assumed only personnel working in the ground zero or ‘active’ forward areas were in danger of being contaminated.
Barely a quarter of the 14,000 Australian and 22,000 British men who were required to attend the tests in support of the British teams were regarded by Penney and Titterton as being vulnerable to exposure to radioactive fallout. Most of those whose work would take them into the acknowledged danger areas – at the ground zeros of the detonations and in tracking the fallout clouds well away from those – were given blood counts before they were sent to the Australian and later the Christmas Island sites.
This was at AWE’s insistence against considerable opposition – documented extensively in these files – from many of the medical and operational senior echelons of the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force. The Australian Safety Advisor Ernest Titterton agreed that blood tests weren’t worth the bother despite writing in his 1956 book Facing the Atomic Future:
One of the first effects to result and one of the most sensitive indications of an over-dosage of radiation is found in the blood … blood counts are taken regularly for people who work with radioactive materials.
Yet, the other men who were at the Monte Bellos, Emu Field, Maralinga and Christmas Island rarely had their blood tested.
The documents show clearly that while the AWE routinely universally tested its own employees’ blood before, during and after their work with or near radioactive materials However, such prior testing as took place of the test ‘participants’ was thought by the operational commanders to be
too logistically difficult and expensive, as well as potentially alarming to the men themselves.
There is no discussion whatsoever in these documents of follow-up blood testing and health monitoring to identify radioactive illnesses if and when they would begin to emerge in individuals.
Best we Forget – Australia’s 70 year old nuclear contamination secrets about to be exposed
Testing at Montebellos
More than 20 years ago, I reported that the military planners of the first test – Hurricane in 1952 at the Montebellos – were well aware there would be radioactive contamination and that personnel could well be subjected to exposures that could cause radiogenic illnesses and deaths. Rear Admiral AD Torlese, task force commander of Hurricane, wrote to Rear Admiral PWB Brooking of the Armament Research Establishment in September 1951, pointing to the medico-legal implications that could arise:
“It is not suggested that any one man who took part, and subsequently suffers from a disease which might (emphasis in original) be due to the Operation, should automatically be compensated. I do feel, however, that some formula might be accepted by MInistries which would dispose any tribunal favour of a claimant ex ‘Hurricane’.”
The recently-released documents repeatedly refer to these and other medico-legal possibilities, but the scores of senior echelon comments and committee minutes show that the need even for pre-deployment blood tests was pooh-poohed – too ‘foolish or impractical’ to be implemented with well over 30,000 personnel much less the local populations of Australia and Christmas Island.
A 1954 memorandum from the Medical Division of AWERE [Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, which later became AWE – Atomic Weapons Establishment] in Harwell, England stated in its opening paragraph:
“Ionizing radiations produce blood changes in animals and men. At sufficiently high exposures, the blood changes are progressive and if exposure is continued a critical stage is reached, beyond which progression continues despite cessation of exposure. The process is then irreversible, progressive and leads to a fatal issue. Nor is it amenable to therapy. It is important in radiological protection of the individual to ensure that a progressive change is detected early so that a critical stage will not be reached.”
But AWERE never seems to have explained this clearly to the operational leaders of the trials, except in the case of the RAF, where some monitoring of sniffer and aircraft decontamination personnel occurred.
Sailing through a radioactive cloud
The Medical Officer’s Journal of HMS Tracker, which was required to sail in the path of the radioactive clouds of the Hurricane blast in October 1952, records: “This day a start was to be made on blood counts for all personnel likely to be exposed to radiation hazards.”
However, Captain JR Gower, who was required to track the fallout from the two Mosaic detonations – the second of which was twice the size as that over Hiroshima – in May and June 1956 in command of the HMS Diana, has since written “What puzzles so many of us is why, on conclusion of the trials, no effort was made to see what effect the nuclear explosions had, both physiologically and psychologically, on the men who had witnessed them and perhaps more important, on those who went through the fallout. Yet we had no follow-up checks of any kind….”
“We were required to steam through the fallout from two nuclear explosions,
to deliberately contaminate our ship and to continue to serve in a ship, parts of which had been unacceptably radioactive.
A March 1958 document, Radiological Safety Regulations Christmas Island, issued by the Trials Planning Branch, AWERE, stated that radiation…
“may be encountered during the Trial’ and ‘The danger is insidious because the effects are not immediately felt and may become apparent after a period of years. Damage might arise not only from external exposure but from irradiation of internal organs as a result of ingestion, inhalation, injection into the bloodstream through cuts or abrasions, or even by absorption through an intact skin.”
In July 1958, committee minutes of Headquarters Task Force Grapple, Air Ministry in London, included this paragraph:
“All medical opinion present agreed single blood counts to be of negligible scientific value’ and R.A.F. medical representation at the meeting did not believe blood counts to be a medico-legal safeguard and, as they are scientifically worthless done under Service conditions, considered it “immoral” to do them.”
Pre-Olympics nuclear bomb lies exposed, while veterans yet wait for compensation
Dangers ignored
These dangers had been totally ignored for the great majority of the ‘participants’ throughout the six years of major and minor Trials in Australia.
There is a score of documents in these files reporting the fight against delivering even a single pre-deployment blood test by military medics and their civilian medical advisors, who did not understand that a baseline had to be recorded for each individual before he was possibly exposed during weeks or months on duty even well beyond the small ‘controlled areas’ of the detonation sites.
But the men also had to be ‘subsequently’ monitored with post-deployment examinations. Which, in the event, was only offered to individuals who began to manifest possibly radiogenic injury – and then only to some of them, mostly Air Force pilots, crew and ground staff who had flown through the known radioactive clouds.
During the Australian years the Director of the AWRE was in charge of radioactive safety at the tests that were designed by his employees. There are documents in this recently released trove that indicate that the scientists were well aware of the genetic risks.
Why were these documents released by two separate UK governments in the wake of the Letter before Action raised earlier this year by some UK nuclear veterans against the Ministry of Defence for its failures of duties of care against known hazards?
The evidence contained in them is so consistent, extensive and damning that they vindicate calls from UK veterans and their lawyers for a Special Tribunal rather than an adversarial court case.
Equally, this evidence points to the urgent need for the Australian government to review the terms its predecessor agreed to limit UK indemnity for claims “arising out of any act, matter or thing done or omitted to be done by the United Kingdom or its servants or agents in relation to the carrying out of nuclear tests or experimental programmes by the United Kingdom at the sites in Australia or in relation to the decontamination and clearance of the sites,” according to an Exchange of Notes in December 1993. And to note that those terms do not apply to the tests carried out before 27 June 1956.
Moreover, at least a third of the documents relating to the 1984-5 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia held in the National Archives of Australia are still marked decades later as ‘not yet examined’. Forty years on, it’s time they were.
Sue Rabbitt Roff studied and taught at Melbourne and Monash Universities. Her recent writings on cultural aspects of settler colonial Australia have been published in Meanjin, Overland, the Conversation, the Independent and on Pearls & Irritations. She is currently writing a revisionist history of British atomic tests and nuclear trials in Australia.