While our Government ignored America and Israel’s bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran, the British Government may finally succumb to compensating victims of atomic bomb testing in Australia in the 1950s. Sue Rabbitt Roff reports.
Forty years after a group of British nuclear test veterans braved the Official Secrets Act to begin campaigning for recognition of their health problems as possible consequences of working with radioactive substances, UK Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard has made remarkable statements.
After 40 years, he is accepting what successive UK governments have denied with an implacable single-mindedness across Tory and Labour at great expense in various courts and tribunals.
During Armed Forces Week in the UK, on June 25, 2025, the incumbent Luke Pollard said in a BBC radio interview:
‘We know the consequences for many of those people participating in the tests are carried, not just by individuals, but by their family members. That’s why we want to work out what we can declassify and share, and get to the heart of trying to get justice for those individuals.”
Which is to say that the incumbent Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces has just conceded virtually
every litigated point that has been denied in half a dozen major court cases over the past 30 years.
Cockups and coverups revealed. UK Government failed Australian nuclear test veterans
Pressure on Starmer
In its first year in office, the Starmer Labour Government has been pressured by a carefully curated stream of print and television programmes on major channels such as the BBC and Channel 4. But one of the most significant has been a short, less than ten minutes, YouTube video made by a British human rights advocate, Peter Stefanovic (not the Australian journalist of the same name).
It shows clips of senior Labour members of parliament supporting the calls for the release of documents and an enquiry into the concerns of nuclear test veterans before the last election that brought them into government just a year ago.
🚨PLEASE DON’T BETRAY OUR NUCLEAR TEST VETERANS PM
As video emerges of the Deputy Prime Minister, Defence Secretary & Armed Forces Minister BACKING compensation for nuclear test veterans in opposition, veterans call on @Keir_Starmer to meet with them & honour the commitment made pic.twitter.com/OZSAr1lUU8
— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) May 16, 2025
Few of the elected Labour MPs felt able to follow through on their pre-election promises once they became the government a year ago. Until now, seven weeks after it was aired in mid-May, Stefanic’s YouTube video has been viewed 3.2 million times, and counting.
Media-savvy members of the Nuclear Tests Veterans Association have unremittingly orchestrated the pressure on the Starmer government. They have been supported in particular by Susie Boniface, a journalist on the Mirror papers, who utilised the Freedom of Information regulations to press for the release of the huge trove of documents held by the Ministry of Defence and the Atomic Weapons Authority.
In the final days of the Tory government, these began to appear, and they recently reached a crescendo when the Merlin database, containing approximately half a million documents, was released.
Tipping point? Documents reveal failed duty of care for Australian nuclear test participants
Only in principle, as no funding has been allocated as far as can be seen for the downloading and analysis of the documents. But this may change, and it might be that the crowd-funded lawyers supporting the current leadership of the veterans organisations will require them to be produced if court cases that were mooted in May 2025 take place.
The lawyers are preparing civil claims on behalf of veterans and their families. They have served a 500-page criminal dossier on the Metropolitan Police alleging misconduct in public office by numerous officials who are alleged to have taken part in the cover-up over decades.
I have read a thousand or so pages of documents that have been downloaded onto the AWE FOIA site as having studied these issues over the past 30 years.
It is clear to me that the health of the 30,000 or more servicemen (no women were sent to the test sites), scientists, civilians, and indigenous people who were handling radioactive material or in the vicinity of the fallout from the atomic and hybrid nuclear tests in Australia and off Christmas Island were not adequately protected even by the standards of the time from potential radiogenic illnesses. The procedures varied for different tests and sites, as well as for different categories of personnel.
They were more honoured in the breach than in the observance by the senior echelons of each of the services, and often by the medical officers.
Warmongering Marles commits Australia to US war against China amid Iran mayhem
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.