by Alan Rimmer
Their reassurances would have been more convincing but for the fact that as they spoke a tanker passed outside, spraying the pavement and spattering the window of the room they were talking in with water.
Mr Lavrukhin looked up as the tanker swung by and burst out laughing. The moment broke the ice, and Mr Lavrukhin and his party threw away their well rehearsed scripts and relaxed. Mr Lavrukhin talked about his family and how they had all been caught up in the panic to evacuate the city.
He said he received a call in the early hours of the morning informing him there was an emergency at Chernobyl. He wasn’t given too many details at that point; just that there had been a large explosion.
As soon as he put the receiver down, it rang again. It was his boss who told him to report to the town hall at once. Before he could get out of bed, the phone rang again. It was the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow demanding information.
He ran to his car with just an overcoat over his pyjamas. At the town hall everyone was milling about, unsure of what to do. His boss was already there and was on the phone to people in Chernobyl. The chief of police and the fire officer ran in and were instructed to make all haste to Pripyat.
The blood drained from their faces when informed the nuclear power station had blown up.
Mr Lavrukhin said everything after that was just a blur. His job was to prepare for the possible evacuation of the whole city; an enormous task which kept him preoccupied night and day for three days.
Everything depended on the wind. If the winds swung toward Kiev, then everyone, three million people, would have to be evacuated; a virtually impossible undertaking but one which, nevertheless, had to be prepared for.
This would mean somehow telling the populace something of the emergency on their doorstep without causing widespread panic. On the second day, the winds did indeed swing toward Kiev and the first phase of the evacuation began.
All the schoolchildren, roughly about 200,000, were bussed out of the city and dispatched with all speed south to pioneer camps.
Lavrukhin’s own family, his wife and two daughters of school age, were evacuated in this first wave as they lived north of the city and therefore closest to Chernobyl. Mr Lavrukhin was overwhelmed by the responsibility: Not only did he have to deal with the possibility of the mass evacuation of the city…he also had to deal with the huge influx of people from Chernobyl and the surrounding area.
The following day McGinley was taken on a short trip outside the city limits to see the efforts being made to bring back normality.
Heading north out of Kiev there was evidence of the vast evacuation that had taken place. Municipal buildings and community centres were crowded with evacuees: so many that in some areas makeshift shelters had been hastily constructed on the pavements.
Leaving the city limits, things became even more chaotic. Fields surrounding the Ukranian capital had been turned into large encampments, with wooden and canvas structures supplying the bulk of living space. Many tents had been set up by the side of the road, and further tented camps had sprung up in wooded clearings.
Large convoys of trucks, tractors, buses, battered old cars and even a few horse-drawn carts were all parked up on the sides of the road. Groups of mainly young men stood around in surly groups. Check points, were positioned at intervals on the side of the road heading away from the disaster zone.
These were manned by up to a dozen people, each brandishing radiation monitors or jet-sprays hooked to their backs. Everyone passing through was swept and either passed ‘clean’ or directed to join the ragged queues at hastily erected tented clinics.
All that was left behind was a vast wasteland abandoned by its inhabitants as they fled the invisible enemy that spread like a dark stain from the stricken Chernobyl reactor.
BETRAYAL
McGinley’s eyewitness accounts of events in the Soviet Union made banner headlines. But the publicity generated by the Chernobyl incident was a mixed blessing.
Abroad, the veteran’s stock had never been higher. It encouraged ex-servicemen from across the globe to come forward with hair-raising accounts of their own experiences.
A group of former Soviet generals revealed that thousands of troops had been deliberately irradiated after an atomic bomb, twice the size of Hiroshima, was dropped near the provincial city of Orenburg in 1954.
Hundreds were said to have died in the immediate aftermath and the pilot and co-pilot of the TU-34 that dropped the bomb both died of leukaemia.
A startling report alleged that an experimental town in Kazakhstan had been “nuked” to test a new nuclear bunker system doubling as a subway. According to information passed to western scientists the bunkers survived the blast, but hundreds of luckless “volunteers” who had been herded inside the maze of tunnels died horribly after the fireball sucked all the oxygen from the air in the tunnels.
Elsewhere a huge explosion in 1957 at a nuclear bomb factory in the Ural Mountains caused the evacuation of an entire region. Hundreds of survivors were said to have been carted off to a town near the city of Penza where military doctors used them in radiation experiments.
French ex-servicemen also contacted their British “brothers in nuclear arms” to talk of their experiences in the Algerian desert and Polynesia in the Pacific. France exploded more than 200 nuclear devices and hundreds of soldiers were now complaining of ill health.
But like Britain and the Soviets, the secrecy surrounding the test programme and the difficulty of scientifically proving a link between radiation and illnesses that often emerged decades later prevented them from gaining compensation.
In Britain, the death of William Penney in 1991 marked a watershed. Any hope the veterans had of compensation seemed to die with him. There was a different mood in the country as Britain entered the 1990s.
It was a time of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. People were obsessed by celebrity and the celebrity lifestyle. The nation embarked on a gigantic spending spree and considerations about the environment and other issues were brushed under the carpet.
Society appeared indifferent to the horrors of the past, and the nuclear bogyman didn’t seem so scary any more.
The British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association, its membership inexorably dwindling by the death (natural or otherwise), began to fall into disarray. Lack of progress in the campaign led to rows, in-fighting and arguments about what direction the organisation should take.
Ken McGinley’s position as chairman for the first time was being challenged. Sheila Gray, his long-time secretary said: “People used to think he was God, and his word was law. They were not so sure any more.”
In a bid to revive flagging morale, McGinley launched an action in the European Court claiming his human rights had been violated by the British government.
Appearing before nine European judges in 1997 he argued the case that the government had concealed vital documents; he claimed the lives of veterans had been ruined by being forced to witness nuclear tests at Christmas Island and that the government had used them as guinea pigs.
It all had a tired, familiar ring to it and with no new evidence to go on, no smoking gun, the court action failed. It was another bitter blow and it left the campaign with nowhere obvious to go.
Many veterans abandoned the fight. Others vowed to carry on, but there were few options left open. Ken McGinley strove to keep the issue in the public consciousness.
He wrote to the famously-abrasive actor Sean Connery asking him to consider performing a voice-over for a proposed documentary on Christmas Island. The actor said he was prepared to consider it, and McGinley managed to get an Australian soap actor to agree to play the starring role. But the project failed through lack of interest.
McGinley introduced a royal angle by revealing the Duke of Edinburgh had visited Christmas Island in 1959 on board Britannia. (The Queen’s consort apparently hopped off the boat for an hour or two to have a look at the troops and watch a native dance. But he was careful no
t to eat or drink anything until he was safely back on board.)
But although these activities garnered some publicity, they had little impact. The Conservative government, the Ministry of Defence and the British public were unmoved.
Happily a revival of fortunes seemed on the cards when Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to power in 1997.
Blair and most of his government had all pledged their undying support for the nuclear veterans during the long, lonely years in Opposition. Sitting Labour MPs and prospective candidates had ruthlessly used the nuclear veterans to embarrass the Tories.
They had all joined Blair in supporting a Private Member’s Bill in 1990 which would have handed justice to the veterans and their families. The Bill, championed by Labour MP Bob Clay, was “talked out” by Tory backbenches to howls of protest from Labour MPs
Unfortunately the Labour Party wasn’t so well disposed toward the veterans once in power. A letter of congratulation from McGinley, and a gentle reminder of Labour’s earnest promises in Opposition, was sent to Tony Blair as soon as he had his feet under the table at 10 Downing Street.
There was no response.
A follow-up letter several weeks later again was ignored. It was only after several more letters had been sent that Blair replied; the news was not good. Tony Blair said that although he was “sympathetic” toward the veterans, he wrote: “Unfortunately independent scientific studies do not support the payment of general compensation.”
The veterans were outraged, but the Blair administration was as intractable as the Tories had ever been. Veteran campaigner Jack Ashley, a Labour Peer and long-time supporter of the veterans, pleaded: “Most of the Cabinet supported the veterans in opposition. The least they can do is to support them now when they have the power to do something about it…”
But Tony Blair was unmoved, and his equanimity was still unruffled even when an extraordinary story emerged about his own involvement in nuclear bomb testing. Apparently when he was a little boy, he was exposed to radiation from an A-bomb test in Australia.
The story begins on October 11, 1956 when young Tony, aged three and big brother Bill, six, were at home in suburban Adelaide with their mother Hazel. She was a 33-year-old housewife, married to husband Leo who was a lecturer in law at the University of Adelaide.
Mrs Blair was a shy, introverted woman who wasn’t keen on the social side of life in this far-flung corner of the Empire. According to Bill Blair his mother missed her home in the UK and felt lonely and isolated.
In the absence of any real friends, she devoted herself entirely to the well-being of her young family. She stayed home most days, and was watching Tony and Bill playing on their tricycles in the garden (an activity the two Blair boys enjoyed doing most), when a large, reddish-brown cloud stretching from horizon to horizon moved toward Adelaide.
It transpired later the cloud enveloped much of the Blair’s neighbourhood as well as large parts of the city. A radio report said it was a sand-storm. What it didn’t say was that mixed in with the sand was a deadly seeding of radioactive isotopes.
Unexpected wind changes had apparently blown the dust from Maralinga, 350 miles to the north east of Adelaide, where the British government had detonated an atomic device.
Experts at the local Giles Weather Station, run by the British, had calculated that prevailing winds would gently sweep the radioactive cloud across the less populous desert regions of the northern territories. But things had gone wrong.
According to Hedley Marston, one of Australia’s foremost scientists, unforeseen wind shift blew part of the radioactive mushroom cloud across Adelaide, contaminating much of the city and the eastern seaboard.
Using a home-made filtering device and Geiger counter set up on the roof of a laboratory, Marston recorded huge levels of radioactive Iodine, Caesium and Strontium-90 in the air over the city.
He was furious when these measurements were officially denied, and accused the British government and William Penney (who was in personal charge at Maralinga at the time) of covering-up the incident.
Marston claimed he had measured radioactive iodine levels up to 5000 times higher than normal in the thyroids of sheep at two locations near Adelaide, enough to contaminate the food chain.
According to Marston, strontium-90, linked to bone cancer, and leukaemia was being ingested by children, via cows' milk; government policies at the time guaranteed a half pint of milk daily to every Australian schoolchild.
In papers published after his death, he complained to his friend, the nuclear physicist Sir Mark Oliphant: "I am more worried than I can convey about the expensive quasi-scientific pantomime that's being enacted at Maralinga under the cloak of secrecy. And even more so about the evasive lying that is being indulged in by public authorities about the hazard of fallout. Apparently Whitehall and Canberra consider that the people of northern Australia are expendable."
Marston later accused the Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee and the British and Australian governments of lying. The presence of iodine-131 in animals, he warned, would result in increased cases of human cancer of the thyroid gland.
His outspoken criticisms meant he was ostracised by both Australian and British scientists who accused him of scaremongering. He had his equipment confiscated, and his research grants evaporated over-night.
Marston, who died in 1965, was posthumously vindicated in 1985 by the Australian Royal Commission who found that most of his calculations were correct.
When the Blair’s returned to the UK, health problems beset the family. Tony Blair was just 11, when a stroke deprived his father of speech for many years, and soon after his sister Sarah was hospitalised for two years with rheumatoid arthritis. His mother contracted thyroid cancer and was dead at the age of 52, after a long battle. It is well known that Tony Blair later suffered heart problems.
British medical researcher and toxicologist Dick Van Steenis who had access to much of Marston’s papers wasn’t surprised. "Adelaide was plastered with radioactive fallout from 11 to 16 October 1956 comprising plutonium-239, americium-241, iodine-131, strontium-90 and caesium-137," said Van Steenis. “Tony Blair’s mother died of thyroid cancer following that exposure.”
Dr Van Steenis, who studied medicine in Adelaide, further claimed: "All the medical conditions could have been triggered by exposure to radioactivity. And, as a youngster in Adelaide, drinking local milk Tony Blair is very likely to be at risk of bone cancer himself, almost certainly with a residue of strontium-90 in his bones and bone marrow. It is a hell of a catch-22 for the British prime minister. He has never denied the impact of the Maralinga tests on his family. He has never denied that radioactive fallout was ultimately the cause of his mother’s death. But he would not acknowledge it, because to do so would strengthen the legal case against his government for the compensation entitlements of British and Australian veterans.”
Bill Blair described the impact of the health problems in the family in a newspaper interview. He described his mother as a “very brave woman, adding: “She was in hospital for considerable periods. It was traumatic for all of us. Her death had the effect of ending a particular part of the family story. A year or so before she died, hoping the illness had gone away, she and my father bought a house that they began to renovate. She never got to live there."
Her death affected his brother Tony "very much ... I think people have tended to underestimate the role my mother played in forming Tony's view of life. From Tony's perspective, I believe it was a combination of things that gave him the drive to succeed. The death of his mother affected him every bit as much as his father's stroke."
Tony Blair, for whatever reason, has chosen to ignore the possibility his family may have suffered. His spokeswoman when pressed for a comment derided it as “a silly season story”, and refused to comment further.
As the new millennium approached, the veterans received an unexpected windfall in the shape of a generous donation of £50,000 from distinguished British author Cather
ine Cookson.
This enabled them to fund a study by Dundee University into blood diseases among the veterans. The research uncovered evidence that many more veterans were stricken with blood cancers than NRPB studies had suggested. The Dundee research was backed up by death certificates and medical records, and blew a very big hole in Government’s entrenched position that veterans were not harmed by their participation in the tests.
But the NRPB, which by then was conducting its third study into the health of test veterans, was not impressed and issued a statement denouncing the research as ‘unscientific.’ It was a familiar mantra.
In 2000 Ken McGinley decided to step down as national chairman of the veterans association. He announced he would never give up the battle, but after 18 years he wanted to spend more time with his wife and daughter.
In truth he was exhausted by the internecine in-fighting that had broken out within the ranks of the association. Many members were openly voicing their disappointment about the way the organisation was being run, and of course the lack of progress being made.
McGinley was replaced by John Lowe, a mild-mannered former national service seaman who had witnessed the first Grapple tests at Maldon Island in 1957. He was joined by Jeff Liddiatt, who served with the RAF in Maralinga from 1959-1960.
Between them they managed to fill the vacuum caused by McGinley’s departure and prevent the organisation from imploding. They decided to adopt a quieter approach to the campaign, working behind the scenes to persuade MPs from all parties to support the cause. It was an uphill struggle.
SICK FAMILY SYNDROME
It was 2002, and figures released by the veterans showed they were dying off at the rate of three a month. They were limping into extinction. It took a brainwave from Fleet Street legend Richard Stott to put them back on the agenda.