by Joan Smith
This article is ostensibly about a specific claim by an eminent scientist about the medical effects of an H-bomb test. What is lacking in it is any discussion of that claim other than one throw away phrase - the allegation that Pauling and Rotblat warn of ‘radioactive dangers to a degree not supported by eminent experts advising the Government’.
Who are these advisers? How would they answer Pauling’s very specific claim about the effect of the test? The whole point of the piece is to divert attention away from this scientific controversy, in which the opponents of the test can muster just as impressive a set of experts as can the government, to unsubstantiated innuendoes about anyone who doesn’t support the British government’s line.
What about Pincher’s own credentials? He is the journalist who told us that the first British atom bomb ‘was almost certainly exploded on the top of a steel tower’ when it was actually inside HMS Plym. He is the journalist who published a book called Into the Atomic Age by ‘Chapman Pincher, BSc’ in 1948, in which he described how the uranium gun bomb was tested at Alamogordo. It was not. As we have seen, scientists were confident the uranium bomb, Little Boy, would work. What they tried out was the plutonium implosion bomb, Fat Man.
On 19 March 1957 Pincher said in a story in the Daily Express that Britain intended to run a further series of atom bomb tests at Maralinga that year; most would be exploded on top of towers, but one might be dropped from a plane.
When the British government started looking for the source of the leak, Pincher sent a letter explaining the origin of the story. It had come from Australia, he said, and his source said the series would finish work started at an earlier set of tests. That, he said, was why ‘I suggested most of the weapons would be tower bursts and that one might be dropped from an airplane. This I confess was sheer guess-work based on what happened in the previous series … The fact is that if my guess about what is going to happen in these new trials is correct, it was something of a fluke.’ (My italics.)
Pincher, of course, was not alone in the practice of dismissing opposition to the tests. The Times of 18 May 1957 reported a student demonstration at the British embassy in Tokyo to protest against a British H-bomb tests. The students’ federation was ‘a notoriously fellow-travelling organization, and today’s protest march showed all the signs of careful planning and forethought,’ the story said. Even the poor old Japanese were not allowed to have a legitimate interest in the effects of radiation.
That thoughtful journal, the News of the World, made its contribution to the debate by inviting Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s wartime scientific adviser, to make a statement on Britain’s first H-bomb. ‘Until today he, as well as other top-flight scientists, has kept silent on the effects of Britain’s H-bomb tests in the Pacific,’ the paper reported on 19 May 1957. ‘Now for the first time Lord Cherwell answers some of the questions which are disturbing people all over the world today.
‘Lord Cherwell – he is known as “The Prof” to Sir Winston – sat back in his armchair as I read the statement. “I accept your paper’s invitation because I think it vital the truth should be known,” said the tall, lean man in tweeds who knows all Britain’s scientific secrets - and has done for years.’
Given what he goes on to say, it is hard to see why Cherwell’s views had been kept a secret for so long. Under the heading ‘UNANSWERABLE FACTS’, Cherwell begins uncompromisingly. ‘Many people in this country and abroad have been genuinely worried about the alleged danger to the health of the world caused by our nuclear tests in the Pacific. Their anxiety is completely unfounded.’
Their anxiety had been stirred up, in fact, by a curious group of people identified by Cherwell as ‘freelances’ - the implication being that their opposition, far from being genuine, had been paid for by the highest bidder. These people, whom Cherwell goes on to traduce as ‘agitators’, had claimed the bomb tests must be stopped in spite of a report from the Medical Research Council which ‘gave us facts and figures showing that these tests will not harm any of us’.
This assertion, impressive as it sounds, is merely Cherwell up to his old tricks again. During the Second World War, as Frederick Lindemann, Cherwell distorted scientific evidence to persuade Churchill to lift his embargo on area bombing. In 1957, he was simply misrepresenting a cautious report by the MRC which had admitted the possibility that even low doses of radiation could cause cancer. But were the readers of the News of the World in any position to argue with ‘The Prof’?
In the face of this stream of sustained and abusive propaganda, it is remarkable that the voice of dissent succeeded in being heard at all. It certainly found little outlet in the popular press, which was besotted with the bomb as the restorer of the nation’s virility.
It did surface in publications from scientific organizations. Linus Pauling based his claim that 1,000 people would die as a result of Britain’s first H-bomb test on a report from the Atomic Scientists’ Association in April 1957. The Association, based in Britain, had set up a committee to follow up problems raised in the MRC report the previous year. It was chaired by Joseph Rotblat.
It recognized the problem that the effects of small amounts of radiation were simply not known. But it suggested that an H-bomb of the type tested by the US at Bikini in 1954 ‘may eventually produce bone cancers in 1,000 people for every million tons of TNT or equivalent explosive’. No wonder Chapman Pincher was reluctant to get involved in the turbulent scientific debate about the effects of the test; it was much safer to stick to unsubstantiated innuendo.
Dissent also appeared in journals with comparatively small circulations. Of these, the New Statesman played a key role. In 1952, its ‘London Diary’ was one of the few voices to call attention to the outbreak of lunacy spreading through Fleet Street.
‘A great deal of nonsense is being written about the A-bomb explosion at Monte Bello,’ it pointed out. ‘“Now Great Britain is really Great again,” exclaimed the Evening Standard, and other leader writers patted us on the back with much the same heartiness. Yet the fact is that no one in London or Washington can possibly know whether our bomb is more effective than the American bomb, since each has been produced secretly. What the leader writers mean, I suppose, is that it takes a Great Power to make A-bombs and that now we’re making them we can hold up our heads alongside the Russians and Americans.’
In 1957, the Statesman’s ‘London Diary’ reported incredulously that Lady Carew Pole, organizer of the WVS in Cornwall, had written to all her branches saying, ‘The hydrogen bomb could be a terrible weapon, but with your help the blow can be greatly eased.’ She urged women to attend talks on how to protect their homes, how to care for the sick at home, and ‘how you would be cared for’. Kingsley Martin, the paper’s editor, commented, ‘I have long suspected that the government’s purpose in keeping civil defence organizations going was more psychological than practical.’
On 2 November 1957, the New Statesman published an article by J. B. Priestley, ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bombs’, which called for Britain to reject nuclear weapons. ‘Alone, we defied Hitler; and alone we can defy this nuclear madness into which the spirit of Hitler seems to have passed, to poison the world,’ he wrote. ‘There may be other chain reactions besides those leading to destruction; and we might start one.’ He urged ‘a declaration to the world that after a certain date one power able to engage in nuclear warfare will reject the evil thing forever.’
The article was published just after the Labour Party conference had rejected a motion that Britain should disarm unilaterally; it provoked a great debate and led to the setting up of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The first meeting was attended by Kingsley Martin, the paper’s editor, and Patrick Blackett, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose advice against the bomb had been peremptorily rejected by Ernest Bevin.
The aims of CND have still not been realized; nevertheless, the tide was turning against the bomb tests. By 1963, opposition to them was so strong that Britain, Russia and the US sign
ed the Partial Test Ban Treaty which outlawed tests in the atmosphere. The problems are not over: France and China have ignored the treaty, radiation has escaped from underground tests into the air, and radioactivity from the 1950s’ tests is making its way back to earth to this day. But at least the days of large, uncontrolled emissions of radiation into the atmosphere, unless there is a nuclear war, are over.
Curiously, the attitudes that went with them still persist. They even find publishers who are willing to print them. Air Vice-Marshal Stewart Menaul, a high-ranking Royal Air Force officer during British tests at Maralinga and at the later tests at Monte Bello, is a case in point.
In 1980, Menaul published a book called Countdown: Britain’s Strategic Nuclear Forces. The book jacket claims that, in it, Menaul tells for the first time the ‘whole story’ of how Britain designed and tested nuclear weapons.
Menaul’s style is one with which students of 1950s’ propaganda have become familiar. ‘The Labour Government, elected in 1945, had among its members an assortment of Communist fellow-travellers, conscientious objectors and pacifists whom Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, distrusted implicitly, though Attlee tolerated them,’ Menaul says. In the circumstances, he feels, it was quite right that decisions about the British bomb should have been taken without reference to the full Cabinet, or to Parliament. ‘In retrospect, to anyone who has been involved in nuclear affairs in the post-war era, the manner in which decisions were taken by Gen 163 was entirely correct and appropriate.’
He allows that ‘some government scientific advisers, like Professor P. M. Blackett, opposed Britain’s nuclear programme, but his views carried little weight except among his own kind. Professor Lindemann (later Viscount Cherwell), who was Churchill’s principal scientific adviser, had no doubts and fully supported the programme right up to the final test phases in Australia and at Christmas Island.’ (My italics.)
Menaul believes the British tests harmed no one. How reliable this view is can be gauged from what he says about the American nuclear tests. The tests in Nevada in 1955, he says, ‘provided visitors and local inhabitants with a spectacular and interesting display to distract their attention from the more fleshy entertainments to be had in the enchanting city of Las Vegas.’ Fortunately, he goes on to explain, they were conducted - just like the British tests - under regulations ‘designed to protect life and property from the effects of nuclear weapons and make testing on the American mainland safe and effective.’ (My italics.)
In its issue of 13 January 1984, the Journal of the American Medical Association printed a paper on the incidence of cancer ‘in an Area of Radioactive Fallout Downwind From the Nevada Test Site’. Its author, Carl J. Johnson, reports five times as many cases of leukaemia as would have been expected in the period between 1958 and 1966. The excess persisted in the later period studied, 1972 to 1980. There were also excess cases of thyroid cancer - which is caused by radioactive iodine - and of breast cancer.
‘There were more cancers of the gastrointestinal tract than expected,’ the paper says. ‘There was an excess of melanoma, bone cancer and brain tumours. A subgroup with a history of acute fallout effects had a higher cancer incidence. That these cases can be associated with radiation exposures is supported by a comparison between groups of the ratio of cancers of more radiosensitive organs with all other types of cancer.’
The paper, which was published only after very careful independent scrutiny of its methodology and results, is hardly a tribute to the ‘safety’ of the American mainland tests. But Menaul is very good at looking on the bright side. Later in his book, he recognizes the hazards caused by the US tests at Bikini in 1954 – when numerous Pacific islanders got high doses of radiation – but goes on to say that ‘in fairness to the Americans, it must be said that valuable information resulting from their tests was made known to the world by the American Atomic Energy Authority.’
Attendance at the British bomb tests was, as far as Menaul was concerned, a privilege. ‘Those who were lucky enough to have taken part in these historic events had a unique experience and a greater understanding of the importance of nuclear deterrence in maintaining world peace,’ he writes at the end of a chapter on the British tests. His book is dedicated to ‘the men and women of all three Services who loyally carry out their duties despite scant recognition from their political masters, and all too often in the face of ill-informed criticism from a small but vocal minority who appear to owe allegiance to authorities beyond our shores.’
Chapter Five
‘Hairy-chested’ attitudes
Comment from declassified US document on officers’ approach to radiation risks
During the 1950s, opposition to the atom bomb and H-bomb tests focused on one specific medical issue: the claim that fallout from tests conducted in the atmosphere posed a threat to people throughout the world. On one side of the argument were ranged people like Edward Teller, who was known as the father of the American hydrogen bomb, and Lord Cherwell; on the other, an alliance of scientists embracing Linus Pauling in the US and Andrei Sakharov in Russia.
Teller claimed world-wide fallout ‘is as dangerous as being an ounce overweight or smoking one cigarette every two months’. Sakharov claimed the victims of fallout had already, by 1958, reached almost one million and would rise by up to 300,000 more for every year the testing continued. Cherwell simply thundered that the tests would harm no one.
Today, few people would take Cherwell’s position. Even the conservative Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington recognizes some damage. In 1979, Robert E. Alexander, of its Office of Standards Development, estimated the long-term effects of atmospheric weapons testing at between 29,000 and 72,000 deaths from cancer and 168,000 genetic effects. Dr Rosalie Bertell, an American radiation expert, claims the production and testing of nuclear weapons up to 1984 had already killed or damaged 13 million people.
But even if pessimistic estimates are correct, the effects are difficult to measure when spread across the population of the world, with all the problems of discrepancies in the efficiency of diagnosis and registration of disease in different countries. The effects are much more likely to show up - in the form of a higher-than-predicted incidence of radiation-linked diseases - in a relatively small population known to have been close to one or more nuclear explosions.
The bomb test veterans - servicemen and civilians who took part in the British tests - are just such a population. It is clear that, at the time of the tests, few of the men themselves recognized the risk. They gave the matter little thought, or trusted to the superior knowledge of the people running the tests. The other group of people who were at risk, the aboriginal population of Australia, was even less in a position to realize the danger or do anything about it.
Britain’s last atom bomb tests took place in Australia in 1957, its final H-bomb test in the Pacific in 1958. That year, Britain, the USSR and the US agreed to a voluntary suspension of tests in the atmosphere. The agreement broke down in 1961, but Britain did not resume atmospheric testing of full-scale weapons. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty came into effect. That year also marked the last in a series of experiments, running into hundreds, which Britain conducted in Australia in connection with the nuclear weapons programme.
1963 did not bring with it the end of Britain’s involvement with the testing range at Maralinga, in the South Australian desert. In 1967, when the tests had become a closed chapter in history for most people in the UK, the British were hauled back to Australia to clear up the mess they had left behind at Maralinga, including at least twenty kilograms of plutonium and traces of beryllium, a highly toxic substance. That exercise, code-named Operation Brumby and described in a key secret document known as the Pearce Report, was to play a vital role in the fight for a full investigation into what happened at the tests when the first allegations of illness were made years later.
Many radiation-linked diseases take years to develop. In the 1970s, veterans in Britain and Australia began to su
spect that a surprising number of them were suffering from diseases like cancer, cataracts and skin diseases. Events followed a similar pattern in both countries, although the campaign started later in Britain. In the US, the same thing was happening: former US servicemen who had taken part in tests at Nevada and in the Pacific, as well as those who visited the devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, noticed high levels of disease and linked them with their experience. In the Pacific, islanders who had suffered years of French and American weapons testing started to campaign for compensation for their devastated territory.
The campaigns each began in the same quiet way. Men who were at nuclear tests tried to find out more about their illnesses and the tests themselves, coming up against official denials of any connection, and against the wall of secrecy which surrounds nuclear weapons. They went to the media for help; publicity brought forward more people with similar tales to tell. They formed veterans’ associations to fight the particular problems in each country: in the US and Britain, legislation which prevents former servicemen suing the state for injuries received during their service; in Australia, stringent cash limits on the amount of compensation that could be awarded.
They also demanded large-scale, independent surveys of their health to establish whether their claims of high rates of illness were correct. The studies done so far in Australia and the US have been inconclusive, because they missed out some of the participants. In Britain, the government set up a study by the National Radiological Protection Board; it has been fraught with problems, heavily criticized, and is nowhere near its final report at the time of writing. The study will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter.
In Australia, one of the first cases to gain public attention was that of Warrant Officer William Jones, who died of bone cancer in 1966. His widow, Peggy, first started trying to get compensation for herself and her children in 1968, two years after her husband’s death. William Jones had served in the Australian army at Emu Field in 1953, during the Totem series of British tests.