Clouds of Deceit

by Joan Smith

  He had been told to leave a Centurion tank close to where the weapon was to be detonated; after the explosion, he was sent into the area to bring the tank back. The tank would not start and Jones stayed beside it for two days until spare parts could be brought. He then drove it back to an army base in Victoria.

  Jones tried to get compensation before his death but failed. Peggy Jones was finally awarded compensation, under the Compensation (Australian Government Employees) Act, in 1974 – Aust. $8,600 and small weekly payments for each of her four children. Although the award was tiny, the important point was that the Commissioner for Employees’ Compensation who heard the case decided that Jones had contracted his illness because of the nature of his employment with the army.

  In 1980, Lance Edwards, a former RAAF radio operator, went on Australian television to describe how he had become contaminated flying through the atomic cloud at Emu Field in 1953. Edwards’s story of how he had to shower thirteen times to get rid of the contamination was alarming, but no one knew at that time just how badly contaminated the Lincolns had been - it would not become clear until the publication of a damning Australian report on the tests, the Kerr Report, in 1984.

  Nevertheless, Edwards’s illness - cancer of the thyroid, an organ known to be sensitive to radiation - was accepted by the Australian government as a ‘disease due to the nature of his employment’, just as William Jones’s cancer had been. Edwards was one of the lucky ones: by 1983, less than a dozen of the hundred or so cases brought under this compensation system had been successful. The largest award was Aust. $30,000. Relying on the Australian courts, rather than the compensation system for workmen, proved no better. The only cases to be won have been brought by widows; no survivor of the tests has yet won a case in court.

  The Australian Nuclear Veterans’ Association was set up, with headquarters in Brisbane, to coordinate the men’s fight. In 1980, it drew up a list of demands; the key items were calls for compensation and a demand for the setting-up of a register of all the people who believed their health had been affected by nuclear weapons. The Conservative government’s reaction was to refuse to release names to ANVA for such a register.

  Ex-servicemen were not the only people in Australia who were becoming worried about the effects of the tests. In 1980, the council in South Australia which represents aborigines told the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs that some of the Pitjantjatjara people could have been injured by radiation from the British bombs exploded in South Australia. In particular, an aborigine called Yami Lester described a black mist which passed over Wallatinna Station after an explosion just over 100 miles away at Emu Field in 1953. A number of aborigines became very ill, he said, particularly the very young and very old; he himself later went blind.

  The Australian government responded to all these allegations and court cases by asking the Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Committee to examine the available evidence on the tests. This they did in the report already mentioned, AIRAC 9, which was published in January 1983. Its conclusions were comforting. ‘The measures taken to protect the public, and the personnel involved in the nuclear test programs, from radiation injury attributable to the tests were well planned and almost certainly were effective,’ it said.

  It could not have been published at a worse time. Events were taking place in Britain which would undermine AIRAC’s cheerful conclusions to the point where a full-scale Royal Commission would be considered necessary by the Australian government. What was happening in Britain was much the same as had already occurred in Australia, but with this difference: the British government had run the tests, and scraps of documentary evidence were to be found in Britain which were not available in Australia.

  Some British veterans began to suspect a connection with the bomb tests as soon as their diseases were diagnosed. At the end of 1982, the BBC’s Nationwide programme publicized the claims of men who had participated in the hydrogen bomb tests at Christmas Island. In January 1983, Channel Four showed a programme on Maralinga which included footage from an Australian film, Backs to the Blast, in which Australian veterans talked about their experience.

  I took up the story in the Sunday Times, as did David Leigh and Paul Lashmar in the Observer. Starting in January 1983, I wrote eight stories in the Sunday Times about the veterans. They included the revelation that an Australian responsible for monitoring radiation exposure at Maralinga had admitted that essential pieces of equipment had failed to work and consequently he had made up records of radiation exposure. Lady Connor, widow of the Daily Mirror columnist, Cassandra, told the Sunday Times she believed her husband’s death could be connected with a hydrogen-bomb test he had observed at Christmas Island.

  The articles attracted many letters; some were from men who wanted to contact a veterans’ organization in Britain, some from people who just wanted to tell someone about their experiences. One man wrote from Devon to say how pleased he was that the claims of the veterans were at last being taken seriously. ‘I have often wondered if any of my ailments over the years had anything to do with the H-bomb test,’ he wrote. ‘I even asked a doctor and I was scoffed at.’ He described a skin irritation which started soon after the test, when he was twenty-two, and persisted to the time of writing. ‘I used to wear white cotton gloves when I went to bed but this didn’t stop me from scratching my face and chest until they bled.’

  A London woman, who did not want any publicity, wrote to tell me about her husband’s infertility after the Monte Bello test in 1952. He was a member of a boat party which had been unable to get back to the parent ship before the test; they pulled in to an island and watched the test from out in the open. The woman’s husband had asked his consultant whether radiation could have played a part in his infertility; the doctor took it sufficiently seriously to write to the Ministry of Defence, which simply denied any connection.

  Almost as soon as the veterans’ claims received publicity, the British government simultaneously denied that anyone had been harmed and announced it would commission a study into their health to put people’s minds at rest. Although the study was announced in January, it took eight months to set up and many veterans were unhappy about the way the Ministry of Defence intended going about the task. In May 1983, the veterans set up the British Nuclear Tests’ Veterans’ Association, under the chairmanship of Ken McGinley, the former Royal Engineer who lives in Dunoon, in Scotland. It soon had hundreds of members, including many who had contacted newspapers, like the Sunday Times, or the BBC’s Nationwide programme.

  In Birmingham, Dr Alice Stewart, the well-known epidemiologist, whose work first revealed the cancer-inducing effects of X-rays on the foetus, studied the health of veterans from Christmas Island who had contacted the Nationwide programme. Her initial findings, published in the Lancet in April 1983, suggested a surprisingly high incidence of deaths from leukaemia and cancer of the lymph glands.

  Stewart’s letter suggested several possible causes for the excess: that the men were exposed to more radiation than previously thought; that the effects of low-level radiation were more severe than previously thought; or that more men had taken part in the tests than the researchers had allowed for. (Stewart’s study involved working out the number of illnesses and deaths which would normally be expected among the group of men who took part, and comparing it to the incidence of illness they had actually suffered.)

  Her letter was printed in the Lancet above another on the same subject. The second letter was signed by Joseph Rotblat, by now Emeritus Professor of Physics at London University, and six other eminent scientists. It pointed out that, while the excess of cancers shown in Stewart’s study might not be related to radiation, it had thrown up another suggestive statistic - ten cases of cataract. ‘While … there may be causes other than radiation for the excess RES malignancies [the cancers already mentioned], the reported incidence of cataract, virtually unknown as a spontaneous occurrence among young men, is a strong indication that some of those involved had received
radiation greatly in excess of a safe dose,’ it said.

  Rotblat and his colleagues called for an independent academic body to be given the job of making a full investigation into ‘the morbidity, mortality, and perhaps genetic effects in these men.’ As we shall see, this is not what happened. In October, after the government increased its estimate of the number of men who took part in the Christmas Island tests - a possibility that Stewart’s letter had already foreseen - Stewart accepted that her original results could not now be relied upon. Although the government could not help crowing about this development, the admission did not give the nuclear tests a clean bill of health. It merely underlined the need for a comprehensive study.

  In 1984, two developments took place which were instrumental in persuading the Australian government, if not the British, of the need for a new inquiry. On 11 March, I published in the Sunday Times details of a top-secret memorandum which led David Alton, the Liberal MP, to claim servicemen had been used as ‘guinea pigs’ at the tests. The 1953 memo, which had recently been released to the Public Records Office at Kew, discussed the needs of the various Services at future bomb tests. ‘The Army must discover the detailed effects of various types of explosion on equipment, stores and men with and without protection,’ it commented candidly. (My italics.)

  The Ministry of Defence denied that men had deliberately been exposed to radiation, but admitted they had been placed only one-and-a-half miles from a bomb test in the Buffalo series in 1956. The idea was to give them ‘some experience’ of being close to a nuclear explosion. The story caused a furore and sparked off new calls for an investigation; the next day’s Melbourne Age led its front page with the Sunday Times revelations and reported demands in Australia for an inquiry into ex-servicemen’s claims.

  A few weeks later, a copy of a still secret document, the Pearce Report on Operation Brumby, was leaked to the National Times, an Australian weekly newspaper. It revealed that the minor experiments which went on at Maralinga right up until 1963 had left thousands of acres contaminated with plutonium. They had created it seemed, a worse hazard than the actual weapons tests.

  A general election had brought to power the Labour government under Bob Hawke just over a year before. In opposition, Labour had been sympathetic to the complaints of the bomb veterans. Faced with the new revelations, the government decided to act. A week after the National Times story about Maralinga appeared, in May, Australia’s Energy Minister, Peter Walsh, set up a committee to review data on fallout from the tests. It was headed by Charles Kerr, Professor of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Sydney.

  The committee’s brief was a demanding one: review the evidence and report by the end of the same month. What it produced was a detailed forty-three-page critique of the soothing picture offered the previous year by AIRAC 9: ‘The Committee concluded that AIRAC 9 could not be regarded as an authoritative scientific account nor as an informative public record of important aspects of the British nuclear tests.’

  The Kerr report recommended the setting up of a Royal Commission to investigate the tests. Although the Labour Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, is not believed to have been over-enthusiastic – his stance on nuclear issues has repeatedly angered many Labour supporters - the government went ahead and announced the Royal Commission in July 1984.

  Although its terms of reference direct it to look at the effects of the atom bomb tests on Australians, the development was not one calculated to raise cheers among members of the British government. Since the British had deliberately kept Australia as much in the dark as possible about the tests, any dirty washing hauled out for inspection was likely to belong firmly to Britain.

  This fact was reflected in the thoroughly uneasy, often hostile relationship between the British government and the commission. When the commission started its hearings in Australia in autumn 1984, the new British High Commissioner, Sir John Leahy, complained that the public hearings ‘reflected on the British government’. The commission’s president, Mr Justice James McClelland, a dryly witty former Labour member of the Australian Senate, complained that Britain was tying the commission’s hands by allowing it to see declassified documents only if it agreed to keep them secret.

  Britain was not represented at the autumn hearings of the commission in Australia. It changed its mind only in time to brief a QC for the London hearings, which started on 3 January 1985. The commission opened in London in a blaze of publicity, part of which was engendered by a public row between the judge and Adam Butler, the junior Defence Minister acting as spokesman for the British government.

  Just before Christmas, Butler told the House of Commons: ‘I am persuaded by the evidence that I have seen, and from studying the matter as closely as I can, that precautions were adequate and observed.’ On the opening day, Judge McClelland hit back. ‘At this stage of our investigation, I am unable to say that the evidence which we have received would permit us safely to reach the comfortable conclusion which the Minister has reached,’ he said.

  Britain had given repeated assurances of its willingness to co-operate, but he went on: ‘If I retain some doubt as to the whole-heartedness of these assurances it is because they have not always been matched by conduct that one might have expected to back them up.

  ‘It is only in recent weeks that the British government has decided to be represented before the commission. There are grounds for believing that this decision was taken reluctantly and only after the commission had publicly suggested that the British government was dragging its feet.

  ‘The nuclear tests were carried out by the British and the evidence which has already been adduced suggests to us that they told the Australian authorities almost nothing about what they were doing in Australia during the tests.

  ‘Since the British know so much more than we do about what they did in our country at that time, cooperation now, if it is to mean anything, involves not simply telling us that we are free to delve into the mountain of documents which are in British hands but positive assistance in bringing to light anything of relevance which those documents may disclose.’

  McClelland also complained that the British government had agreed to hearings on British soil only if the Australians ‘would waive the usual right to initiate punitive proceedings against persons giving perjured evidence.’ At the time, this assertion by the judge, widely interpreted as a licence to lie on the part of the British witnesses, went unchallenged by the government. It was denied in rather mystifying circumstances - an article by Adam Butler in the Guardian - only after the commission had been sitting for several weeks.

  What was behind the judge’s speech was a row between the commission and the British government over access to documents. The British had thirty-eight tons of them, and Peter McClellan, the barrister assisting the commission, wanted to see a lot of them. He also wanted to call as witnesses British scientists who took part in the tests. Up to the time of the commission’s arrival in Britain, the British government had been distinctly uncooperative.

  The commission did have one card up its sleeve, however. When it was set up, Margaret Thatcher had written to the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, promising full co-operation. The judge’s comments were a calculated reminder of that fact, and they worked. The Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, pointed out to members of the British government that the holding back of documents and witnesses could not be maintained. The commission got what it wanted.

  Between 3 January and 18 March, British and Australian veterans were able to watch flesh being wrapped around the bones of allegations they had originally made as long as five years before. Some of the revelations were confirmatory. The Totem I test had been fired in the most dangerous possible conditions and was responsible for the ‘black mist’ which aborigines at Wallatinna Station talked about, for instance. Others were new and startling - among these that Scotland had been seriously considered as the venue for testing the trigger of an atom bomb, along with Skipsea, in Yorkshire, and Don
na Nook, an RAF bombing range in Lincolnshire.

  By the time the commission was ready to go home and resume taking evidence in Australia, the veterans felt they had been publicly vindicated. The Guardian said the hearings had left ‘a frightening catalogue of ignorant and careless acts’. Even the deeply conservative Times allowed that ‘enough evidence has now been extracted from archives and witnesses to undermine the bland and brief reassurances which Britain has issued at regular intervals since the tests’. Adam Butler remained silent.

  Even if the British government did not have detailed knowledge of all the documents it held on the atom bomb tests - a likely eventuality, in view of their sheer number - the precedent for declassifying such information was hardly a happy one from the Cabinet’s point of view.

  In 1979, an American former soldier called Orville Kelly set up the National Association of Atomic Veterans to represent the quarter of a million US personnel who had taken part in nuclear tests or risked exposure to radiation in the bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kelly was US army commander of Japtan Island, in the Marshall Islands, in 1958; he saw twenty-two bomb tests in only four months. Kelly died of cancer only months after founding the veterans’ organization, but his wife, Wanda, carried on its work with other men who had been at the tests.

  It had long been known that the US tests in the Pacific had had disastrous consequences for the islanders in whose territory they were held. The huge hydrogen device tested at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954 - its yield was equal to 15 million tons of TNT – irradiated the Marshall Islands and in particular Rongelap Atoll, where the inhabitants suffered burns and radiation sickness before they were hurriedly evacuated. Fallout also landed on a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon; one crew member died of radiation sickness and almost all of the remaining twenty-two showed signs of it.