by Joan Smith
As if that in itself was not bad enough, the study is too narrow in scope; the largest of the organizations representing the British veterans, the British Nuclear Tests Veterans’ Association, has dissociated itself from the study and says it has no confidence in its eventual results.
The government announced its intention to commission the study in January 1983. Its motives were far from altruistic. The veterans’ complaints had just been aired in a blaze of publicity in newspapers and on television and the announcement could be interpreted as an attempt by the government to silence the subject by taking action which could not possibly produce results for a matter of years. Having made the announcement, the government took nearly eight months to award the contract.
When it did, it took the surprising step of giving it to the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB). This body, set up by Act of Parliament in 1970, acts as watchdog on Britain’s nuclear industry. Unfortunately, its independence is seriously undermined by its close links with that industry; and its structure and history suggest it suffers from much the same problems as the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Its staff tend to be people who have previously worked for the nuclear industry, and it has taken positions in the past that will not hinder nuclear power.
This very problem was spotted in 1977 by Sir Brian Flowers, who chaired the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. He pointed out that many of the NRPB’s staff had previously worked for the body which oversees the development of nuclear energy, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and the two organizations are based at the same rather remote place, Harwell.
‘In making these remarks we intend in no way to impugn the integrity of the present members or staff of the Board,’ Flowers said, ‘but rather to emphasize the importance of fostering not only the reality, but the appearance, of independence.’ His recommendations - reconstruction at board level and a review of the organization and expertise of the expert body - have never been carried out.
The links with the nuclear industry affect the organization’s top level including its director. From 1971 to 1981, the job was done by Dr A. S. McLean, who was also, for the greater part of his time as NRPB director, a member of the ICRP. Before his appointment at NRPB, he held three different positions with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.
This tradition continued with the appointment in 1982 of McLean’s successor, John Dunster. Dunster appeared in chapter 7 as one of the longest-serving members of the ICRP and its committees; in the days before the UKAEA was set up, Dunster worked for the Ministry of Supply nuclear plants at Harwell and Windscale. He later held senior positions in the UKAEA.
In 1958, while working for the UKAEA’s health and safety branch, Dunster went to a UN conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, where he provided an illuminating insight into what was happening at Windscale. Discharges from the plant, he said, were part of a deliberate experiment to find out more about the movement of radioactive substances in the environment. Although these discharges were not considered dangerous at the time by the scientists responsible for them, they are now under suspicion of being the cause of leukaemia near the plant.
The NRPB’s own record does not suggest it is a speedy and vigilant protector of the public when it comes to radiation. Although it was set up in 1970, the NRPB did not produce a report into Britain’s worst nuclear accident, the fire at Windscale in 1957, until 1983. That report was produced only after an independent environmental research organization, the Political Ecology Research Group, came up with its own report in 1981, suggesting that numerous cases of thyroid cancer could have been caused by the fire.
When the NRPB’s own report on the fire appeared, one oversight quickly became clear. The NRPB report included estimates of the number of cancers likely to have been caused in the population of the UK by the radioactive substances released by the fire, but failed to consider one of the most carcinogenic, the isotope called polonium 210. After I pointed out in the Sunday Times that polonium 210 had come out of the pile during the fire, the NRPB was forced to issue an addendum to its report, increasing its estimate of the number of cancers probably caused by the fire. What made the omission of polonium 210 from the first report even odder was that traces of it were found near the plant immediately after the fire by John Dunster, then a health physicist and, by the time of the report, the NRPB’s director.
But it was not only the choice of the NRPB to carry out the study of the veterans that sat oddly with the claim that it was to be an independent survey. The scientists originally chosen to do the work at NRPB included Dr John Reissland, a public critic of Alice Stewart’s work on low-level radiation. In 1978, Reissland published an assessment of the Hanford study - the important study of nuclear workers in the US published by Stewart with Thomas Mancuso and George Kneale - which dismissed most of their conclusions. ‘There is wide agreement that the Hanford study … does not represent a valid statistical interpretation of the actual data,’ he wrote. Reissland’s conclusion is disingenuous: it would be nearer the truth to say that the Hanford study is controversial, with no general agreement on its conclusions. The choice of Reissland to look into the veterans’ claims looked at the very least combative, given that their cause was first championed by Alice Stewart.
After the study was set up, Reissland’s death in a fire at his home necessitated a change in the team carrying out the work. This event, and other problems, means that the study will be published later than planned - at the time of writing, it is unlikely to appear before late 1986.
The veterans themselves are highly critical of the study. It will look at only two issues: whether there is a higher death rate among the veterans than in a comparable group of servicemen who did not take part in the tests, and whether more of the veterans have contracted cancer than men in the comparable group.
Several problems are immediately obvious. First, there is to be no attempt to contact individuals. This means that the researchers will rely on death certificates for the cause of death, yet some cancers are well known to be under-reported as a cause of death. This method could lead to cancers being missed.
Second, the study is confined to looking at only one disease – cancer. It is impossible to differentiate between cancer caused by radiation and cancer caused by some other agent. But the study has excluded an examination of the incidence of cataract – a disease which can be caused by radiation - among the veterans. This condition, which usually occurs only in the elderly, would be a significant indicator of radiation-related problems if it was found to have occurred among the veterans, most of whom are only in their middle years.
Third, the study will not look at genetic effects. A number of men who took part in the tests have reported deformity or illness among their children. This is a difficult area: although scientists have no doubt radiation can cause genetic effects, they have not yet observed them in an irradiated population. But if studies on people who have been exposed to radiation exclude consideration of genetic effects, that situation will never change. The NRPB study ignores the opportunity to -look for genetic effects among the veterans.
All in all, the veterans believe the study is being carried out by the wrong organization and with the wrong terms of reference. They also think it is a way of stalling their claims: the government has made it clear it will not change its position until the NRPB has reported. At the moment, that report is not due to appear until nearly four years after the British veterans first aired their complaints in public.
Frank Cook, the Labour MP for Stockton North, summed up the feelings of many veterans when he spoke in a debate on the tests in the House of Commons in December 1984. Cook expressed his disappointment that the NRPB had nothing to report by then.
Instead of commissioning a statistical survey, the British government should have set up a Royal Commission into the tests, he said. ‘Ultimately, the people who were in the front line will die out the longer this goes on,’ he said. ‘We have a
responsibility not only to them but to the generations after them.’
As well as a proper investigation into what happened at the tests, many of the veterans also want compensation. Men who have suffered chronic illnesses, and the wives and children of men who have died, feel the least the British government can do is give them cash payments or pensions. So far, their attempts to prise money from the government have achieved minimal success.
The major obstacle is the Crown Proceedings Act 1947. Section 10 bars servicemen from bringing claims for compensation against the government for injuries received during their period of service. The thinking behind it is obvious: the government simply could not cope if every serviceman injured during a war was subsequently entitled to demand large amounts of cash from the state. But the veterans say their case is different - that what happened to them had not been envisaged by the people who drafted the Act. The government has shown no sympathy towards this line of argument.
The veterans are in the process of mounting a court challenge to the Act and they are also preparing cases on behalf of civilians who took part in the tests and who are not covered by the prohibition in the Act. Such actions are inevitably costly, and the British Nuclear Tests Veterans’ Association is still trying to raise money to pay for them.
In the meantime, they are trying to devise other ways to gain official recognition that they have been affected by radiation. Open verdicts have been recorded at inquests on a handful of veterans who have died of diseases that could be linked with radiation, but the most important attempt to use an inquest as a forum for the men’s claims proved unsuccessful.
In April 1985, an inquest jury returned a verdict of natural causes on the death of Kenneth Measures, a former chief petty officer in the navy, who suffered a rare form of lung cancer after taking part in the first British hydrogen bomb test at Malden Island in 1957. The veterans had hoped for a verdict of unlawful killing.
Coroners’ courts have come in for much criticism in recent years and, in retrospect, it seems a little optimistic of the veterans to believe that inquests might provide a useful alternative route to justice. But the veterans have scored one major success elsewhere, with a ruling at a pensions tribunal which does appear to undermine the government’s insistence that absolutely no one has been harmed by radiation.
Mick Saffrey, an RAF radio operator who spent several months at Christmas Island after the 1958 tests, applied to the DHSS for a war pension in 1980 on the grounds that he had suffered cataracts and gone blind as a result of radiation. When his application was turned down, he appealed. On 26 July 1984, a DHSS pensions tribunal ruled that he should receive compensation. The form of the award - whether it will be a pension or a lump sum - has not been decided at the time of writing.
Saffrey’s eyesight has been partially restored after an operation. He also suffers from a low sperm count, which could be attributable to radiation. The pensions tribunal ruled that even if it ignored the evidence of the sperm count, ‘we feel that we are left unsure that the cataracts were not caused by Christmas Island radiation. It follows from this that the appeal must be allowed, on the basis that the disability is attributable to service.’
After the successful appeal Saffrey said that he was convinced his condition had been caused by radiation. ‘These things were exploded over the water and we used the same water to wash in,’ he said. ‘I never once saw a sign on Christmas Island saying you couldn’t go anywhere. We used to wander all over the place, as we had nothing else to do.’
The Ministry of Defence denies that the Saffrey case makes any difference at all to its claim that no one has been injured by the tests. The tribunal had not ruled that radiation caused his condition, a spokesman told me, only that it might have done. Nevertheless, the British Nuclear Tests Veterans’ Association believes the case is the first chink in the government’s armour and intends to go on fighting on as many fronts as possible for the compensation it believes should be paid to many of its 1,300 members.
That the wind of change is blowing in their direction is in little doubt. Already, the Canadian government has earmarked the equivalent of £17 million to pay compensation to veterans who took part in nuclear tests - Canada did not mount atom bomb tests but its servicemen were present at those staged by other countries, just as the Australians were.
There is one more thing that many of the veterans want, and that is an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. Their concern is a timely reminder that Britain’s final test in the atmosphere, on 23 September 1958, did not mark the end but only a change in Britain’s weapons-testing programme.
With an atmospheric test ban treaty a near certainty in the foreseeable future, the nuclear powers were already looking for alternative ways of testing bombs. The obvious place to put the tests was underground. Britain’s thoughts inevitably turned to its accommodating ally, Australia; for a time, the British were scouting round for a suitable Australian mountain in which they could drill a hole and blow up a bomb.
Fortunately for Australia, the plan came to nothing. The first joint British and American bomb test took place at the Nevada test site in the US on 1 March 1962. The test, code-named Pampas, took place 1,200 feet underground. Immediately after the explosion, two small clouds escaped from the ground and floated away.
Leaks of this sort from underground tests in Nevada have become a regular occurrence. Inhabitants of Cedar City, Utah, who live downwind from the Nevada test site, have formed an organization to campaign for an end to nuclear tests; they say forty-three underground tests have leaked radiation, endangering communities close to the site.
In fact, there have been far more nuclear tests since the Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963 than took place before it. By June 1976, official figures show that the US alone had tested a staggering 588 nuclear weapons; only 183 of these were detonated in the atmosphere before the signing of the treaty.
During the 1970s, the US actually stepped up its testing programme. The figures rose from around eight underground nuclear tests in 1972 to sixteen in 1975. Russian tests recently declined in number; they went down from twenty in 1978 to four in 1982.
Britain’s nuclear test programme has never been in the same league as that of Russia or the US. But it has carried steadily on: one Anglo-American test in Nevada in 1979, three in 1980. Details are scant; the joint test carried out at Nevada on 25 April 1982 was between 20 and 150 kilotons, the official American statement announced uninformatively.
Nuclear testing is not an episode in our past, as peculiar to the 1950s as the beatniks and James Dean. Britain is, on paper, committed to working towards a complete test ban treaty. In fact, since they started in 1977, the talks have been bogged down in arguments over how to ensure the other side is not breaking the treaty.
In 1939, when the splitting of the atom coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, the scientific world was infected with the contagion of secrecy. That development, which flew in the face of a long tradition of sharing information about scientific discoveries, concentrated the fruits of an international and rather haphazard quest for knowledge in the hands of one country, the US, which tried to exploit its position of superior knowledge for its own gain.
America’s shortsighted attempt to gain advantage through its almost accidental possession of the bomb produced the atmosphere of distrust which led to the arms race. An agreement to end nuclear tests, because it would require a degree of trust between the signatories, would be a first step towards reversing the baleful situation which has existed since the Second World War. That such a step has not been taken is a measure of how little the contagion of secrecy and distrust has loosened its grip in the forty years since it first took hold.
British Nuclear Weapons Tests in Australia and the South Pacific
Bibliography
Bertell, Rosalie. No Immediate Danger. The Women’s Press, 1985
Bertin, Leonard. Atom Harvest. Secker and Warburg, 1955
Eden, Anthony. Ful
l Circle (memoirs). Cassell, 1960
Glasstone, S. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1957
Gowing, Margaret. Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939-1945. Macmillan, 1964 Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945-1952. Volume I, Policy Making. Volume II, Policy Execution. Macmillan, 1974
Ground Zero Organization. Nuclear War - What’s In It for You. Methuen, 1982
Gyorgy, Anna, and friends. No Nukes. South End Press, Boston, 1979
Harris, Kenneth. Attlee. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982
Heckstall-Smith, H. W. Atomic Radiation Dangers and What They Mean to You. J. M. Dent and Sons, 1958
Jungk, Robert. Brighter Than A Thousand Suns. Penguin, 1964
Kimball Smith, Alice, and Weiner, Charles (eds.). Robert Oppenheimer, Letters and Recollections. Harvard University Press, 1980
Kunetka, James W. Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1982
Macmillan, Harold. Tides of Fortune, 1945-1955. Macmillan, 1969
Mazuzan, George T., and Walker, J. Samuel. Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962. University of California Press, n.d.
Menaul, Stewart. Countdown: Britain’s Strategic Nuclear Forces. Robert Hale, 1980
Pauling, Linus. No More War! Victor Gollancz, 1958
Pincher, Chapman, BSc. Into the Atomic Age. Hutchinson, 1948
Pochin, Edward. Nuclear Radiation: risks and benefits. Clarendon Press, 1983
Pringle, Peter, and Spigelman, James. The Nuclear Barons. Michael Joseph, 1981
Rosenberg, Howard L. Atomic Soldiers: American Victims of Nuclear Experiments. Beacon Press, Boston, 1980
Saffer, Thomas H., and Kelly, Orville E. Countdown Zero. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1982
Sternglass, Ernest. Secret Fallout: Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three-Mile Island. McGraw-Hill, 1981