To enable me to cope with
the stresses and the nightmares
from the atom bombs
that I witnessed,
I have devised ways and
means of keeping myself busy.
One of those interests was astronomy.
My objective was to map the moon.
I could see each crater,
each piece of desert area,
this dividing line between
light and dark, where there was
nature's power being
demonstrated and its violence.
It puts everything in perspective.
It's given me more of an understanding
of the nature of man
to destroy life.
And that thought
has weighed heavily on my conscience.
Personally, I feel that
I'm a part of something
that should never have happened.
This is the longest running
scandal in British history.
There is nothing bigger or worse than
what's happened to the nuclear veterans.
In the heart of the atom's destructive power,
there lay the antidote to the threat of w*r,
the great deterrent.
75 seconds.
The world doesn't know.
I've been fighting
this battle for 63 years.
The British state have
gaslighted these men.
The development of nuclear
weapons marched ahead.
60 seconds.
It was really frightening.
We thought they were going to die.
The Britons would test
the megaton or H-box.
They're carrying inside
them invisible b*ll*ts.
Toxic ionizing radiation.
It's a rare internal problem.
Dead at six months old from cancer.
Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer.
You can go on.
We were lab rats.
Minus 20 seconds.
There exists within our
society some dark forces
that suppress the truth.
They k*ll people, and they
haven't acknowledged it.
The question is simple.
What k*lled the babies?
Minus 10 seconds.
We're constantly living in this shadow,
in the shadow of the b*mb.
Five, four, three, two, one.
You could see the evil in it.
It was like looking at the devil.
Between 1952 and 1963 Britain embarks on a
series nuclear tests in Australia
and South Pacific
The operation involves aroun 39,000 British
and Commmonwealth serviceman and svientist
Collectively the men experience 45 atomic
and hydrogen bombs and
hundreds of radioactive experiments.
I was born in these parts,
and the biggest excitement
was a week in Blackpool,
and all of a sudden,
you're going to bleed in Australia.
Bloody hell.
I'd been on a ferry over the Mersey,
and then I'm suddenly on a troop ship
to a small coral island in
the middle of the Pacific.
I was 18, and we were
told we were going out
to Christmas Island.
And I said, Christmas Island?
Oh, where's that?
Haven't got a clue.
Going to Australia, they
all seem rather romantic.
Things which you only see on films.
It was a paradise island.
Wow.
What more can you want than our age?
We were all young men,
under 25, not married.
You played football, lots of beer.
But it was infested, as well.
We were eating alive with
mosquitoes right from the start.
There were hundreds of crabs, hundreds.
Now these things are huge.
Dragonflies come out the bush, you know,
right in front of you, you know.
Cook frightened the life out of you.
We were having a good
time, until the bombs started.
I thought we'd be safe.
Excuse me.
We had no idea what we
were letting ourselves in for.
We were taken to a beach.
The tallest I turned to sit
with our backs to the sea.
Throw your knees up, put
your hands over your eyes.
That is the sum total of my instructions.
Minus 40 seconds, close eyes, close eyes.
There was about 2,000 of us.
People worked out the navigation.
We were nine miles away from two air bombs.
Oh, we had a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.
There was fear.
I was frightened. They were all kids,
a couple of friends of mine
who were wetting themselves.
25.
Some of them were praying.
And some of them wanted the mothers.
Five, four, three, two, one, land.
Boom.
The crescendo.
The flash was so bright, I
could see through my eyes.
You saw all the bones, tendons,
everything through your hands.
You feel it go through your body.
You look a light bulb.
There was this humongous
ball of fire boiling up in the sky.
Hurtling towards you was this big lion.
This blast hits you.
It blew grown men off from place.
You could burn, but you didn't blister.
It was that hot.
I felt that my body was boiling.
It was as if I was being microwaved.
This tremor inside,
you felt you were just going to explode.
People picked themselves
up and started to run away.
Well, we were running too. God,
don't they not? Come just get it.
We thought we were going to die.
Then after all of that, my
next order was back to work.
Nobody told us anything.
We were just left to get on with life.
The film showing the bursting of the first
atom b*mb, the experimental one in New Mexico.
During the w*r, the British had played a huge part
in the Manhattan Project in the United States,
which created two different
kinds of atomic weapon.
One was dropped on
Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki.
The two targets, 100,000
people dead in an instant,
and that figure by the end of 1945 will have
doubled as a consequence of radiation poisoning.
At the end of the w*r,
the Americans made it ill*gal to cooperate on
nuclear weapons development with any other nation.
For Britain, it was clear that they were going
to have to develop the weapon on their own.
The developing Cold w*r, the Soviet
Union glowering across the Iron Curtain.
There was a sense in which this was a weapon that
was needed to be at the top table of the Americans.
The testing of weapons on
the UK homeland was politically
untenable because it would have
exposed the population to risk.
They would need to find
another part of the world for it
to be politically safe.
Looking to its former Empire, Britain
finds a suitable location in Australia
The Admiralty made a search
through their charts,
and it seemed as if the Montebello Islands
would offer everything that we wanted.
OPERATION HURRICANE
Monte Bello Island
Britain saw itself as the master,
and Australia was very much the servant.
Can we have the already signals, please?
There were very few questions asked.
Five, four, three, two, one, now.
This was Britain's first atomic expl*si*n.
The UK graduated
as an atomic b*mb power,
but within the space of a month,
the United States had tested
its first hydrogen b*mb.
Winston Churchill said the gap between a
hydrogen b*mb and an atomic b*mb
was about the same gap as between
the atomic b*mb and a bow and arrow.
By 1953, the Soviet Union would have
tested its own hydrogen b*mb,
and Britain finds itself having
to start almost from scratch again.
The hydrogen b*mb
is now as necessary as the
atomic b*mb had been before it.
EMU FIELD
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
read screen
The British considered
Emu Field and later Maralinga
to be empty land.
Uninhabited,
but they were aware that these
were homelands of Aboriginal people.
Aboriginal people crisscrossed through
these lands from generations to generations.
My grandparents and their parents
walked through country,
maintaining language,
maintaining culture,
maintaining their spiritual connection
to this country, and they've been doing
that for thousands of years.
There was no consent
from traditional owners,
no consultation at all.
People were living there.
Many of them were
loaded on trucks and moved
to various locations away
from those sites.
There was lots of grief and trauma
because of the British testing program.
OPERATION TOTEM
Emu Field, Australia
Operation Totem consisted of
two nuclear weapons tests.
They were highly experimental.
Sir William Penny flew to the site.
On his shoulders lay the responsibility
of deciding the exact firing date,
taking into account
the prevailing weather condition.
The British mission was headed
by William Penny, a physicist
who came to be the
father of the British b*mb,
the British Oppenheimer.
The meteorologists warned
William Penny about the wind directions
which were likely to interfere
with safe testing of Totem 1.
But those warnings were ignored by
William Penny because he was in a hurry
to get this weapon tested.
William Penny and the scientists
were under extreme
political and military pressure,
and if you're under pressure of that kind,
corners must end up being cut.
They were more concerned about speed
than safety.
5, 4, 3,
2, 1, Zero.
The b*mb was detonated and,
as a direct result, a meteorological
phenomenon occurred.
A cloud detached itself
from the main atomic cloud,
and it moved approximately
170 km or so,
rolling across the countryside.
Dad was a young boy at the time.
They were playing in
the sand dunes on that date.
That morning they heard the first sound.
The ground shook.
You can feel it.
I remember this black mist
coming over...
and quietly rolling
through the mulker trees,
black and shiny,
oily looking.
And this went over our camp.
There was panic in the camp then,
in the sand dunes.
An animal were digging holes
to protect the children.
That afternoon people were
showing signs of sickness.
Our older generation
were starting to pass,
and my grandparents were...
digging grave sites.
Soon after, Dad's eyesight was impacted.
They become blind on one eye.
I feel sorry for myself.
I cried for my eye.
Four years after Dad was completely blind.
That was it. I opened my eyes...
Blackness!
And that's when his
world turned into darkness.
The country's scarred.
The people are scarred.
Generations are still
feeling the trauma today.
And it's so hard to explain to Western
culture and Western people about this.
Because white men don't see it.
They don't hear.
They don't smell country.
They don't...
feel it.
You can never bring it back.
And that's the 'injust'.
That really is the 'injust'.
The British were now set on a
course towards a hydrogen weapon.
The Mosaic series were urgent tests to
refine the design of a hydrogen weapon.
They were also looking to see the effects
of the explosions on equipment and,
sadly, on personnel as well.
I was allocated to a ship
called HMS Diana,
which happened to be the ship
that was chosen
to attend the nuclear tests
at Montebello.
The object of the exercise was to see
how
servicemen would react
to a nuclear w*r where
they'd have to cope with fallout.
Do you know Portia's speech
from a merchant of Venice?
'The quality of mercy is not strained.
Dropth is the gentle rain from heaven.'
And they would have us believe
that this nuclear fallout
was just the gentle rain from heaven.
It wasn't.
It was toxic and it was deadly.
It was ionising radiation.
HMS Diana was the designated
guinea pig ship for Operation Mosaic.
The ship was sent into the fallout cloud for
both Mosaic bombs as a deliberate strategy
to understand what would happen
when a ship went through an atomic cloud.
The mission of the ship was to sail into
the toxic fallout of the nuclear blast,
to follow directly as it moves.
There is no doubt that
the British government
intentionally put men in harm's way.
'I was used.'
Everybody on that ship was used.
You weren't given a choice in this.
And if that's not being used,
tell them what is.
If the M.O.D. are honest,
they would say that.
Susie Bonnyface, a very nice lady.
And I think I'm aiming her
little black book.
I would be in love with Susie, but
not at my time of life. I'll soon
have a boiled egg lightly done.
This is the longest running scandal in British history. There is
nothing bigger or worse than what's happened to the nuclear veterans.
I've been working on it
probably about 20 years.
The whole thing was one big experiment.
In 1955, the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden,
was briefed by the scientists
that it could damage troops' DNA.
And his response was, 'It's
a pity, but we can't help it.'
Of the 300
or so men who were on HMS Diana,
about half of those who were found to have
died since died from tumors of some sort.
And they generally have increased rates of
prostate, bladder, kidney and blood cancers.
It was just we're going to
sail a warship through fallout
on two occasions
for eight hours each time.
The effect on hardware was
considered of far more importance
than the effect on the men...
Who were expendable.
The British are going very hard and fast
on hydrogen-borne development by 1956.
They are seeking to narrow the gap
between themselves and the Russians
and the Americans in this weaponry.
And part and parcel of the British quest
is to understand more
about this phenomenal fallout.
Operation Buffalo consisted
of four atomic weapons tests.
Britain needed the scientific data
that was coming out of the Maralinga tests
to go to the main game.
The hydrogen b*mb.
I was to be a part of a
radiation monitoring team.
This was the first time in Maralinga
that an aircraft would be required to
fly actually into the mushroom cloud.
The objective was to take a sample.
We tore down the runway.
This was my first
experience in flying in a jet.
We then reached our predetermined point.
We circled.
We got to the point where
the expl*si*n took place.
And...
we turned towards it.
One's natural instinct
is to go in the opposite direction,
not towards it.
That's where anxiety comes in.
It was at that point where
I looked down and saw this inferno...
crimson, black smoke
billowing up towards us.
I didn't think we were going to make it.
The cloud was rising.
It was coming up at an alarming rate.
This fear.
I felt so vulnerable.
How we got so close and
weren't vaporized, I just don't know.
The gauges started to fluctuate.
This enormous shock
wave flipped the aircraft over.
I was literally hanging by these straps.
We were more or less
upside down but climbing.
Fortunately, away from the b*mb.
The thought did occur to me.
It was in the hands of God.
The shock wave undoubtedly saved our lives.
Whether it was the intensity
of that noise that shook
or...
the electromagnetic pulse.
My hands have shaken ever since.
My other role was
ground sampling of craters.
Our mission then was to
walk directly towards the crater
where we were to take
samples from the rim.
The sheer heat of the expl*si*n
converted the sand into glass.
It was like thin ice.
A significant number of the men were
deliberately and knowingly exposed.
In Operation Buffalo,
they ordered hundreds of men
to walk, march and crawl
on their elbows through fallout
in order to see how much
of it stuck on their uniforms.
It didn't take me long to realize
that we were being put at risk.
Safety was of secondary consideration.
A primary objective
was to get that weapon,
at any cost.
Britain was moving very fast towards
testing its hydrogen weapon
and it began Operation Grapple.
The Australian government
had demanded that the British not test
a hydrogen weapon on Australian territory
and so they finally settled
on Christmas Island in the Pacific.
The British hydrogen b*mb
project was something of a rush job.
The international community,
led by the two
H-b*mb powers of the time,
America and Russia,
decide to put an end to
atmospheric testing,
which would be disastrous if it
happened before the UK
had tested its
first thermonuclear weapon.
They need to get this weapon
tested before that ban comes in.
The neglect of safety at
Christmas Island was appalling.
The many personnel,
but also the people of Christmas Island,
were subjected to extraordinary risk.
There was a small but vibrant
local community on that island.
Those at the top were
not too worried about the human cost.
This was a very menacing
Cold w*r environment,
which they would have felt,
I think at the time, trumped
some collateral damage,
even some collateral human damage.
To take us to a beach where we
knew that we were closer to the b*mb,
we didn't know why,
but they did tell the lads
they'd get a better view of it.
An atomic b*mb dropped
20 miles away from us.
For the men involved
in these tests, there
is no safe distance
from an atomic expl*si*n.
I never had special,
defensive clothing issues.
The initial blast of gamma radiation and
ultraviolet radiation, plus the heat that
was generated, were
probably the most
significant causes
of radiation exposure.
There was everything flying
past us, coconuts and bits of trees.
High energy,
electromagnetic energy
sources that can
penetrate almost anything.
Protection, zero.
Electrons are beta radiation.
There wasn't one on
that beach had a monitor.
Neutrons from the
nucleus of the atom,
again, can penetrate
almost anything.
We had no idea what we'd been exposed to.
Protons can be fired
off like cannonballs
and have the potential
to do the most damage.
The initial blast,
though, is really just one aspect
of the destructive power.
Further away from the zone,
the source of radiation of most mportance
would have come from the fallout,
the byproducts of
the initial explosions,
which have potentially significant
biological consequences.
The mushroom cloud, we saw it
sucking up all the
sand up in there.
It rained for three days after the b*mb.
So all that debris,
all that sand,
all that rubbish
was on the island.
But the admiralty said,
no, it was too far away.
But it bollocks.
A question that comes
up is, how much did we
know when these tests
were being conducted?
And the answer is, we knew enough.
We knew enough to know
that this was dangerous.
The soldiers, the
scientists, this population,
this community
involved in these tests
were living in an area that
was significantly contaminated.
We had to breathe
irradiated air, drink
irradiated water,
eat irradiated fish.
Individuals consuming
these local products
will be exposed
to that radioactivity.
Operation Grapple made
Britain the third nation
in the world to possess
the hydrogen weapon.
The largest of the Grapple
bombs was about 200
times the size of the b*mb dropped
on Hiroshima.
Radiation safety standards
were very much secondary
to the timetable to
build the British b*mb.
We were up against an enemy that
we can either
see, smell, touch.
We would take toxic
particles home with us.
When I think of what
happened afterwards,
and the lads dying, and...
yeah.
Can I get upset?
Yeah, can't help it.
Sorry about that. Sorry, sorry about that.
This is a medical
study by the British
Nuclear Veterans
Association in 1985,
which actually shows
the names, what they
died from, their ages,
and where they were.
Christmas Island, Montebella,
Christmas Island, Maralinga.
There's only 10% of
them left, and many of
them have had decades
of chronic illness.
What they died from, leukaemia, leukaemia, cancer,
heart disease, cancer, heart failure, cancer,
cancer, cancer, cancer,
cancer, cancer, cancer,
cancer, cancer, cancer,
cancer, cancer, you can go on.
Something has happened to
them to make them some of the
sickest people in the
country. Whatever could it be?
Age groups, 26-year-old,
25-year-old, 31-year-old,
43, 44, every one of
them have died young.
I was as fit as a butcher's
dog. I've had cancer.
I've also had pernicious
anemia since
I was 26.
In 2007 there was a genetic study from
New Zealand which found that the veterans
themselves had a rate
of genetic damage similar
to that of clean-up
workers at Chernobyl.
I had cancer of the bowel.
That wasn't terribly pleasant.
The effects are at
the level of the genes,
neurological function,
heart function.
I've now had seven heart
operations. I'm still suffering
from that now. I've had
93, 93 skin cancers removed.
Even very low doses of radiation
can cause damage to the DNA.
I had tumors, tumors
come up on my right-hand
side. I could rest
my elbow on them.
We often
don't discover the consequences
until much afterthe fact,
when the consequences have
done great harm already.
I've been lumbered with
lipomas, probably 150. There's
a big one there.
I've been
abdomen everywhere, you know.
I'm sure you don't want to go on a
trip show, but the ionising radiation
is with you for the rest of
your days. You
can't get rid of it.
The UK personnel
were not the only ones
to suffer. It's also
local communities.
The British nuclear test is
one of government secrecy.
The minor trials at Maralinga were
among the most dangerous scientific
experiments ever
held in Australia,
particularly Vixen
A and Vixen B.
Very little was shared even
with the Australian government
and nothing was shared
with the Australian public.
I was in the Australian Air
Force...
I worked on the Vixen B series of tests.
My job there
was to build the firing platforms.
There was beryllium,
natural uranium,
and of course there was
the 24 kilograms of plutonium
that was blown to pieces
in the experiments.
It was the most devastating thing
that ever happened at Maralinga.
It created one of
the most contaminated places
in the world.
The British government did not tell the
Australian government that it was using
that it was using plutonium-239
in the Vixen B experiments.
Roughly 22 kilograms
of plutonium-239 was left lying
aroundthe site.
That is easily enough
to k*ll everyone on the planet.
Australia just accepted at face
value the assurances they were given.
That was the
case for most of the tests...
including the atomic b*mb tests.
The cloud itself is carried
away by the wind.
The cloud is now well on its way across
the continent of Australia.
The British knew that there
were people living in the vicinity.
They knew that
they were going to be at risk.
They gave assurances all the same to the
Australian government that there was no such risk.
I was based at Womara for
a short while.
Womara was an
Australian rocket range but
was largely run by the British.
Womara was the operational base
for a large chunk of British
post-w*r weapons testing.
It was a community that
was peopled by military
personnel but also
civilians and their families.
My wife worked in the hospital.
It became noticeable
that there were more and more babies
and little children
being buried at the Womara Cemetery.
The missus delivered some of them babies.
I used to go down to the cemetery.
There'd be another dozen
little graves,
sometimes with a name,
sometimes nothing.
All I could do was wonder
how these children died.
I reported in 2003 that
there were dozens
of babies who died at Womara in
inexplicable circumstances.
Families from the base
went on picnics
and actually watched the nuclear bombs
going off 600 km away.
Then the cloud would come
over the top of the town.
We know that Womara
probably had one of
the highest concentrations of fallout
across the whole of Australia.
All these poor little kids...
only 4 months...
old, stillborn...
seven months old...
stillborn.
You're looking at an extraordinary
number of infants
babies.
I've counted 22 stillborns,
another 34...
who were either days old
or months old...
and another 12 toddlers.
It's quite overwhelming.
These people are completely forgotten
victims of the British nuclear test program.
And you've got to ask yourself
the question, why? What happened?
Officialdom has always blamed
these deaths on heat waves...
but a lot of them occurred
and what we have here is winter.
The records involving their deaths
remain sealed by the Australian
National Archives and you
can't access the autopsy results.
It's time that secrecy ended.
What's written in the medical records,
you can't get them.
The question is simple.
What k*lled the babies?
And I'll probably die never knowing.
I don't go back to the cemetery.
It's too painful.
None of them should have suffered that.
Is it difficult to talk to them?
Oh, without doubt.
There are huge wounds.
They had a son.
We named him Stephen
and everything was going great.
Until one morning
we woke up
and my wife screamed and said
Stephen
isn't breathing.
I picked him out of his cot and
started giving him the kiss of light.
Panic, sheer panic.
Eventually the ambulance came
and they took him to the hospital.
And I knew he was dead.
I just knew.
The police came.
They arrested me and my wife
under caution.
Three days later the police said
with no charges it was a COPD death.
The death certificate
said he died of pneumonia.
If that little baby
had got pneumonia when we put him
to bed that night,
we would have
known he was perfectly
healthy when we put him to bed.
I was numb.
The only time I really,
really understood was
that when the undertaker
came with his coffin.
A little,
a little white box.
It was
the hardest day of my life.
I was suffering.
My wife was
in bits.
The coroner report
showed that his
lungs possibly had
not formed correctly.
The problem is I cannot prove it.
I blame the M.O.D. and the experiments
they did on us
for Stephen's death.
And I always will.
We have now three and four
generations
being born with problems.
There's absolutely no doubt that
radiation causes genetic damage.
That damage can then be
transmitted to the next generation.
My father was David Purse,
a flight lieutenant in the RAF who served
at Maralinga in the 1960s.
"The Minor trials" are documented that they
were the most dangerous and the most polluting.
The wind blew the sand from
the contaminated to the clean area, ,
onto your Land Rover, your bed,
your clothes, your food, all covered
in this fine layer of sand.
And he said that was radioactive sand.
When I was born, it
was obvious from the
moment anyone saw me
that there was an issue.
The doctors just took me
away from Mum,
and they left it to Dad to break
the news to her that I was disabled.
But then he just said the phrase like,
"I think it's my fault because
of my time in Australia."
I've been told there's
about 200 forms of short stature,
but I don't fit
any of them. I'm unique.
I'd always said I would not have
children because I didn't want to pass
on any of the genetic damage that
I had,
but I met a wonderful woman.
And we got married in 2019.
And then we decided,
"Well, we can try it."
Hello. You've been on the beach.
We have a wonderful son.
Yes, he did. He's brilliant.
He didn't escape, though.
He has a genetic condition,
which means his teeth are crumbling.
It's quite a rare condition, which
again, fits well with our community.
All the conditions are
unique, like mine, or rare.
The hope is that that's all he'll get.
The worry is that some of these
problems come out in adolescence.
That's the nature of
what we deal with. It's like these
invisible b*ll*ts that keep being fired.
Sometimes they hit, sometimes they don't.
This is a Sunday Mirror
statistical study of the
health problems of nuclear
veterans and their families.
So this is about 2002.
Just the list of what's
wrong here is enough
to sort of scream at you
that there's a problem.
Severe eczema, face and hands, bowel
malformation, problems with testicles, eye.
A daughter and two grandchildren
with deformed feet, insides
deformed, severe internal
problems, dead at 15 months.
Giantism, deformed hips, hole in the
heart, dead at six months old from cancer.
Malformed vocal cords, heart and
lung defects, two thumbs on one hand.
Deformed fingers and toes,
webbed feet, just goes on.
Deformed p*nis, no an*s,
numerous miscarriages.
You name it, they've had it.
And there's no explanation as to why.
Ministry of Defence has just never,
ever done the genetic studies.
If it wasn't radiation, well then
what was it? They've never said.
My wife had over a dozen miscarriages.
One of my children had been
born with two wombs,
one hidden behind the other.
My son,
his right eye was buried into his nose,
so all you could see was the whiteness.
And his left eye was locked.
Another son, he was born
with two large holes in his heart.
There was a survey of veterans'
families by the University of Liverpool,
which found they reported three
times the normal rate of miscarriages
and ten times the normal rate
of birth defects in their children.
There is this feeling that the whole
community was part of that experiment.
My dad was sent to Christmas Island.
He witnessed 24 detonations in 78 days.
My father didn't really talk
about his time at the tests.
He'd sign the Official Secret Act.
Don't worry.
He started to suffer lots of health
problems in terms of his heart.
He...
always wondered,
was there a connection?
And he had a heart attack.
52 is no age to go.
Unfortunately, my brother
died 18 months later,
with exactly the same
condition that my father had.
So he was 31 years old, when he
had again a massive heart attack.
My sister, she's had
tumors removed in her face,
and her eyesight is deteriorating now,
and eventually she will go blind.
And then in 2022, when I was 51,
I suffered a cardiac arrest.
I was gone for eight minutes.
Unfortunately, my son
witnessed the whole thing.
He's 15 years old.
I worry about my son.
I worry about kids that he may have.
It's a thing that runs through all of us.
This whole thing affects
families in so many ways.
It's a disgrace that
it's got to this point.
One, two, three, four,
rock and cross.
I've learned to live with it.
The fear of what's going
to happen down the line.
I don't think a lot of us
ever got over the shock.
The fear before it, and even after it.
I was silent in living hell for me.
They started planning tests around '53.
They saw us come and go
and let us die.
A blood poisoned
radiation in the sky.
They did have nightmares.
They started wetting the bed.
They were just screaming out in mislead.
Screaming out.
The atomic b*mb is very dangerous.
We must get ready for it.
I'm the worst example of a
British nuclear test veteran.
I've got all my own hair, my own teeth,
and I don't take one tablet.
The injuries I have you can't see.
There's a bright flash brighter than
the sun. If you are not ready,
it could hurt you in different ways.
I started having a series of nightmares.
The falling.
They still get flashbacks.
The vision grounded in my mind.
Those flames coming up towards me.
We must be ready to do the right thing.
The atomic b*mb explodes.
I keep pushing everything
to the back of my mind.
Wash it away.
Trauma, this sense
of tension.
That will cover it.
Even a thin cloth helps protect it.
Even a newspaper can
save you from a bad burn.
I didn't know what fear was.
After that first b*mb...
I knew what fear was going to be.
I consider myself lucky
compared to most.
I've survived.
We've had veterans who
have committed suicide
because they can't cope.
Government studies show,
compared to other veterans,
every single decade,
there's more suicides
than there should be in this group.
And I would argue that's
because of the way that the British
state have gaslighted these men.
We're constantly living in this shadow.
In the shadow of the b*mb.
We must all get ready now.
Then, you're on your own.
There exists within our
society some dark forces
that suppress the truth.
And I firmly believe that now.
We've been betrayed.
Shamefully.
Betrayed.
The official line is there is no causal link
between the participation at the nuclear tests
for the veterans and their health issues.
If you speak to the MOD,
they will tell you anyone who
has an injury is able to
claim a no-fault w*r pension.
If you have a leg blown off in Afghanistan,
you can prove it quite easily.
But if you were irradiated,
the MOD asks you to prove
what your radiation dose was.
These guys were never
told what their doses were,
and most of them didn't
have a dose taken anyway.
So the only real proof of what
happened to them is their blood tests.
The long-term position of the MOD has been that
these blood tests simply didn't take place.
But the veterans have told me
they were tested throughout.
I have asked for my
blood records four times.
So the MOD have either destroyed them,
lost them,
or will not release them
because they could implicate them.
The Maralinga records went to England.
I believe the British
government seized them.
What does it say about
what level of radiation
we were subjected to?
We have hundreds and hundreds of people
who are telling us that
their medical records
are either incomplete
or will not be released to them.
I'm crying out to be diagnosed.
My son's got a condition.
This sort of information would help.
We still have hundreds of years
of children
being born with conditions,
so we need to start the research at ASAP.
Successive governments
have fought every legal action,
fought every w*r pension claim.
But in 2023, after a
really long FOI battle,
I was past the document.
It was...
earth-shattering.
It contained 150 documents,
all about blood and urine
testing, of troops, of civilians,
of Australian personnel,
and of Indigenous people.
I was astonished at the contents.
Blood testing,
blood data,
medical examinations on natives,
everything that the MOD had said
for 30 years that it didn't happen.
Hundreds and thousands of men
were subject to orders for blood testing
and had had it done.
And they failed to disclose
that to multiple courts.
It was proof the MOD
had been lying all this time.
They had seen the problems
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I am disgusted
with our establishment because they knew.
What they have said all the time, that they
were guinea pigs, that they were lab rats,
was right.
They were experimented
on as human beings during the entire
course of the nuclear weapons tests.
And it is continuing today
because there are people in
the atomic weapons establishment
and higher up at the Ministry of Defence
who know full well what these records show
and who are using spurious
and unlawful grounds
of national security to
prevent them being published.
Those medical records are my life.
We were really, really lab rats.
They need to provide the blood tests
that they have pretended they never took.
And that would show
definitively whether or not
any radiation got inside those men.
They have not known the truth.
These records would provide answers.
It's that pressure of not
knowing that never goes away.
The Kafkaesque attitude
of their own government
saying that what they experience
can't possibly be the truth.
And...
it's just not acceptable.
The only thing that fixes
this is political willpower.
We have a dozen of those little kindlings.
We've got to place them all
in there in the right sequence.
And away you go.
The nuclear weapons testing,
it was a fairly long programme.
In the end, everything was contaminated.
What they'd done was just picked up all
the horrible-looking debris,
dug great big trenches with bulldozers
and pushed it in there and covered it over.
But the rubbish wasn't the dangerous part.
The British government had
told the Australian government
that the land was not contaminated,
but there were three million
pieces of plutonium-239 on the site.
Australia, we're going to hand
Maralinga back to the Aboriginal lands.
I said, "Well, they can't hand
it back. It's too contaminated."
And that's why I blew the whistle.
I knew about the plutonium
that was buried there,
and my concern was what was going to
happen to the plutonium that was buried
and who would be responsible for it.
I took the risk of being locked up
for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
Avon Hudson made it impossible for the Australian
government to ignore what was going on.
He drew political attention to it.
The Australian government granted a
royal commission that I was fighting for.
After 30 years of secrecy here,
the commission is steadily lifting
the lid off Britain's nuclear past.
The British were horrified that
we were going to even have it.
There have been claims of
cover-ups, secrecy and out-and-out lies,
all dragged kicking and
squealing into the open.
I know a lot of clever men came out here
and said a lot of clever devices off,
but it just strikes me as a
massive monument to human folly.
Yemi Lester also
played a crucial role in
the Royal Commission,
bringing the harm caused
by the British tests to light.
Dad really wanted to say, "You
hurt people, and you k*lled people,
and you need to be
held accountable for that."
The Royal Commission
ultimately led to a clean-up.
The British were dragged kicking
and screaming to contribute to the cost.
They paid less than half.
Vast areas remain too
contaminated to ever be inhabited.
For all the shortcomings of
the Australian government,
there has at least been an attempt
to recognise the harm that was caused.
This has not been matched by similar
undertakings by the British government.
We're supposed to be a nation
that honours its heroes,
and part of our national story is
the wars we have won and lost.
The first duty of the country to those who
keep it safe is to keep them safe in return.
These men...
performed.
a vital role in protecting our country
in the same way as
the men who landed at D-Day.
They are totally forgotten,
utterly betrayed by their country.
Many other veterans would say,
"It's the MOD playbook.
We delay and deny until they die."
We're nearly at that point now.
There's not very many of them left.
How many more generations
does it have to be?
The legal action is about suing
for access to these blood tests.
The average age of these
guys now is 85, 86 years old.
We are losing them very
fast, at least a couple of weeks.
This is really a last
opportunity for the MOD
to come clean.
If this goes to court,
it will take five years,
and these men will be dead.
We have to get an answer now with the threat of
legal action that the MOD cannot hope to win.
That's the only way it will happen.
Right, Terry, Brian, let's have you
in a line with Gina and Steve, please.
It just made it possible for people at the
top to say, "We don't have to tell the truth."
To me, it's a stain on Britain's
history. Well, let's remove the stain.
When we say, oh, a sharp salute,
crisp as you like.
All right. No, not you two.
Let's turn over the page and have a new
chapter where we admit to what we did.
There's nothing that's
lasted longer than this.
It's a bit like you saw at Hillsborough,
and we've had at Grenfell, and the Affective
Blood Scandal, and the Post Office.
What is right has been tipped upside down.
And if we can find a way
to fix the nuclear test veteran scandal,
a lot of other problems get fixed.
My granddaughter, Laura,
is expecting a child.
I hope she won't
have to live through the
pain that I lived
through because of loss.
The first great-grandson, you've
got to be happy.
You've got to be.
All my fears,
I'll overcome them
all as I've done it all my life.
I mean, I've been living with
Stephen's death now for
60 years.
That experience,
even now...
is very difficult.
There's no responsibility
has been taken for the last 60 years,
and that's what
this has done for our family.
This...
will live with me until in my head
I can say we're over there.
And we'll get there,
won't we? We'll get there.
It'll be so wonderful to
behold my
great-grandson
and say, "Come here,
lad. Let's have a snuggle."
People need to
know the danger that
this world is in
with atomic bombs.
This is a complete
map of the moon
which I drew from my telescope.
It took five years.
I was once asked,
"Did I believe in God?"
to which I quoted an
old English astronomer.
Don't let's talk about God.
Let's talk about our
cosmic intelligence.
Let's dig in the way in
the background for 18 life.
Life is precious.
Mankind should come together and
cherish the earth
that he lives on.
I'll hang on to those words.
I'll hang on to those words.
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Britain's Nuclear b*mb Scandal: Our Story (2024)
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