from Sunday Herald, 08 April 2001
New evidence of experiments in which British servicemen had to crawl through the radioactive contamination from nuclear explosions to test the effectiveness of protective clothing has discredited the government's oft-repeated insistence that people were never used as radiological guinea pigs.
The revelation has emerged as governments in Britain and New Zealand come under renewed legal pressure from veterans who believe that the radiation they were exposed to during nuclear tests in the 1950s and 60s made them sick. New court challenges for compensation have just been launched in both countries.
"They think that just because they write on official headed paper we will believe everything they say," said Sheila Gray, secretary of the British Nuclear Tests Veterans Association. "But when we dig deeper and find out for ourselves we discover that they do not always tell the truth. They cover up the truth."
Despite persistent allegations by veterans that they had been used as guinea pigs in the tests, the Ministry of Defence has always maintained that this was wrong. Any experiments that were done on the effects of nuclear explosions on humans used lifelike dummies instead of real people, ministers have claimed.
This line was heavily relied upon in 1997 by lawyers defending the MoD in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against compensation claims from veterans. It was repeated as recently as January this year in a response to the veterans association from the defence minister, Lewis Moonie.
"I must first reject your contention that nuclear test veterans are victims of nuclear weapons," said the Kirkcaldy Labour MP, who is now responsible for all veterans' affairs. "The implication in your statement is that those who participated in the UK's atmospheric nuclear tests programme were deliberately exposed to ionising radiation, which is simply not the case."
But now the Sunday Herald has uncovered evidence that casts serious doubt on the minister's assertion. Two dozen soldiers wearing different sets of clothing were asked to drive, march or crawl through the fall-out zone three days after a nuclear explosion at Maralinga in the Australian desert in 1956. "The object," according to an official account, "was thoroughly practical - to discover what types of clothing would give soldiers the best protection against radioactive contamination in conditions of warfare."
The story has surfaced because in February Sue Rabbitt Roff, a radiation researcher at Dundee University's Centre for Medical Education, came across a reference to "clothing trials" in a military memo from the Australian government archive. The memo said that people who took part in these trials had been exposed to radiation during the 'Buffalo' series of nuclear tests at Maralinga in 1956.
Roff thought that this was important as it appeared to contradict the MoD's persistent denials that men had been used as guinea pigs. Since the 1980s the ministry had maintained that a reference in an oft-quoted 1953 government memo to the need to discover the effects of tests on men had been misinterpreted because it only meant the use of dummies.
"I was in the European Court of Human Rights in November 1997 when the UK government categorically denied using humans as part of the studies of the effects of radiation," said Roff. "In fact the government representative said it would have been 'an act of indefensible callousness to have done so' that would have caused a "public scandal on a scale to rock or unseat any civilised government'."
The Australian document confirms that servicemen did suffer radiation exposure in the clothing trails, she argued. "This was perhaps a necessary part of Cold War defence but to deny that such experiments happened is to demean the role of the servicemen and to deny their claim to the due process of the duty of care owed by successive governments."
When the Sunday Herald queried the MoD about the trials, it made contact with the Australian government in Canberra and eventually confirmed that "contaminated clothing trials" had taken place. They involved 24 men wearing three different types of protective clothing from an "Indoctrinee Force' of over 250 British, Australian and New Zealand officers and civilians.
"Officers moved in groups through a fall-out area three days after the detonation," said an account provided by the ministry. "Some were in a vehicle, some marched along a track, and some crawled 30 yards 'in the accepted military manner' and then marched through the bush."
Roff is now calling on the government to fund a study tracing and examining the health of the 'Indoctrinee Force'. She said she has another document listing 71 of the individuals in the force and their putative radiation doses which would make a good starting point for such a study.
A spokesman for the MoD, however, insisted that the men who took part in the clothing trials were not guinea pigs. "They were told of the purpose of the experiment and were closely monitored to ensure that no-one was exposed to dangerous levels of radiation," he said.
This will not satisfy the veterans. "These tests were horrendous. They completely blow apart the idea that there were no tests done on individuals," responded Ian Greenhalgh, a Wigan-based lawyer who represents more than 20 veterans.
"This is another example where there have been consistent denials and then an admission that tests were carried out on people. How many other instances remain to be uncovered?"
Although the MoD successfully defended itself in Strasbourg, it is now facing another legal action from the widow of an airforce pilot who flew through the mushroom cloud from a nuclear test in the Pacific in 1958. Shirley Denson, whose husband, Eric, committed suicide after suffering from years of depression, has just won legal aid to sue the government.
Three New Zealand veterans of British tests have also launched a multi-million pound claim for damages against the New Zealand government, claiming that radiation gave them, their children and their grandchildren diseases and disabilities. "They knew the risk and they failed to warn us," said one of the claimants, Trevor Humphrey.
In one respect at least the MoD may be right, admitted the British veterans association's Sheila Gray. "The men were not proper guinea pigs because they were not tested afterwards," she told the Sunday Herald. "They were sacrificial lambs. They were used and then discarded."
