from The Observer, 31 October 2010
The widow of a British airman contaminated by flying through a radioactive mushroom cloud has won compensation in the US, despite being denied payments in the UK.
Pat Spackman (66) has been awarded $75,000 (£47,000) by the US Department of Justice after her husband, Derek, died from throat cancer. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) had previously refused her a war widow’s pension, claiming that her husband’s death could not be blamed on the contamination.
Her victory is an embarrassment for the MoD, which has battled for decades under successive governments to avoid paying money to nuclear test veterans and their families. Mrs Spackman condemned the MoD’s behaviour as “shameful” – a criticism echoed by a Conservative MP.
According to lawyers, the MoD has spent more than £4 million trying to block legal claims from over a thousand test veterans and their relatives for war pensions and financial compensation. Cases are currently before a tribunal and the High Court in London.
Between 1952 and 1962 Britain and the US exploded more than 40 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere around Australia and in the Pacific. The explosions and their aftermath were witnessed by over 21,000 British servicemen, often dressed only in shorts and sandals.
Flight Lieutenant Derek Spackman was an RAF navigator on a Canberra aircraft, stationed at Darwin, Australia. Between March and May 1954 he was sent on a mission, codenamed Aconite, to sample radioactivity from up to six nuclear tests by the US government around the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.
The explosions included the largest ever detonated by the US, a massive 15-megaton shot called Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954. Between four and nine hours after the detonations, planes spent two hours flying inside the huge clouds of radioactive dust they kicked up.
Evidence from the official US archive shows that Canberras were decontaminated by their crews after each explosion. Small radioactive particles were also thought to have penetrated the planes’ filters, and been inhaled by the air crew.
A letter from the UK government’s Department of Atomic Energy in July 1954 listed Mr Spackman as one of 15 crew members who had received an “augmented” dose of radiation as a result of the Aconite mission. In 1957, he was awarded the Queen’s Commendation for distinguished service.
He retired from the RAF in 1986, and in February 2000 was diagnosed with cancer of the pharynx. Despite surgery and radiotherapy, he died five months later, aged 69.
Pat Spackman, his third wife who lives in Devon, applied to the MoD for a war widow’s pension, but was rejected in 2002 and again on appeal in 2004. She then applied to the US Department of Justice, which decided that she qualified for compensation and sent her a cheque for $75,000 earlier this month.
"I would far rather have Derek alive than any amount of money,” she said. “But it was a very nice surprise to get something from the US government. This makes our own government's attitude to Derek, and all the other nuclear veterans, even more shameful.”
She was helped by Derek’s son by his first wife, David Spackman, a 54-year-old GP from near Banbury in north Oxfordshire. “I was appalled by the MoD,” he told The Observer.
“I am saddened and angered that the UK government, which my father served without question for so many years, has refused to accept that flying through an atomic mushroom cloud may even possibly have contributed to his throat cancer.”
The Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, John Baron MP, who is a patron of the British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association, said: “The UK remains well behind other countries in recognising its nuclear test veterans. It is shameful and the MoD has much to answer for.”
Sue Roff, an expert on nuclear test veterans from Dundee University Medical School, pointed out that cloud sampling was the one of the dirtiest jobs anyone did. This was the second time a UK veteran rejected by the MoD had been given compensation by the US, she said.
Roy Prescott, a UK veteran who watched 36 UK and US tests while stationed on Christmas Island in the South Pacific, was given £40,000 compensation by the US government in 2006. He had earlier been refused a war pension by the MoD.
Airmen and ground crews from RAF 543 Squadron were also contaminated after flights through French and Chinese nuclear explosions between 1966 and 1974. According to veterans, ten of them, or their widows, have been awarded pensions by the MoD for cancers they have contracted.
Neither the MoD or the US Department of Justice would comment on individual cases. The MoD argued that it was difficult to compare the schemes in the two countries because US veterans do not automatically receive free healthcare or social security benefits
“The UK war pensions scheme requires evidence of a link between service and illness,” said an MoD spokeswoman. In the US, however, claimants do not have to prove causality, just that they were exposed to radiation and contracted one of the qualifying diseases.
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