In December 1957 the British government decided to test hydrogen bombs just a mile off the south east coast of Christmas Island where 4,000 troops were based. The decision was made by Top Brass as they strolled along the beach ‘gin and tonics in hand’ (according to Task Force Commander Wilfred Oulton), because they feared an imminent test ban treaty. But it was a risky strategy requiring pin-point bombing accuracy by the RAF, and absolute faith in the predictions of the meteorologists. But whether by negligence or design things went drastically wrong during at least one of the six bomb drops that followed. On the morning of April 28, 1958, the largest of the H-Bombs, codenamed Grapple Y, created a thunderstorm that deluged the men on the ground with ‘rainout’, radioactive rain which contaminated the land, swimming areas and the drinking water. Several ‘hot spots’ of radioactivity on the island were detected by radiation monitors, but this was covered-up by the military. The results, of course, were not immediately apparent because the overall levels of contamination on the island were low, and the ‘rainout’ was mainly ingested by the men and did not show up on radiation monitoring badges. The long-term consequences for the men only became
clear 20-30 years later when early deaths and increased cancer rates became apparent. In the early 1980s the British Nuclear Tests Veterans Association was formed to fight for justice and compensation. The media, and principally the BBC, became involved. Hundreds of men came forward with complaints, Compelling evidence supporting the veterans was produced by various experts. It looked as though the Government was buckling, but suddenly in the mid-1980s the BBC virtually stopped its coverage after the Ministry of Defence began a much-criticised statistical study. The BNTVA lost momentum and the movement became wracked by internal divisions. Thankfully, medical and other records of men who contacted the BNTVA survived and the graph (opposite page) shows a breakdown of the men with complaints and the tests they attended. The results show an overwhelming preponderance of Grapple Y and Z members...powerful evidence of the folly of the British Government in exploding H-bombs so close to where the soldiers were based. Sixty years on, thousands of secret files on Grapple Y are still locked away. These files should be released for independent examination, so that light can at last be shone on this dark corner of British history.
THE first Grapple bombs in early 1957, tested for safety reason 400 miles away from Christmas Island, were abject failures. The first using tritium fuel had an explosive power of just over 200 kts and fell well short of the “megatonrange” required of an H-Bomb; the second, although reaching 750kts wasn’t even an H-bomb, but a boosted atomic bomb using vast quantities of uranium; while the third , again using tritium fuel, was even less powerful than the first.
The Americans who monitored the tests were unimpressed. In Britain the politicians were furious and the Task Force Commander Air Vice Marshal Wilfred Oulton, stationed on Christmas Island, was summoned to London for urgent consultations. When he returned he and the chief scientist William Cook announced they where to hold the next series of bomb tests, six in all, almost on their doorstep, just one and a half miles from the south east tip of the island. In his memoirs, Oulton states that the decision was made while walking “gin and tonics in hand” along the shore line. He said: “We knew we couldn’t do it from Malden again because that was 400 miles away. We thought it would be safe at Christmas island because the dropping point was 30 miles from the Main Camp where most the men were stationed.”
But he was wrong, just how wrong only became apparent a quarter of a century later when hundreds of nuclear veterans and widows revealed heart-breaking stories of death and disease among their ranks. The connection between cancers and the bomb tests were first revealed by the BBC in a Nationwide programme in 1983. The Ministry of Defence then denied, as they have always denied, that any connection existed. The basis of the government case was that strict safety procedures were laid down and in all significant respects they were all adhered to and anyway the number of Christmas Island veterans suffering from diseases was no greater than a normal cross section of the population. The veterans disputed this, and their harrowing stories still reverberate to this day. Many like Royal Engineer Phil Munn, a founding member of the British Nuclear Tests Veterans Association was stricken with leukaemia. In an interview before he died he said: “Radiation is a cause of leukaemia, it is not hereditary. We know that radiation has a long period of time, 10, 20 years before it comes out…and literally 25 years to the time that I witnessed a hydrogen bomb I suffered leukaemia.”
Mr Cyril Maynard, a naval telegraphist, was 46 when he died. His wife said: “He got an idea he had cancer. He went to the hospital and they did a lot more tests and they confirmed he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He told them he had been on Christmas island and we were told the incubation period was 21 years, which was just about right.”
The group pf men deemed most at risk were the pilots and crew of the Canberra bombers tasked with flying through the mushroom clouds to collect samples for the scientists to analyse. Flt Lt Christopher Donne, the lead pilot for one of the biggest H-bomb test at Christmas Island was codenamed sniff boss. In an interview he said: “We had to make sure that our aircraft was facing away from ground zero at the time and the flash because of the brightness. And I can remember so well even though we had special darkened visors which came right down over are faces and our eyes, 30 miles away from ground zero I could still see imprinted on my eyes this incredible bright flash and the heat of the cockpit combing and the imprint of the instrument panel in front of me.
awe that something of that size could be made by man and knowing that a few minutes later I was going to have to fly through it.”
“And I can remember seeing this incredible fireball rushing up at this amazing speed so bright that you couldn’t look at it. And down below there was little tiny Christmas Island. We were over 50,000 feet looking down at it and I was conscious of this white shock wave radiating out at the speed of an express train, more. It was rather like dropping a pebble into a very still pool one could see this white shock wave just roaring out from the centre of ground zero… and then of course just disappearing over the horizon. My feelings were one of total
Sniff Boss now had to lead his Canberra flight through the H-bomb cloud itself and the aircraft and its crew all received high doses of radiation. He said: “I think you have got to remember that flying an aeroplane at that height was rather like driving a car very quickly on ice. It was almost out of control, but not quite because we were literally scrambling for those last few feet of altitude. And so one very gingerly turned the aircraft and I remember seeing this huge seething yellowybrown thing ahead of me spreading out almost as far as I could see. I remember turning the aeroplane and getting it straight and level and just scrambling up those last few feet and then approaching the cloud hoping that I’d got a small part of it. We called it a cut. From that we could work out whether we could send the other aircraft in. And then we hit it and the instruments just went haywire and my navigator said ‘bloody hell, let’s get out of here.’ But of course we couldn’t because there was no way I could turn the aircraft because the turbulence was making it very hard to fly at all at that height. I can remember sort of glancing out of the side of my eye to look at the instruments which showed the needles were pressed firmly up against the stops.”
“This showed the very high radiation levels which were very much higher than we had anticipated. I can remember the health physicist that we had on board muttering in his beard about it being very much hotter than he thought. And I can remember my recollection, my one wish was to get the aircraft out in to the daylight again because the further one penetrates into the cloud the more turbulent it gets. One senses the smell of the cloud although obviously one wouldn’t be able to smell anything at all because being on 100 per cent oxygen that’s all you can smell. I think its probably psychological that the horrible yellow churning masses of cloud will give you a sort of sense of smell as well. And then finally we broke into daylight and I can remember thinking well thank God that’s over.
“And then we had to work out when it was safe to send the other aircraft through. But it was very, very much more radioactive than we had certainly anticipated and certainly it was a very much more bigger explosion than people had anticipated.”
Back on the ground Flying Officer
problem. Thomas Brandon said: “The water we used to wash the aircraft was just a high pressure jet and this water just had no place to go but just down into the ground and soak into the sand. Consequently the area was permanently radioactive between tests and during tests. There was nowhere for the effluent to go to; it just had to soak into the sand where you were walking…”
Donne and his crew were all decontaminated. He’d received such a high radiation dose that he was taken off this particular squadron and sent home.
The second group at risk were the men in the so-called active handling flights. Their job was to decontaminate the aircraft and crews and extract the radioactive dust samples for analysis. A number of men from this unit came forward to say it wasn’t always possible to observe safety precautions. The waste from the high-pressure hoses used to hose down the ‘hot’ aircraft was a constant
One of his colleagues, Brian Young said: “It was a silly thing. Water came off the back of the wing, contaminated water came down on the person underneath. We were only wearing cotton white and of course it went straight through to me. I wasn’t a very happy person underneath, but we were all too busy really at the time to do much about it. In the middle of decontaminating you can’t suddenly stop and say I’ve got to go into the shower and stop. The work has to carry on…”
Colleague Michael Hardisty said: “We had a machine that we stepped up to similar to a coffee vending machine that you placed your hands inside and pressed against the back and the needle would register into red. I don’t know whether it was defective or not because we could go up and put our hands in and ring a bell at will at any time. And when new people came out and we would show them how to do it, we would just walk up to it and put our hands in and say when its clean its like this and when it’s danger the bell will ring. And the bell would start ringing and they would look at us and wonder what was the matter with us. We were just hoping that the machine was defective because we never could seem to get clean enough to keep in the green.” What made the men in charge of the tests particularly confident about their safety was the fact that all the bombs at Christmas Island were airbursts. Because they were all detonated high in the atmosphere in theory there shouldn’t have been any fallout over the island. One of the scientists in charge of the tests was Mr William Jones of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, He had never spoken in public before until a rare interview with the BBC. He explained: “When the fireball started to rise, if you can imagine a sort of cleaning your
front room with a vacuum cleaner. There is a suction force that lifts up off the ground, it lifts just off the ground any water that’s round about, but because by that time the fireball is rising fairly rapidly, the two do not meet. The column of dust on the ground and residuals from the fireball itself, from the explosion itself, they don’t meet so obviously there is no contamination of the material that was sucked up from the ground. This of course is not the case if the fireball touches the ground.” But this statement was proved to be false when AWRE photographs came to light that clearly showed that large quantities of dust certainly were sucked up in at least one explosion. And it is now admitted that the scientists did know that there was some radiation around ground zero. That was why security was meant to be strict. Flying Office Donne claimed there was no security at all at ground zero. He said: “After our flight we borrowed a land rover and drove into the ground zero area, We didn’t go very close for very obvious reasons and it had a sort of eeriness about it that meant that we didn’t really want to go very close. But I can remember vividly seeing where ground zero had been, and it was rather like looking at an enormous football pitch in very good condition. There was nothing there at all. Everything had just disappeared. Totally flat. Except one could see what looked like grass as far as the eye could see. Green. We discovered of course it wasn’t grass at all. It was where the heat; this colossal heat from the explosion had actually fused the sand of Christmas Island into green glass. It was something which fascinated us because we’d been up there and looking down on it and a few of us just wanted to see what it was like on the ground. It was absolutely unbelievable.”
Home movies made by men on Christmas Island suggest there was something of a holiday atmosphere. One shows men splashing about in the Pacific breakers, while others are shown displaying their catches after a leisurely days fishing. Ironically the man who took one of those films died of cancer shortly after returning home. Special days like Christmas Day were treated with due respect for tradition. But between the tests there wasn’t much to do and the radiation risks seemed to be the last thing anyone was worried about.
According to the Daily Mirror, the biggest problem reported at the time was a scuffle in the NAAFI about the monotonous diet. A senior officer had been pelted with cans. To prevent an occurrence many men were sent to Hawaii for rest and recuperation. Almost all the men relaxed 25 miles from ground zero in areas thought to be safe. But there was danger lurking all around in radioactive fallout that contaminated the entire island, and which went unrecorded at the time.
Major James Carman: “Crayfish left us all amazed.”
Carman said: “That particular night about eight of us caught about 150 crayfish. It was the best catch we’d had for a long time. We brought them back. The next day the cooks and stewards prepared them for the party that night and we invited a large number of officers from the Main Camp for this grand opening. Halfway through the party out came the crayfish in big dishes. Everyone ate them. I was talking to what we called the NBCD officer which stands for Nuclear Biological Chemical Decontamination officer. His job on the island was to take a background count to check for radioactivity. And he’d been out there for almost a year I think and he’d never had a reaction on his Geiger counter at all.
The evidence of Major James Carman is a graphic illustration of the extent of the contamination. He told of the time when he went to an officer’s dinner to inaugurate a new officers’ mess. On the menu was seafood they’d caught near ground zero.
And this night halfway through the party he said, ‘well I’ve got to go and do my background count’, and he did it with great ceremony saying he had to go out and leave the party. He was a Naval Lt Commander. And I said, ‘look bring the damn thing in here.’ So he did. And for the first time he got a reading on it. The Geiger counter went clicking away and everyone was amazed at this and in fact we had a Royal Air Force Officer who hadn’t had any crayfish. We put the Geiger counter in his hand which he stuck out at arm’s length. We shovelled crayfish in his mouth and it took about two minutes for the radioactivity to come through his system and register in his outstretched hand. It all caused a lot of amusement…”
The radioactive crayfish may have been the cause of some merriment among the officers, but the implications had been noted. A few days after the incident a special team from AWRE secretly monitored the sewage outlets for the Main Camp and Port area. One squaddie sent to help in the sampling process was Tim Raine from Gloucester. He said: “When I was told what the job was I nearly mutinied! The latrines on the island were the most disgusting things ever...and I had no interest at all in finding out where it all went. Me and a few other lads went to a place on the shoreline to a tangle of pipes that fed into the sea. We spent the day prodding and poking the pipes trying to clear blockages. Then a group of scientists arrived dressed in overalls with their boots covered and wearing gas masks. We were all told to stand back and not ask any questions while the scientists went about scoop-
ing up samples and sealing them in jars. Geiger counters were produced at one stage, but we never saw if they registered anything because we were all ordered to withdraw well away from the action.”
The team spent three days taking water samples near the outlet pipes. Mr Raine was told later that the samples were taken to a special laboratory near the forward area. Before they left the site, Mr Raine and the other workers were told not to mention anything about scientists when they returned to camp. As far as is known The results of the tests have never been published.
The clear implication of such tests is that if radioactivity was found in the effluent from the sewage works, then everyone on the island must have been contaminated to such an extent as to affect their digestive tracts and thus their internal organs.
Despite the glaring evidence about radioactivity on Christmas Island, government spokesmen seized upon several strange anomalies. There was the case of the pilot who flew through the middle of the H-Bomb cloud itself, getting a high level of radiation and saying he felt perfectly fit decades later. Obviously radiation had different effects in different people. BBC Nationwide decided that the only way to evaluate the compelling evidence of hundreds of men who came forward complaining of cancers and other illnesses was to hand all of it to teams of medical researchers. Professor Joseph Rotblat worked on atomic bombs in America in 1945 and later was one of the pioneers in the development of the British bombs. Later he become known for the work he had done publicising the dangers of nuclear war. Prof Rotblat, who died in 2005, was a world authority on the effects of radiation on the body and had long been interested in the mystery of Christmas Island.
In a BBC TV interview he said: “Now it was the bombs were exploded at such height that almost all of the radioactivity should have gone up into the atmosphere and therefore in theory there should have been no radioactivity on the island. However in practise it could have happened through rainout. Now rainout is a phenomenon which occurs when the nuclear cloud encounters a raincloud and then some of the radioactive particles are deposited on globules of water and then this water comes down with the rain.”
He pointed out that it actually did rain on Christmas Island after the Grapple Y test, deluging the fleet anchored off the island and on the control ship Narvik where the men had been ordered to witness the tests. Bernard Ghorghan, a radio operator on the Narvik confirmed: “This particular morning the cloud developed and developed and de-
veloped; it was absolutely enormous and eventually it came right over the top of the ship and passed the ship. It started raining. It absolutely bucketed down, real tropical drenching. We were all soaked to the skin and. Everybody was soaked to the skin. Most of us had been wearing just the cotton zoot suit and perhaps just a pair of tropical shorts underneath. We were all very apprehensive there was this rain coming smack out of the nuclear cloud right over our heads. And inevitably everyone was pretty petrified about it. Very soon after that a broadcast came from the bridge assuring us there was no contamination registered on the ship and we were allowed to disperse…No-one believed that for a minute, but we just carried on as normal.
Prof Rotblat was asked by the BBC, ‘how do you answer the Ministry of Defence who have always said that no person on Christmas Island was ever exposed to any dangerous level of radiation or to any significant fallout?
Prof Rotblat said: “The rainout is significant even in small amounts. The point that I am trying to make is, people might have been exposed to this rainout without it being registered on their dosimeters I am told that because of the hot climate that the men spent a great dal of their time in the water washing and swimming. While in the water, if the water was radioactive, they could have received a certain amount of radiation, but this would not have been registered because presumably they would not wear their dosimeters in the water. This would have given them an external dose of radiation. But in addition to this they could have been subject to a dose of internal radiation by taking in some small amounts of radioactivity into their bodies. Now this could have happened in several ways. For example when you swim you can swallow a certain amount of water. I am told that people washed in the lagoon, in sea water, to
clean their things. Above all I am told that they had been eating fish caught locally. If the water was radioactive then the fish would have concentrated some radioactivity in them, and then of course it could have gotten into the bodies of the people who ate the fish. In such cases if you have that inside your body most of the dose of radiation comes from beta rays and these again are not registered on the monitors…”
His views were supported by the Department of Social Medicine at Birmingham University. Researchers there specialised in trying to find the causes of disease by statistical survey. Using this technique one of them discovered for instance that x-raying pregnant mothers harmed their unborn babies. In 1983, the researchers analysed case histories of 330 men who had been present at the tests and compared them with cancer rates in general. Their preliminary findings were published in the Lancet. They showed an alarming instance of rare blood cancers. Using the Prime Minister’s own figures in the House of Commons the researchers assumed that there had been 8,000 men who had witnessed the tests. According to the national averages they therefore expected 17 blood cancer deaths. In fact in a much smaller group of 330 men they found 27 deaths.
The figure was half as many again as the average for the total number. The Ministry of Defence reacted almost immediately to the alarming implications of the Birmingham report. They criticised the survey for being what they called “unscientific” and also increased their estimates of the men who had been at the tests from 8,000 to 12,000 and the immediate effect of this was to dilute the seriousness of the findings. They refused to even discuss the possibility of rainout, but were later forced to
accept it when secret government documents, released under freedom of information laws, proved there had been rain after at least one of the Grapple tests and that large areas of radioactive ’hotspots’ had been found on the island. Other declassified documents, this time from America, revealed sensational links with Britain’s chief atom bomb scientist, Sir William Penney, and a sinister US plan to use radioactive fallout from thunderstorms as a military weapon.
They revealed Penney was at the centre of a small group of elite scientists who proposed using downpours caused by nuclear bombs to irradiate populated areas. The plan has chilling parallels to Penney’s biggest bomb test which caused a storm that deluged hundreds of troops on Christmas Island. Many later died of leukaemia and other radiationlinked cancers. The cold-blooded project was first considered by the seven-man target committee of Los Alamos scientists who decided which Japanese cities would be bombed in 1945. At the time, Penney played the pivotal role of deciding what height the “gadget” should
be exploded for optimum damage. He sent a chill down the spines of the assembled scientists as he explained how more people could be killed by drawing them into the blast area.
The plan to use the atomic bomb to deliberately contaminate people far from the blast area was drawn up by Los Alamos physicist Joseph Hirschfelder who calculated that given the right conditions rising hot air from a nuclear explosion would create a thunderstorm.
A memorandum with the ominous title ‘STRATEGIC POSSIBILITIES ARISING IF A THUNDERSTORM IS ENDUCED BY GADGET EXPLOSION’ was sent to J.R. Oppenheimer just before the world’s first atomic blast in 1945. The memo, which also bore Penney’s name, explained that it would be feasible for the bomb to produce a thunderstorm which would poison wide areas, up to 100km away, untouched by the explosion. The memo adds: “Because of the high potential temperature of the hot air, the active material and fission products would rise to heights of 10,000 feet in three minutes before the thunderhead would develop.
Grapple Y fulfills all the criteria envisaged by Hirschfelder 13 years earlier. Penney’s bomb was exploded in the middle of the rainy season on Christmas Island which runs from February to the end of May. During this time the atmosphere is almost invariably saturated with moisture...just the sort of conditions a nuclear explosion would need to create the cumulonimbus clouds necessary for a thunderstorm. Added to that, on the day in question the bomb drop was delayed by more than an hour because of torrential rain.
hurry to beat a test ban treaty doesn’t make sense.
So why was it exploded at that time? The accepted wisdom is it was fired in haste because Britain was worried about a possible test ban treaty. But the UK had already demonstrated it could build a working H-bomb by exploding a similar, but slightly smaller device codenamed Grapple X six months earlier. The then prime Minister Harold MacMillian acknowledged this in his diary when he said American cooperation (which he called the ‘great prize’) had ‘been secured’ following the Grapple X explosion. Besides Penney went on to explode a series of four more nuclear devices codename Grapple Z, that continued until the end of the year. So firing Grapple Y in a
It is entirely possible therefore that Penney and his military planners decided to test Hirschfelder’s rainout theories. And there must have been enormous satisfaction in the outcome, for every component of the Hirschfelder blueprint was fulfilled: The blast did cause a thunderstorm; fallout did descend on places many miles from the blast area; scientists were able to measure exactly how far the fallout spread and how long it would take to reach the ground. So the experiment was a huge success...except of course for the thousands of luckless servicemen, most of whom were known as “lilywhites” because they had only just arrived on the island. Many paid the ultimate price. It is a fact that nearly half of all the reported injuries of nuclear servicemen have been made by veterans who witnessed the Grapple Y explosion.
This bomb may have secured Britain’s entry to the ’top table’ of international politics and Penney’s crowning achievement. But it may also have spelled death and immeasurable suffering to untold numbers of men and their descendants.
I was aboard HMS Plym on the way up from Fremantle in early August 1952, when the captain was at last authorized to give the ships company an idea of their future. The full details, of course, were kept secret, as they had been right up to the announcement by the Prime Minister that Britain was about to explode its first atomic bomb. Only then did we realise Plym’s fate: she was to be vapourised.
On arrival at Monte Bello on August 8th, Plym moored firmly in the lagoon to six cables, and main engines were rung off for the last time. Whatever else might occur, there would be no more anchor watches for us.
The first two weeks were really busy, and as many big jobs as possible were done before the “run down” of the ships company commenced with the draft of 22 men to the flagship Campania on Monday 25th. This thin-out didn’t slow down the rhythm of work unduly, and preparations went on at a good rate to complete setting up the equipment, filling the L.C.M’s with stores, and distilling water up to maximum stowage capacity. All these and other jobs were completed by the weekend, and Monday 1st September saw the real end of the commission.
the test, and on Saturday 20th, the “dress rehearsal” went off without a hitch, including a dummy evacuation just before dawn. Further adjustments were made, and scientific finishing touches put to all the apparatus. Dr Penney and other top scientists came, approved, and went while officers with working parties came on final rabbiting runs before it was too late. The boats, sailing and pulling, which had been one of our chief recreations, were carried off by their allotted L.S.T’s, and on Thursday 30th, the stand by period began with the drafting of half our remaining men.
All ships had left the lagoon the previous week, giving us a very doomed feeling as even the little Aussie lighters chugged past us seaward. Tension began to heighten as more boffins descended to make final adjustments and cold-bloodedly asked which bits of our ship they could take away as souvenirs.
After a minimum of delay, D-1 was declared on the 2nd October, and that afternoon one more party left, including our last cook. Supper that night was out of tins, prepared by a keen amateur, and rather than tempt fate the dishes were virtuously washed up.
With only 25 in the ships company, including 3 officers and 7 scientists left , work was hard with the routine of keeping the ship running, but not one defaulter was brought up during these final weeks and everyone did his job with a minimum of supervision. Scientists came and went in droves, setting up and adjusting their equipment ready for
A cancellation, more amateur cooking and unwashed dishes would be too much to face in the morning. But fortunately luck held, the weather was right, the evacuation went to plan, and the explosion took place at 0930 local time on Friday October 3rd. So went Plym...but history was made in her passing and she remains a proud memory to all who served in her.
My father was James Ronald Owen, he was Royal Navy and was on Christmas Island for Operation Dominic 1961-62. He saw all of the Operation Dominic tests. He died in 1994 aged 52 from heart problems. My brother died in 1996 aged 31 from the same heart condition. I have a sister Laura Jackson who has had health issues. I am married to Melanie. I have an 11-yr old son Joseph. I live in Llanddarog in Carmarthen, South Wales.
The BNTVA is moving forward with the medal campaign. We have retained our singular identity as this is important to the membership. The board are a very dedicated set of individuals, with a broad range of experience, they are a combination of veterans and descendants. We need to ensure that no Nuclear Veteran is excluded from the membership and that their families are aware of the BNTVA, the descendants group (Fallout) and that we continue to build a library of pictures, images and stories of the tests. We are currently investigating a children's educational package to make them aware of the tests and the participation by their grandfathers and now great grandfathers.
The BNTVA do not have any representation on the NCCF board and no longer have any relationship with BH Associates or any of the ex-chairman of the Association. The new 1173575 registered Charity continues to use social media and produces the Campaign magazine in house every quarter. We are building links across the world with other international organisations, from New Zealand, USA and Kiribati under our new Nuclear Veterans Worldwide program.
Our aim is to ensure that no Nuclear Veteran should be forgotten, that we help them as much as possible with any issues including health and benefit claims. The All Tests Reunion at Weston Super Mare will continue to be supported as an independent event. We will attend funerals with a Standard Bearer and a coffin drape to honour any Nuclear Veteran.
Due to the membership now getting older, we will rely on the descendants of the Veterans to join the BNTVA to ensure it's future. By utilising social media, we hope to encourage more descendants to join the Association. Our new medal campaign logo 'Still engaging an Invisible Enemy' is a success, and following a revamp of the stock on the shop, shop sales are at record levels.
The new BNTVA Chairman Alan Owen attend-
ed a meeting of the Anglia Branch and was warmly welcomed. He is a breath of fresh air compared with what we have experienced in the past and we were very interested to hear what he had to say.
Alan stressed how important it is for the public to be aware that British nuclear tests took place in other locations than Christmas Island in the 1950s, Monte Bello and Maralinga, for example.
He said the Daily Mirror’s 6 week concerted effort to raise this awareness, and promote a petition to obtain medals for veterans of the tests, was much appreciated.
The BNTVA is using social media to arouse further public interest in the continuing effects the tests have had, and is having on veterans. The Association is in touch with similar organisations in Kiritimati (Christmas Island), Fiji, New Zealand and with the American veterans, whose governments have already recognised their involvement in nuclear weapons’ tests.
BNTVA patron, John Baron MP has resigned, and has been succeeded by John Hayes MP.
Alan attended a meeting in the House of Commons to launch the medals’ petition. A pleasing number of MPs also attended. Among the 36 was the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, 3 members of the House of Lords, and the comedian, Al Murray.
A party of veterans visited Christmas Island to make contact with the island’s veterans
and to dedicate a memorial to commemorate the service of all involved with the tests.
In order to educate young people to the implications of British services’ and civilians’ involvement in nuclear weapons’ testing, a mobile phone App is being investigated.
Questions from the floor raised the issue of the use of DDT as a pest control on Christmas Island, and the progress of the two studies being undertaken to monitor veterans’ health. Alan responded positively and in detail.
Ian Gibson assured us that we should, in the end, be granted recognition, given the continuing persistence shown by all concerned.
Anglia branch chairman Gordon Willcox reported he had attended an event in Norwich to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Grapple Y H-Bomb.
Gordon sent a letter to Alan Owen requesting that our patrons in parliament should seek an apology from the MoD based on evidence in the April edition of FlyPast magazine that showed that the MoD was aware of the modifications required to aircraft loaned to France for their nuclear test programme in the early 1960s. Aircrew were to be protected from the hazards of radiation by extra modification of the cockpit area, and were warned not to touch the skin of the aircraft when alighting from them to avoid radiation contamination. An apology is demanded from the MoD based on the fact that if radiation dangers were being acknowledged in the early 1960s, it is likely that they were aware of the same risks in previous years, although they have always denied there were dangers to personnel.
