British Nuclear Test Veterans Association
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30 September 2002
Statement to the Press
Fifty Years On: Time for a Fair Pensions Policy for Nuclear Test Veterans
In September 1951, a year before the first British atomic detonation at Monte Bello, Rear Admiral Brooking of the Armament Research Establishment at Sevenoaks, received a memorandum from his counterpart in the Trials Planning Section, who was responsible for planning Operation Hurricane. Admiral Torlese anticipated that there might well be radiation contamination hazards for men working on the project, and that the ill effects could be long delayed. While much of military service is potentially hazardous, such service is "usually performed in the knowledge that the Admiralty accept liability for those killed or injured on duty." Admiral Torlese wrote, "It is not suggested that any one man who took part, and subsequently suffers from a diseases which might be due to the Operation, should automatically be compensated. I do feel however that some formula might be accepted by Ministries which would dispose any tribunal in favour of a claimant ex ' Hurricane'."
Today, fifty years after that first detonation, we do not yet have such a formula for pension awards for presumptive illnesses probably caused by participation in the UK's atomic and nuclear weapons tests. The United States has had such a formula since 1988, which has been extended over the years to include more than 30 conditions which are known to be potentially radiogenic. Surely, on the fiftieth anniversary of Britain's entry into the nuclear club, it is time for the UK Government to recognise its duty of care to its nuclear veterans, with a fair and accessible pensions policy, especially as these ex-servicemen are expressly forbidden to sue the Crown for any illnesses that may have been caused by their work at the tests.
There were a total of 40,000 servicemen and civilians at the UK tests in Australia and Christmas Island, 22,000 of them from Britain and the rest from Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. By 1998, according to the then War Pensions Agency, 12 pensions had been awarded for radiation-related injuries to UK veterans or their widows. Since then at least twice as many pensions have been awarded, for conditions recognised by the United States as radiogenic, including 6 cases of multiple myeloma. This increasing pace is due to a combination of the availability of stronger professional representation before the WPA (which became the Veterans Agency last year) and clearer archival evidence of the hazards that the servicemen were exposed to at all sites. It also may reflect a more frequent cancer rate now that the servicemen, who were mostly in their early twenties when they worked at the tests in the 1950s and 1960s, are in the 'cancer prone' age groups. Evidence from survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs indicates that radiogenic cancers can take several decades to appear, and are likely to appear in what is already a dangerous age, increasing the chances that an atomic or nuclear veteran will suffer from cancer in his later years.
But these pension victories of the past three years have all been achieved at the Pension Appeals Tribunals. It is still standard practice for the Veterans Agency to virtually automatically reject initial applications by men or their widows. It is only if the rejection is appealed that the independent PAT panels begin to consider the cases on their merits. The guidelines do not permit them to make decisions purely on precedent, although they have accepted the weight of the growing number of previous decisions and the need for consistent decision making. The whole process takes at least two years and commonly five years. A 100 per cent war pension for the non-officer ranks is about £5000 a year. It is estimated that the VA (an agency of the MOD) regularly spends £50,000 trying to reject such awards.
The decisions in two dozen cases that I have participated in in recent years have repeatedly found the radiation dosimetry reports called for by the VA on the individual man to be too dogmatic in the light of the scientific consensus that there is no threshold below which radiation is harmless - even the slightest speck of radiation can harm us if it is ingested, or inhaled or otherwise taken into the body.
We have a range of decisions accepting that each site - Monte Bello, Maralinga, Christmas Island - was contaminated by the local fallout from the tests. (The VA used to submit 'environmental monitoring' reports from government scientists saying that a man who served at Christmas Island would have received only 35% of the background radiation that he would have been exposed to if he had spent that time in England. Even though this was the period of the Windscale/Sellafield accident, most PATs have found it difficult to believe, given that in the last series of joint US-UK tests 26 nuclear devices were detonated over a period of six months in 1962 - or a rate of one a week on the southern end of a small Pacific island on which several thousand men lived, worked and ate fish from the lagoons). It is impossible for the UK government to deny that Maralinga was left in a highly contaminated state since it made a £20,000,000 grant to the Australian government to attempt to clean it up. If today we were to go back to Monte Bello, the site of the first British bomb in October 1952, we would only be allowed to stay on the island for a maximum of one hour - fifty years after the atomic explosion there.
Similarly, the epidemiological studies conducted by the National Radiological Protection Board under commission from the Ministry of Defence are routinely ruled to be irrelevant to individual men's applications since they only seek to estimate the chances of contracting cancer for the whole group rather than the clinical cause of a particular man's illness.
Surely now, fifty years after these men, many of them National Servicemen, were required to face known hazards for the sake of our national security, it is time for the government to honour its duty of care by developing a fair formula such as Admiral Torlese argued for from the outset. That formula should be based on a similar 'presumptive' principle as that of the United States so that the claims of men who served at the tests and who suffer known potentially radiogenic conditions can be processed quickly and sympathetically. The VA should make its decisions transparent, perhaps following the example of its Australian counterpart in posting decisions on an internet site.
The several hundred applications that have been denied over the past decades should be reviewed to see if they are in fact legitimate claims and the Government might even acknowledge our debt to our nuclear test veterans by striking a medal in their honour, as the New Zealand Government has recently done.
Sue Rabbitt Roff, Dundee University Medical School
Roff is a medical sociologist who regularly submits information supporting
pension applications by nuclear test veterans in the UK, Australia and
New Zealand.