Campaigning giants Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram have vowed to win recognition for Britain’s nuclear test veterans, telling them: “You were victims of a crime.”
The two metro mayors likened 70 years of official denials about the Cold War radiation experiments to Hillsborough, forced adoptions and the contaminated blood scandal.
Around 22,000 men served at 45 bomb tests and more than 600 radiation experiments in Australia, America and the South Pacific between 1952 and 1991. Many have died from cancers and suffered rare blood disorders. Their 155,000 descendants show 10 times the usual rate of birth defects, which the government refuses to investigate.
After meeting survivors, Mr Burnham said: “It feels like you were victims of a crime, and that has been passed down through your families.”
Mr Rotheram added: “The pattern of these scandals is the always the same. They deflect the truth, they make it about money, they deny, suppress, cover up, and blame.”
John Morris told them: “I don’t want their money, I just want the damned truth.”
In 1957, aged 20, he was among troops exposed on a beach when the 1.8 megaton Grapple X bomb was exploded 20 miles away. “I wore a shirt, shorts, and sunglasses. The flash was white, the heat like a blowtorch on your back, then we were knocked off our feet,” said John, 84, from Rochdale.
“There were 2,000 men running around, terrified. We couldn’t get in our wagons to get away because the tires had melted. If I told you to stand 20 miles away from the Sun, would you do it?”
After his return home, John was diagnosed with a radiation-related blood disorder. His first-born Steven died in 1962, aged four months, in an unexplained cot death. Daughter Liz Bacon said: “We’re made to feel unreasonable just for questioning it. He didn’t even get the autopsy report until 2018.”
Ex-railway manager Archie Hart, 84, of Warrington, told how he was an 18-year-old stoker on HMS Diana in 1956 when the ship was twice ordered to spend 8 hours in the fallout of atomic bombs in a human experiment designed to test the effect on ship and crew. Archie, wearing just a cotton hood for protection, was on deck throughout, and within two years began developing benign tumours.
“There’s 100 all over my body, some the size of tennis balls,” he told the mayors. “I can’t do the dance of the seven veils anymore, because my body’s an unsightly mess. What they did to us was morally wrong, and their cavalier attitude in the years since is causing problems to this day for the generations that follow.”
Both men have survived cancer, but told the mayors: “We were the lucky ones.”
Alan Owen, whose Royal Navy dad Jesse died aged 52 after witnessing 24 US bomb tests in 78 days in 1962, said: “The Americans compensated my family, but our own governments delay, deny, until we die.”
Mr Burnham said: “These are the tactics of the British state: to deflect onto the victims, use a lack of progress to grind people down, and create mental torture so people cannot fight injustice.”
Both mayors supported the idea of a medal for its “totemic significance” to veterans, whose average age is now 85, and promised to support an nuclear tests education programme to be rolled out across their regions’ schools, with veterans meeting children to discuss their personal legacy.
And they demanded Prime Minister Boris Johnson look veterans in the eye at a personal meeting. “We’re used to broken promises, but this transcends the party political Punch and Judy,” said Mr Rotheram.
Mr Burnham added: “He needs to show them the respect they deserve.”
Archie Hart, stoker, HMS Diana
Archie Hart was an 18-year-old sailor on National Service when he was used in Operation Mosaic, a human radiation experiment.
Destroyer HMS Diana spent a total of 16 hours chasing the mushroom clouds detonated off the coast of Australia in 1956. One bomb had a yield the same as that which flattened Hiroshima in 1945; the other was seven times as powerful.
Captain John Gower later wrote that the aim was “to deliberately contaminate our ship and to continue to serve in a ship, parts of which had been unacceptably radioactive”. He said that after the tests the onboard evaporators, which made the crew’s drinking water, were “hot”.
Most of Diana’s crew of 280 men have since died, many from cancer. Fewer than a dozen are believed to still be alive.
John Morris, private, Royal Army Ordnance Corps
John Morris witnessed four nuclear explosions in 1957 at Christmas Island in the South Pacific.
A private in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, he was among 3,000 troops ordered to prepare it for H-bomb tests. Aged 20, he was ordered to stand on a beach and watch the explosion of Operation Grapple X, a 1.8 megaton blast, just 20 miles away.
He was diagnosed with pernicious anaemia at 26, a condition caused by the bone marrow’s failure to produce red blood cells, and linked to gamma radiation exposure. In 1962 he and wife Betty lost their first son Steven at just four months old, and the couple were wrongly arrested for his murder.
A post mortem concluded Steven had died from bronchopneumonia - a condition he showed no symptoms of.
His heart and lungs were covered in microscopic haemorrhages.
The couple had a further three children, one with fertility problems.
