Campaigners have accused Whitehall civil servants of blocking further revelations in the Mirror’s investigation of Cold War radiation experiments on troops
Bungling Whitehall officials have been accused of blocking the Mirror’s investigation of the Nuked Blood Scandal.
Campaigners fear that a ministerial review is being used as an excuse to prevent the release of further information about medical experiments conducted on troops without their knowledge.
Freedom of Information requests for documents on the health of troops sent into Ground Zero have been refused, on the grounds that officials cannot be sure if they definitely hold the information until after the review is complete. But there is no deadline for it to be finished, and the answers provided.
Alan Owen of campaign group LABRATS said: “They have said we cannot know what is in a document that has been hidden for 73 years, on the grounds that a government minister has yet to find it.
“But you could say that about everything we have uncovered. If they deliberately exposed troops to radiation, or if they’ve somehow ‘lost’ the evidence, the state has failed to keep its troops safe, and they’re blocking us from finding out the truth at the same time as warning they will want our sons for conscription.”
Veterans Minister Al Carns, who is leading the review announced after the blood testing allegations featured in a BBC documentary, is under pressure to provide answers, but has failed to tell Parliament when he will report back. He has said the task is “gargantuan” and is reportedly considering a mass declassification of files. Campaigners have welcomed the suggestion, in the hope it would enable them to search the records themselves.
Last year the government was forced to declassify thousands of top secret records, including evidence of human experiments at Hurricane. Documents showed 20 sailors were ordered into deadly fallout “with and without respirators”, and their urine, sweat, and decontamination monitored afterwards.
Hospital ship HMS Tracker was used as a “health control” ship for Britain’s first nuclear weapon, codenamed Operation Hurricane, in 1952. Troops had to pass through its medical checks before and after going into the blast zone. The Mirror has since discovered HMS Tracker officers produced a report containing “valuable observations” about the health of troops used in the experiments. It has never been published.
We asked the Ministry of Defence to provide the document under FOI legislation, but the Navy Command Secretariat said that the ongoing review made it impossible to know whether it had a copy or not, and it would be too expensive to search for it in the meantime.
“At this stage we do not know for certain what information is contained within the various records,” it said. “We cannot currently confirm for certain until all relevant documents have been reviewed as part of the discovery exercise.”
Nuke scandal: Lawyer Jason McCue speaks to veterans and families
Jason McCue, lawyer for the veterans, said: “The only information in the public domain about experiments done on our troops is there as a result of the Mirror’s investigation. The MoD always claimed it simply had not happened, until your FOIs proved the truth.
“The minister should immediately order them to find the document as part of his review, and undertake to publish it as soon as possible.”
A MoD source said there had been no attempt to unlawfully deny the Mirror’s FOI request, and the letter was “written badly”.
We uncovered the Nuked Blood Scandal in November 2022 with a top secret memo between atomic scientists discussing the “gross irregularity” found in blood tests of Group Captain Terry Gledhill. He had been ordered to lead ‘sniff planes’ through mushroom clouds of nuclear blasts in 1958 codenamed Operation Grapple.
It led to the discovery of repeated orders to test the blood of thousands of troops from all three armed forces, as well as Commonwealth troops, scientists, civilians and indigenous people, in Australia and the Pacific for more than a decade. Our investigation has also uncovered evidence that the true scale of the experiments has been withheld from ministers and Parliament, after we found hundreds of documents about the blood testing had not been revealed.
After questions in Parliament about why the results were not in veterans’ individual medical records, it has led to a fresh legal battle for compensation by veterans and families with costs estimated to top £5bn.
