Fleet Street Fox on the scandal that just won’t die
One day in 2006 my phone rang with someone who needed help to understand just what the hell was wrong with the world.
Craig Prescott told me about his dad Roy, who had been ordered to take part in nuclear weapons testing, and had died without a war pension because the Ministry of Defence had refused to admit liability. He was just 66. Roy had passed away without justice. Three months later Craig spoke for his dad at an appeal hearing, and finally won a widow’s pension for his mum. But the real issue was that these were British troops used at American tests; and the Americans always paid out, but the British never did.
A few years prior to this I had been a defence reporter on a local paper in Plymouth, and knew damned well not only how the MoD worked but had a decent knowledge of nuclear risks, too. Craig’s determination to fight in his dad’s name was both impressive, and infectious.
The Mirror had campaigned for the veterans since 1984, when campaigning investigative reporter Paul Foot first raised the alarm about a growing number of old soldiers reporting cancers and birth defects in their children. The late, great Richard Stott – the only man to edit two national newspapers twice – was our main columnist by the time I pitched up in the Mirror newsroom, and still determined to thunder in the veterans’ defence. A couple of weeks after Roy’s story appeared, veterans began ringing up asking for “the veterans’ reporter”, and somewhere a pebble moved.
Roy had been one of 500 Royal Engineers at the tail end of the Cold War weapon trials. There were 40,000 more, from Britain and the Commonwealth, whose service covered all three armed forces and more than a decade of nuclear blasts. Officers and lower ranks alike, they told the same story – aggressive and unusual cancers, high rates of miscarriage, and problems with their children. A year after Craig rang me up, research from New Zealand showed test veterans had the same rate of genetic damage as clean-up workers at Chernobyl.
More rocks began rolling. A High Court case began, and I sat through weeks of hearings while MoD lawyers tore the ageing veterans’ recollections apart in the witness box and the veterans’ legal team repeatedly appealed to the judge to order national security be lifted so they could see documents hidden behind it. Gordon Brown’s wife was related to a test veteran, but his government waited for the outcome of the trial. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which – having never heard any evidence about radiation – decided the claim was out of time.
The devastation and bitterness of veterans, widows and descendants was hard to witness. But they ploughed on: new research into birth defects, new documents uncovered in the National Archives, and in 2018 they began a fight for a medal. The Mirror rowed in behind their campaign and after four years, and many revelations about a MoD stitch-up of the whole process, I got another call, this time from Downing Street: Rishi Sunak would announce the medal, in-person, at a memorial event that day.
It was just a cheap bit of metal, but it meant the world – it meant being seen, and honoured, two things these men had never fully experienced before. Today 4,000 veterans worldwide wear one on their chests, and another 1,000 or so have been claimed by families, carefully displayed in a frame or on a mantelpiece, with a picture of the man who never got to wear it.
But it was done with the maximum disdain. To some veterans, but not all. A commemorative gong, not a service medal with their number engraved on it. And delivered in a Jiffy bag, like a cheap bit of tat off eBay. The veterans were disgusted, and rightly so. In private, ministers past and present have told me they felt the same.
The medal campaign had stirred new life into the veteran community. One day, a daughter going through her father’s old papers sent me something she thought may be of interest. I sat bolt upright and stared agog at my screen: a 1958 memo between atomic scientists about the “gross irregularity” in the blood tests of a pilot who had led a squadron of planes through the mushroom clouds. Here, finally, was the evidence of what the veterans had always claimed. A human experiment.
I traced the papers back to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, and after many Freedom of Information requests found it was stored with thousands of others on a top secret database locked on the grounds of national security. After Parliamentary pressure, 150 of them were declassified, and showed shocking evidence: blood test data, orders, analysis, and the redacted names of thousands of troops called up to take part.
Today that first pebble has become a huge, growing earthquake: the Nuked Blood Scandal. It has led to a ministerial inquiry, a major crime review by Thames Valley Police, a fresh lawsuit backed by a crowdfunder, and the release of 750,000 pages of evidence from the AWE. It is, so far as anyone can tell me, the biggest release of nuclear secrets in British history, and within it will be yet more proof of what happened to the veterans.
The campaign continues, but this is my final column for the Mirror, so I would like to thank all those who have read this far, and everyone on the online desk, pictures and social media team who have helped produce them for the past 13 years.
