How Britain Poisoned Its Own Soldiers

In 1952, Britain was nearly bankrupt. Its great imperial possession India had declared independence, and other parts of the empire were being slowly dismantled. Yet the country still had pretensions to great-power status. It was, after all, still the third-largest economy in the world. “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it,” British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin declared in 1947. The “thing” in question was the atomic bomb.

Possession of nuclear weapons—and especially the more powerful hydrogen bomb, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described in 1953 as “as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow”—was one way for Britain to keep its place at the top table.

Possession of nuclear weapons—and especially the more powerful hydrogen bomb, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described in 1953 as “as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow”—was one way for Britain to keep its place at the top table.

Yet time was running out. The United States had stopped sharing its nuclear technology with its allies in 1946. Moreover, a moratorium between the United States and Russia to end atmospheric testing would take effect in October 1958. Thus, in order to become the world’s third nuclear power, Britain would have to go it alone—regardless of the cost in pounds or lives.

Britain exploded its first atomic bomb off the Australian coast in October 1952 and began testing in the outback in 1953. Between 1952 and 1967 more than 39,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen and scientists witnessed the detonation of 45 atomic and hydrogen bombs and hundreds of radioactive experiments in Australia and the South Pacific. A new BBC documentary, Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story, demonstrates beyond question that Britain’s Defence Ministry was willing to sacrifice safety for speed in its race to acquire apocalyptic weapons.

The British establishment could hardly plead ignorance about the dangers it was exposing people to. In 1946, the American geneticist Hermann J. Muller had won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for proving that there was no safe level of radiation. In 1955, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was even shown a report that warned that exposure to radiation would damage servicemen’s DNA. “It’s a pity, but we can’t help it,” came his reply.

The British hoped that acquiring the bomb would secure U.S. nuclear cooperation again. Conversely, Britain didn’t want to be seen as overly dependent on the Americans. As then-Prime Minister Clement Attlee told Bevin in 1946: “We ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them; for we can … and, if necessary, will do so.”

British nuclear tests took place in the Montebello Islands and two separate locations in South Australia. For young men growing up in austere postwar Britain, a tropical paradise seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Many would go as part of their compulsory national service (a form of peacetime conscription for able-bodied men aged 17 to 21 that ended in 1960). They were told very little about the mission, though a senior British Army officer informed one ship of Royal Engineers that they were “about to experience something no one else in the world will ever see.”

In the documentary, we hear stories from servicemen who watched from a beach less than 10 miles from ground zero as the Defence Ministry rehearsed for the end of the world. Often wearing no more than shorts, T-shirts, and sandals, the men’s only instructions were to look away during the initial flash. Some covered their eyes and saw the bones and blood vessels in their hands. It wasn’t unusual for them to wet themselves. Afterward, still stunned by what they had seen, the servicemen were sent to scour the beaches for bird carcasses and irradiated debris.

Other servicemen were ordered to fly or sail through giant mushroom clouds. The HMS Diana and its 300 crewmen were required to steam through the fallout from two nuclear explosions. The ship’s captain, John Gower, a hero of the Arctic Convoys that supplied Russia during World War II, subsequently wrote a seven-page account of the mission in which he claimed that “the Chiefs of Staff had wanted to know what effect an atomic explosion would have on ships, their contents, equipment and men” (emphasis mine).

John Folkes was 19 when he was sent from sleepy Kent to the tropical atolls of Maralinga in South Australia. Soon after he went ashore, he was ordered to fly through the radioactive aftermath of four atomic explosions. “You could see the evil in it. It was like looking at the devil,” he recalls in the documentary of his close encounter with the boiling red mushroom cloud.

Britain’s largest H-bomb test was carried out 1.5 miles off the coast of Christmas Island in April 1958. Grapple Y, as the bomb was known, had a yield of 3 megatons, 112 times greater than the bomb the Americans dropped at Nagasaki. Yet it would become known among servicemen as “the bomb that went wrong.” The test was carried out during the wet season, and the bomb exploded too near to the ground. Afterward, a radioactive “black rain” fell on ships, servicemen, and Indigenous people, some of whom had been forcibly relocated by the Defence Ministry.

There is a biblical horror to some of the accounts in Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal, suffering rendered down the generations. Royal Air Force cook Brian Unthank witnessed the detonation of two hydrogen bombs with a combined yield equivalent to 320 Hiroshima bombs. A few months after he returned to the United Kingdom, blood began gushing from his mouth. Then he lost all his teeth. He has since had 93 skin cancers removed. His first wife suffered 13 late-term miscarriages. Of his six surviving children, four have birth defects. A daughter was born with two wombs, a son with two holes in his heart, another with his eyes locked in opposite directions. A fourth child has skeletal and stomach problems. A grandson was born with a malignant melanoma on his forehead. Unthank’s official medical records are missing 20 years of annual medical checks covering that period of ill health.

In the documentary, we hear similar stories of physical collapse from veterans and Indigenous people. Now 89, Folkes has prostate cancer and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. His hands have shaken ever since the ordeal of flying into a radioactive mushroom cloud. His blood was tested for radiation while he was serving, but he was never given the results. Like many other veterans, his medical file from that period of his life has inexplicably gone missing.

University of Sydney researchers have since found that the Tjarutja Aboriginal people affected by the tests in Maralinga reported sickness, high rates of miscarriage, and birth defects. Any hopes the Tjarutja might have had of returning to their land when the Maralinga testing site was closed in 1967 were short-lived: When they scuttled out, the British left behind enough plutonium to kill everyone on the planet. (Following several botched cleanup operations, in December 1993 Britain finally agreed to pay 20 million pounds ex gratia toward the cost of decontaminating Maralinga, estimated at 101 million Australian dollars.)

Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal reveals how radioactive fallout from the tests blanketed the small town of Woomera in southern Australia, the location of a military base 373 miles from the test sites. In the town’s cemetery, more than half of the plots from the 1950s and 1960s are filled with stillborn children, hours-old babies, and toddlers. Autopsies were not always carried out, and the medical records of many of the babies remain sealed inside Australia’s National Archives.

Much of the damning evidence presented in the documentary has been doggedly uncovered over 20 years by Daily Mirror investigative journalist Susie Boniface. Through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, Boniface has unearthed 4,000 pages of top-secret documents about the medical examinations carried out on British troops, uncovering evidence of blood tests that Defence Ministry officials and ministers denied had ever taken place. She believes that service personnel were “knowingly and deliberately exposed” to high levels of radiation.

Skin cancers, tumors, heart disease, leukemia, stillbirths, and generational birth defects are among the medical disorders suffered by many of the veterans and their children. A 1988 study commissioned by Margaret Thatcher’s government found elevated rates of leukemia and liver, bladder, and prostate cancer. A 2022 analysis of test participants who were followed between 1952 and 2017 found heightened mortality for leukaemia, stomach cancer, cancers of the respiratory system, prostate cancer and bladder cancer. In 2007, researchers found that nuclear test veterans from New Zealand had a similar rate of DNA damage to that of workers sent in to clean up after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The Defence Ministry refused to comment on the 2007 study initially and later tried to cast doubt on it. Another survey that same year discovered that the children of veterans reported 10 times the normal number of congenital birth defects. Again, the ministry tried to argue that the research was flawed.

In 2002, the Sunday Mirror traced 350 veteran families who in 1984 had reported birth defects and other health problems in their children. Contacting the families 18 years later, they discovered that nearly half had health issues with their grandchildren, including spina bifida, bone problems, and various physical deformities.

Yet Britain finds itself in the ignominious company of North Korea as the only other known nuclear power known not to have paid at least some compensation to its test veterans. (Israel may also have tested a nuclear bomb in 1979, with South African aid.) Eighteen successive governments have denied that any harm was done to veterans by nuclear tests.

Most servicemen are not even eligible for war pensions: To apply, they must provide evidence of being irradiated. However, such records were rarely kept, making it nearly impossible for veterans to prove that their illnesses were indisputably caused by radiation. Instead, the Defence Ministry has spent millions of pounds fighting the nuclear veterans in the courts. I have heard one veteran describe the ministry’s approach as “delay and deny until we die.” Unethical though it may be, it seems to be working: Less than 10 percent of the men who took part in Britain’s nuclear tests in the South Pacific are still alive.

One must hope this powerful and deeply moving documentary will produce a change of heart. It makes a compelling case that thousands of servicemen and Indigenous people were knowingly irradiated by the British government in its reckless dash to acquire the bomb. Most of those affected may well be dead. However, such are the mutagenic effects of radiation that it’s entirely possible some victims of Britain’s Cold War nuclear program have yet to be born. They deserve our consideration, too.