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TechnoratiRadiation From 1960s Nuclear Tests Is Still Hurting My Family
The Government is to hold an inquiry that may finally lead to compensation for British servicemen exposed to radiation during nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s. But for one of them the wait is far from over
Even with the thick, almost opaque, goggles he had been given, Derek Allen could see the flash of the atomic bomb as it exploded 15 miles away. It was so bright that he saw all the bones in his hands as if he were holding up an X-ray. He was 21, a long way from home and terrified. Sitting in his khaki shirt and a pair of shorts, with his back to the blast, the young soldier hugged his knees close to his chest and braced himself for what he had been told would come next - the searing heat from the nuclear explosion.
![[The mushroom cloud from US nuclear test "Castle Bravo".]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/mushroomcloud.jpg "mushroomcloud.jpg")
"It felt like someone had opened an oven door behind you," he recalls. "It went right round your body and inside your guts. I had never been so frightened."
But it wasn't over yet. Next came the blast, so strong that it lifted Derek and shoved him to one side with the force of an invisible punch. Then he turned around and saw his first mushroom cloud, snaking thin and beautiful up into the atmosphere behind him. That was the first of 24 nuclear explosions to which Derek, now 68, was exposed in less than three months. It was April 1962 and he was taking part in atomic weapons tests, the medical effects of which would not become clear until years later.
After decades of campaigning by veterans, and shameful prevarication on behalf of successive governments, the nuclear test guinea pigs have made significant progress in recent months towards receiving the compensation and war pensions many argue they deserve. In January, the first leg of a test case began at the High Court in which 900 veterans and their widows are suing the Ministry of Defence for negligence. Then, last Tuesday, Defence Minister Kevan Jones announced in the House of Commons that the Government is launching an inquiry into possible links between the severe illnesses suffered by service personnel and their families and the tests they took part in.
Some 22,000 British service personnel witnessed such tests between 1953 and 1963 in Australia and on Christmas and Malden Islands in the Pacific. There were also around 330 British troops seconded by the Ministry of Defence to take part in American testing off Christmas Island in 1962. Derek was one of them. He welcomes the inquiry, although for him the news is bittersweet. "I'm really pleased for the British veterans and I hope it comes out in their favour," he says. "It's very good news but I'm not sure it will help me because I took part in American testing. We were involved in many more bombs than they were."
While hope may be on the horizon for British veterans who took part in Britain's tests, Derek has been left in limbo. He is not part of the current High Court action, and does not qualify for compensation from the US Government. He remains convinced, however, that what he experienced in the Sixties has had far-reaching consequences for himself and his family.
"As servicemen, we'd heard the word ‘radiation' but we didn't know what it really meant," says Derek, who lives in Sussex. "We were so naive. In the 24 hours after each explosion, some of the men felt sick. I didn't, but I remember being sick with apprehension each time they told us there was going to be another one."
Within a few years many of the men had developed cancers and the rate of miscarriages among their partners grew to alarming levels. Evidence is now growing of damage having been caused to their DNA, damage which may have resulted in gene mutations that caused illnesses and congenital deformities among their children.
In research conducted by the independent environmental consultants Green Audit in 2007, the rate of congenital deformities among nuclear test veterans' children was almost ten times higher than that of an average control group. Among veterans' partners, the rate of miscarriage was three times the average.
In 1965 Derek's first wife miscarried a baby boy. Then came relief with the birth a year later of Dawn, the first of three daughters. She seemed perfectly healthy for a while; then it became clear that she had difficulty walking. When she was 4, muscular dystrophy was diagnosed. This is usually an inherited disorder that causes a slow wasting away of the muscles, but there was no history of it in the family. Baffled doctors changed the diagnosis a number of times until, at 24, a series of MRI scans revealed that the insulating sheaths around Dawn's nerves were waterlogged. Doctors said that there was no formal name for her condition.
Today, at 42, her illness remains formally undiagnosed. We meet at her small flat on the South Coast. She is bedridden, paralysed on one side after a recent series of strokes, has difficulty speaking and is totally reliant on her husband Steve. She is obsessed with everything Disney and is wrapped in a Winnie the Pooh quilt. All around, to help her imagination to roam beyond the confines of her bedroom, are DVDs and videos.
"I can't help thinking that the radiation my dad was exposed to had something to do with it," she says. "I'm not angry but I do wish someone would admit that what happened to my dad was wrong, and stand up and say sorry."
So, could Dawn be right? Could exposure to radiation be passed on as deformities to one's children? The answer, according to research conducted into the children of those exposed to high doses of radiation at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl, is yes. But can Dawn's family prove it? The answer - a response that plagues all such possible victims - is no, not medically and certainly not as an individual.
According to Kit Hill, former Professor of Physics at the Institute of Cancer Research, there are so many environmental factors that surround us that it is virtually impossible to pin the cause of an illness on any single one of them (and we are all exposed to small doses of background radiation every day, from sources such as cosmic rays and luminous dials). "There are a number of conditions that run more strongly in some families than others," says Hill. "And in genetically-influenced conditions like that, the likelihood of them happening increases to some extent by a parent having been exposed to radiation. The difficulty is that, as far as I know, no one has ever established a one-to-one relationship between exposure to radiation and a pathological disease of any sort."
Hill says that with rare conditions such as Dawn's, the temptation is for a family to assume that some extreme cause, such as her father's experience, was to blame. But proving it medically would be impossible and attempts to pin down the cause statistically would equally be stymied by the fact that her condition is so rare. It is only when large numbers are involved that assumptions can be made. Which is why the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA) commissioned Green Audit to canvass its members and find out about the health of their children. The researchers, led by Chris Busby, visiting professor at the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences at the University of Ulster, gathered information on just over 600 children and 749 grandchildren of veterans and, for comparison, 718 children of non-veterans. The results were nothing short of terrifying. When expressed as cases per thousand, the children of veterans rated 94.2 for congenital defects such as vital organs not being formed properly and hands having extra thumbs, compared with 9.6 in the non-veterans' group. Among grandchildren the figure was 61.4 compared with 7.4 per thousand.
One veteran suffered sunburn and diarrhoea after a test explosion. His child suffered "growth problems from the age of 5. Skeletal and skull slow growth giving brain damage symptoms". Another man reported bleeding gums, deafness and a flu-like illness after a test. His child has Down's Syndrome. There are children with spina bifida, a girl with no ovaries, one with an extra pocket in a bladder, hip defects, heart murmurs, blindness and deafness, all at rates that appear to be well above the national average.
The Green Audit report concludes: "What we seem to see here is a similar effect to that which has been reported in the Chernobyl-affected territories, namely the transgenerational induction of genomic instability, a process where a signal is passed down to the offspring which causes increases in random genetic mutation." Asked to explain this, Busby says: "It is as if the genes in the group, exposed to extreme exceptional circumstances, are throwing up random mutations in the hope that one of them might help the group to survive."
I ask him if Dawn's symptoms may have been such a random mutation. He asks about her father's exposure and, when I tell him about the 24 tests, he says: "My God, that man must have been exposed to so much radiation. If you're asking me whether there is a case for arguing that [Dawn's] condition could have been caused by her father's exposure, I would have to say yes."
Other pieces of research, most notably by Dr Al Rowland of Massey University in New Zealand (its forces were also exposed to tests), have indicated that genetic damage to DNA has resulted in deformities in children.
In the US, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in 1990, sanctioning payments of $75,000 for exposed veterans, but ex-servicemen may make a claim only if they have one or more of 21 accepted cancers. In 2006 Roy Prescott, who had lung cancer, became the first British soldier to receive payment from the US Government. He died two months later. Derek has had many health problems, including two heart attacks, panic attacks and lumps on his hands and arms, but he has no cancers. In that respect, he is lucky. But as things stand, his claim against the Americans would fail and no one is helping him to claim against the British Government.
In 2007, he was advised by solicitors acting for the BNTVA that his claim fell outside the remit of their group litigation. This is significant because when the High Court litigation reaches its conclusion, secondary action will take place on behalf of the children of the veterans, and that will exclude children such as Dawn because her father took part in the American tests.
"I feel as if those of us who took part in the American tests have been left behind by our comrades," says Derek. He resigned from the BNTVA after he had to drop his claim. Douglas Hern, the association's litigation secretary, says: "Apart from Mr Allen, we have only ever heard from one other of this group [British personnel who took part in American tests], a man living in America who we have lost touch with. I sympathise with Mr Allen, but long ago we were told to concentrate on trying to help British veterans affected by British bombs in British tests."
Two years ago, two MPs, Ian Gibson, of the Labour Party, and the Conservative John Baron, set up an informal inquiry in the House of Commons. It concluded that the new evidence did indicate a link between the exposure to radiation and the illnesses among veterans' children.
"These men have been treated extremely shabbily," says Gibson. "Successive governments have been dodging their responsibilities while families have been suffering. The MoD's denial of a link between nuclear tests and ill health looks increasingly shaky now that children and grandchildren of veterans are experiencing congenital disease and early death." Gibson and Baron's efforts led to last week's announcement of Government-backed research.
Only a small number of people have seen the mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion close up. Most of them are dead. Those who survive endure not only their own awful ailments but must, in many cases, wince and weep while their children and now grandchildren suffer before their eyes. As Derek Allen says: "When we realised that we had been put in harm's way by our country, that was bad enough. But we never dreamt our country would turn its back and forget all about us."
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Show AllThere Must Be No Day, Part Two
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The final shot of the series found us eighteen miles from ground zero. The heat was incredible; though this was a much smaller bomb, possibly a tactical warhead. The shockwave jolted the whole ship backwards several inches. It felt as though my whole body was struck by a sledge hammer. The sound was one sharp crack, as though a rifle or firecracker was fired off next to my ear.
After a few days spent dismantling the establishment on Nan Island, Bikini Atoll, we steamed for home.
In later years, I had nightmares of the bombs going off, where I would be standing, crying, realizing that some SOB had finally pushed the button and it was the end of all things. I would wake up covered with sweat, pulse racing and face wet with tears. Gradually, that dream receded, until I saw the rockets blasting out of their silos in The Day After. I was sitting with my arm around my son's shoulder. Suddenly, I began to shake and my eyes filled with tears. Each time another took off, it got worse. I knew what was going to happen, I had been there!
Since the program, it has been continually on my mind. Watching that reptilian Buckley, "Megadeath" Scowcroft and Kissinger sit there, speaking in Orwellian doublethink, explaining that more is less and death is peacekeeping, made me wonder how long these aging, frustrated cowboys are going to be allowed to determine how much youth and innocence is to die for this "ism" or that one, Weisel, Sagan, even McNamara, made sense. This is one fragile green and blue planet.
Buckley and company brought to mind the lectures we got from some Bircher neighbors, when taking our children trick-or-treating. We shouldn't trick-or-treat for UNICEF because UNICEF gave milk to "commie babies!"
There are no "commie babies" or "free world babies." There are just babies and children and youths and adults, all with their hopes and dreams. The man in the street in Moscow, London, Paris or Athens is no different from the one in New York or in Mill Valley. We are all frightened and we all simply wish to be left in peace. The Russian and the European may want it more, because they have been overrun by war at least twice this century. They know what war on the home front means, something no American has suffered on the mainland since the civil war.
Every man, woman and child on this planet must let his government and political leaders know that nuclear terror must cease. It is no longer a viable option, if it ever was. The odds of a mistake are far too great and there is no way to retrieve the error, once an attack/counter-attack has been launched.
By virtue of our alleged intelligence, we have assumed stewardship of this planet and all of the creatures upon it. We have shown great callousness and ignorance in the exploitation of earth's natural resources, the casual dumping of toxic wastes and the wholesale slaughter of entire species. With wisdom and patience, some of these blunders can be retrieved, but with the development of nuclear technology, we have met our destroyer, one way or the other, if we do not call a halt to it. We cannot dispose of spent fuel and refining waste in a safe manner. The cancer and birth deformation rate has risen enormously since we began using it, there is no defense against nuclear attack or terrorism and there have been few signs of sanity or good judgement among those entrusted to do our thinking for us. Papers discussing an acceptable number of megadeaths in a nuclear exchange are not of strategic value, they are obscene, a visible manifestation of insanity and immorality.
Mankind has always had a tendency for its technology to outstrip its moral growth, It is time we begin to slow down the technical race and begin to think, not of what is expedient, or will show the greatest short-term profit, but what will benefit the planet and ourselves in the long run. What kind of agriculture will leave the land fertile and productive for a thousand years and more? What processes can be used that will leave only biodegradable wastes? Does society's existence depend on an endless flow of gadgets and novelties, designed to fall apart almost immediately? Must everything be designed to wear out in two or three years? Is it possible to recycle our mineral resources rather than continually mining more and allowing worn out products to decay, or simply rust in storage? Can't we produce crops and see that they are distributed, rather than stored to rot? Why don't we make a major effort to harness and use wind and solar energy for power and make a greater effort to reduce energy needs?
Let us pledge to make a start by informing all world leaders that nuclear war is out. The people of this planet will take no more of fear and terror!
Then, with this as a starting point, let us, as stewards of a fragile .planet, begin the process of healing and growing, individually and as a species, to the point where all of this will seem an horrible, impossible nightmare. A lesson to be forever remembered, but never repeated. It is up to us.
-30-
1840 words
Note: Read on the floor of the House of Representatives by Barbara Boxer on Hiroshima Day 1984
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So, as you can see, this has been going on for far too long.
This was written after the showing of the made for television film "The Day After." Perhaps you'll find it of interest as it is first hand. I'll have to do this as a two parter.
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THERE MUST BE NO "DAY"
by
Stephen M. Osborn
Where does one begin, in responding to The Day After? For me, it can have many beginnings. I remember, as a seven or eight year old boy, looking with awe at the Bikini battered ships at the Bremerton Navy Yard. Then, I grew up in the cold war rhetoric of the late- forties and fifties.
In 1956, as a young navy man, I was at the thermonuclear tests at Bikini, code named Operation Redwing. The first bomb exploded was, we were told, a twenty megaton plus thermonuclear device, to be detonated at an altitude of twenty thousand feet. Our observation point was to be aboard ship at a distance of thirty miles from ground zero. That is a long way; about, as far as the doctor was from Kansas City when the first bomb went off in the movie [The Day After, 1983, TV]. It is not far enough.
Most of the crew was ranged on deck, wearing blast goggles and facing aft, away from the blast. I was not on deck as there were not enough goggles to go around. Instead, I picked a spot in a passageway, about thirty feet forward of a light well. Any light coming in would have to come from the direction away from the blast, down about a twenty foot well, then penetrate the passageway. I had my back to the well. During the final countdown, I wrapped both arms across my eyes, one over the other. I could hear the voice on the ship's intercom; 5...4...3...2...1...ZERO.
Suddenly, I could see light, right through my arms! The heat was intense, as though I had my back to an opened furnace door. The silence was deafening. After what seemed like minutes, but was probably a few seconds, the light began to fade. As it grew dark, I eased one arm away from the other and the light was back, but again fading. When it was gone, I moved my other arm. The light through my clenched eyelids was painful, but it continued to fade and I gradually opened my eyes and began backing toward the light well. As the light continued to decrease, it finally got to the point where I could squint up the light well at the sky. The light was brilliant, the sky an intense blue. I climbed out of the well and peeked forward around the shelter of the conning tower, directly at the cloud and the, now fading, fireball.
My first impression was of a weird beauty. The cloud was sharply defined, like a thunderhead, and had a fluorescent; amethyst colored glow, which tinged toward a dark red. It is impossible to communicate the scale of the cloud. We were thirty miles away, yet the feeling was similar to when one stands beneath a huge redwood, watching the trunk taper away above you, to be surmounted by a crown of spreading branches far overhead. At thirty miles, it was as though we were right at the base of the cloud looking up, rather than out, at it.
We stood there in silence, looking at the cloud and quietly commenting on the colors. On the right side, close to the cloud, we could see two bright, stationary lights. They were visible for a short while, then they faded.
Over two minutes had passed, then the voice on the intercom began the countdown for the shock wave. 5...4...3...2...1...Zero. The pressure wave at that distance was not violent; there was an increase of about one atmosphere, enough to make your ears pop; the sound was a long low rumble lasting about thirty seconds.
The sun began to rise, lighting the outside of the cloud and overpowering the internal glow. The cloud was identifiable for much of the day, with the. top being slowly torn to rags by the jet stream.
We steamed back to the atoll, rather sobered by the experience. We were quite curious about the mysterious lights we saw beside the cloud. About a week or so after the shot, I was speaking to one of the scientists that had been aboard. He said they also had been puzzled by the appearance of the lights. They finally concluded that what we saw were two bright stars, essentially as we would have seen them from outer space. Apparently, the heat of the explosion was so great that it literally burned away the atmosphere around the fireball. As soon as the temperature dropped sufficiently, the air collapsed back around the envelope, the starlight was attenuated and they disappeared.
We spent, if memory serves, about six months at Bikini. Every so often, we would steam out. for a shot. Frequently, we would go out, muster on deck in the pre-dawn, the countdown would proceed, then, "The shot for today has been canceled," and we would steam back to the anchorage to try again the next morning. This might go on for ten days or more before they would finally set it off.
Once, the wind shifted after a shot and we were battened below in the stifling heat while the ship tried to run from under the fallout. Personnel that had to go topside were decontaminated and their clothes were taken for disposal. After a couple of days, we headed for Kwajalein, some four hundred miles away, until it was "safe" to return to the atoll.
Following one, either underwater or surface burst, the cleanup crews told of fish falling out of the coconut palms. The swimming float that had been anchored with huge concrete blocks in the lagoon was found floating at sea. Two of the blocks were found in the middle of the island.
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End of Part One.
Welcome to the wonderful world of ionizing radiation. If you haven't heard about it, your head's been in the sand for--oh--about eighty years. I won't give you a pass on that, but unless you've studied genetics at a college level, it's a little easier to let you by without knowing what the effects of said radiation can have on an individual's DNA, and that of an individual's progeny.
TMI...DU...spent nuclear fuel: the people who don't understand what they can do to DNA are still making the laws via the ballot box, and the people who profit from their existence still befuddle the issue with obfuscation, twisted statistics, and run-of-the-mill economic FUD.
How do we-in-the-know make the dangers palatable and understandable by the layman registered voter? It's a question with which I struggle, but as a teacher I try to do my best. Simple terms, analogies...that's how I get my message across. It seems to work, but I am but one man in this effort: this effort...my struggle. Mein Kampf?
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If you don't ask yourself why, you know nothing.
Astonishing how close this torture is to the torture of the Bush/Cheney
administration and how little we are doing about either.
"According to all myth, the female - not the male -- gives life"
By the way, the Castle-Bravo blast at Bikini in 1954 (pictured above) was a fifteen megaton surface blast. It blew a hole over a mile wide and four hundred feet deep in the atoll, completely obliterating the island and vaporizing over thirteen billion cubic feet of coral, rock and water, sending it in a radioactive cloud extending into the stratosphere. The fallout over the atolls downwind was devastating to the people and ecology there. All of that material is rendered extremely radioactive and as it cools it condenses to fall as rain or radioactive “snow” which contaminates everything it touches. The effects are felt worldwide.
As a nuclear veteran myself, (Operation Redwing, Bikini Atoll, 1956) Derek's story is giving me flashbacks even as I write. As to curmudgeon99's comment, yes indeed.
Until fairly recently, there was an atomic veteran's site that had the stories and contacts of thousands of atomic veterans. It just disappeared without trace, so a huge amount of information has been erased. (I don't know why. I've tried to reach the webmaster, but no answer.) As he is an atomic vet, also, I fear the worst.
There is a book by Carole Gallagher titled "American Ground Zero/The Secret Nuclear War," which documents the government's treatment of our own test victims from the Nevada tests. She is, or was, a photographer, who became a photo journalist. She captures the memories and stories of the American victims of our testing, written off by the government as "a low use segment of the population." They were written off as expendable in the name of National Security. You definitely should read the book as it has a lot of information about our policies and our actions in this particular field. Here is the information:
American Ground Zero
The Secret Nuclear War
© Carole Gallagher 1995
MIT Press
Cambridge Mass.
ISBN: 0-262-07148-0
The Marshallese and the Rongalapese are still sick and dying from our testing in the Marshal Islands. They've been double dealt by the government many times. It seems to be a never-ending story for our people and anybody else on the planet that our nuclear madness has damaged.
Here is a site concerning all the "Downwinders" which is most of the people of the world, now. http://www.downwinders.org/
Check out Norman Solomon's book "Killing Our Own" on the same topic.
It came out in the mid- 1980's.
Aren’t recent scientific studies saying that all US cities were exposed to radiation during years of American atomic testing? Basically that radiation was carried in the dust across the entire country, exposing all citizens?
Sioux Rose
Here we see two trends of significance: first, that the burden of proof is based too much on past linear cause and effect prototypes. What happens is that all the other environmental factors "that could act as causative agents" essentially immunize the chief culprit--which is nuclear radiation exposure.
Between the data collected from exposures around Chernobyl to those left from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there is a strong body of evidence in support of the FACT that these insidiously toxic explosions cause HARM. Those exposed have varied levels of biological resistance and that's why they, and their heirs, show a variety of symptoms. This causes problems to the aforementioned linear model.
The other point is the cowardice of the military when it comes to the slightest compensation for innumerable harms done, a chain of events that continues to this day in the form of DU and white phosphorus and whatever other diabolical chemical killers are being developed. Militarism is the disease, the devices it explodes project deadly contents far and wide with ultimately and inevitably tragic results.
Note that a similar problem as per the "burden of proof" showed up regarding those exposed to the horrific use of Agent Orange on Vietnam jungles and their seeking damages from the US military/government.
Recall how difficult it was to establish the link (that any sensible person knew to exist) between cigarette smoking and lung cancer?
YOHOCOMA: If you should read this, perhaps you will appreciate how difficult it is to establish ultimately "proof" of a great many things... a lesson Hamlet sought to educate his confidante Horatio to.
But I could be wrong - but....
The same article could be written about any one of a large number of US military personnel and citizens of remote areas of Nevada and Utah exposed to the open-air tests conducted in or near the present Area 51 in central Nevada.
As a youngster, I used to get up early and watch for the glow to erupt on the horizon to the SE.
The only story that ever came out was pooh-poohed at the time - the untimely cancer-related deaths of Susan Hayward, John Wayne and others who were exposed while they made a film about Genghis Khan in St George, Utah area - downwind from 2 tests conducted while they were filming.
I have met several survivors of Military personnel who took part in other a-tests and died of rare cancers at early ages.
The US literally made atomic war against its own military and citizenry in its race for world control.
I second minitrue's recommendation of Carole Gallagher's book. IT is out of print now but can probably be found in a used book store. It was originally available in both paperback and hardback. I am tempted to add details of some of the effects of the tests but get the book, Carole does it so much better than I can.
The only tracking of radiation was tracking Iodine 131 content in milk. Radiologists have told me that as the fallout clouds passed over the country they left a trail of exposed X-ray films.
With all of the talk about dirty bombs, there is no way any terrorist can make a dirty bomb in anyway comparable to the tests we inflicted on ourselves.
Statistics is a field of study very few people understand, so it is easy for politicians to pass it off as fraud. Those of us in the know realize that statistical numbers an be manipulated to say/prove anything, but the science of it is used to make our modern technology work consistently and properly. All statistical studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prove the harmful effects of nuclear bomb radiation, yet many politicians fail to understand the truth.
Statistics should be taught in High School, with the emphasis on critical understanding of how they are set up and how to interpret them. Few have to do the number crunching by hand anymore.
Joe