nuclear-news

Support building for justice for UK nuclear veterans

Britain’s nuclear test veterans are inching towards the recognition they deservehttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-nuclear-test-veterans-inching-2873338 They don’t want much. They want a thank you, they want to know their sick children will have care, they want medical research

The nuclear test survivors are the closest they have ever been to winning recognition.

In 10 years of covering their campaign I have never seen them nearer to finally getting the official salute they deserve.

They have 80 MPs, lawyers, and charity experts fighting to get them where they ought to be – front and centre in the national consciousness, just for a moment.

For 60 years Ministry of Defence bureaucrats have denied the obvious: that nuclear bombs could cause any harm to thousands of men stood below in nothing but cotton shorts.

They’ve never answered the question why, if it was so safe, they didn’t explode them over Surrey.

At test sites in Australia, America and the South Pacific men lived, slept, and ate for up to a year at a time in areas heavily contaminated by radiation.

We’d never do that now. We shouldn’t have done it then.

This is one story I find it hard to be objective about. You cannot help but hug a woman who tells you about six successive miscarriages, or weep for a daughter who tells you how she held her father’s hand as a rare kind of cancer ripped him from her .

I have met men whose health problems deserve their own hospital wing. One whose eyelashes are growing into his eyeballs, another with 200 different skin cancers, a third with pouches of fatty tissue the size of tennis balls all over his body.

There is no science that definitively proves they all came from one cause. Radiation causes random genetic changes, and is hard to pin down.

But anyone can see what happened to these men – and to their wives, children and grandchildren – was most likely the result of atomic tests.

And from speaking to them and fighting for them I can tell you they don’t want much. They want a thank you, they want to know their sick children will have care, they want medical research.

They need, and deserve, a salute from Her Majesty’s Government and the final order: to stand at ease.

December 2, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, weapons and war