nuclear-news

The men who stared at mushroom clouds .

In a beige function room at the Pontins holiday park, Weston-super-Mare, a
man in a Hawaiian shirt addresses the veterans of Britain’s little-known
nuclear testing programme. There are about 130 people in the room. More
than half are in their late eighties and participated in the programme.
Also here are their children and, in a few cases, their children’s
children. They’re wearing Hawaiian shirts too, a tapestry of tropical print
and palm trees embellished with plastic flower garlands, tinsel, wigs and
novelty hats. It’s the third day of the All Tests Reunion, a week-long
gathering for this rarefied demographic, and the group chats excitedly as
they await the evening’s entertainment. Tables are laden with bottles of
house wine and pints of bitter, walking sticks propped behind chairs. In
the corner of the room, four women who are due to perform shuffle about as they attach te riri ni mwaie around their waists — heavy straw-like
dancing skirts that are native to Kiribati, a Pacific island nation that
was among several locations the British chose for nuclear weapons tests
during the 1950s and ’60s.

Until tonight, the group has been discussing
rather serious matters. Such as whether the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was
aware of the risks when it stationed thousands of young servicemen in
places such as Kiritimati (or Christmas Island) and started detonating
atomic and hydrogen bombs in the vicinity; and why it continues to deny or
delay access to the medical records of those deployed there. One
particularly urgent question is whether exposure to blast after blast,
without protective shielding, may be the reason so many of the veterans and their descendants have suffered health problems. Many of these questions remain unanswered. Some may be unanswerable.

FT 1st Nov 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/1fca6893-7dfe-43e3-b7ec-c00e3d4ad0b6

November 6, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health