Radiation compensation
July 27, 2011
This week the UK supreme court will decide whether the veterans of British nuclear tests on a Pacific island in the 1950s and 1960s will be allowed to go ahead with their claim, which could cost the government more than 30 million euros in compensation.
Seventy-two year old Brian Leake is one of those who served on Christmas Island in the late 1950s. The pensioner from the town of Burntwood near Birmingham in the English midlands arrived on the island in 1958.
"I looked out of the window [of the plane] and there was a huge tent. It had a poster across it which said 'Christmas Island Airways'. And nobody was wearing anything other than a pair of shorts and a pair of sandals," Mr Leake recalls.
"Close your eyes"
When he arrived as an 18-year-old, Christmas Island served as one of the UK's bases for nuclear tests. During his year's service there Leake witnessed four nuclear bomb tests - three mid-air explosions and one on the island itself. All were considerably larger than the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He can still vividly recall the drill he and his fellow servicemen went through for each of the explosions- "They said: 'Turn and face away from ground zero. Raise the collar of your shirt, roll down your sleeves, sit down on the ground. Close your eyes, cover your closed eyes with the palms of your hands'. The speaker said 'the weapon has now left the aircraft'. And the count-down started... 5-4-3-2-1... flash.
"You could see the flash so brightly that you could quite clearly make out the bones of your hands.”
Cancers
Since then, Leake has developed four separate cancers. He's one of more than a thousand veterans who say their illness stems from radiation and who are now fighting the UK government for compensation.
They want to set up a 34-million-euro fund to be shared out to survivors, but the government says there's not enough evidence of a link between the radiation they suffered and their illness.
But Susanne Roff, a researcher at Scotland's Dundee School of Medicine, says data gathered by her on the UK veterans has satisfied medical experts of a plausible link between the radiation they were exposed to and illness developed later in life.
"We've been able to show that the island was contaminated. The island is still contaminated," she told Deutsche Welle. "They could have absorbed or ingested radio nuclides from the food that they ate, from the sea or the coconut on the land, they could have got it from the very sand that they walked on."
Finding evidence
Other western nuclear powers, including the US, Australia and France, have paid various degrees of compensation to their own nuclear test veterans. This week the UK's highest court is hearing the veterans' challenge to an earlier ruling barring them from claiming compensation.
The Defense Ministry issued a statement that read, "There is no evidence of excess illness or mortality amongst the veterans as a group which could be linked to their participation in the tests or to exposure to radiation as a result of that participation."
But Leake is angered by the government's reluctance to admit they might have been exposed to unhealthy doses of radiation. Leake also says money is not the main issue.
"If they'd said 'well we're sorry, we slipped up but we can't afford to pay you compensation' - then that would be something else," he said. "But they can't even do that, they can't even apologize."
The UK and the US detonated more than 40 nuclear weapons between 1952 and 1962 in the Pacific and around Australia. More than 21,000 UK soldiers and officers witnessed the detonations.
Author: Lars Bevanger
Editor: Ben Knight