The British Nuclear Bomb Scandal: A Review of Our Story – How Britain’s Nuclear Testing Program Destroyed Lives

GRenfell, the Post Office, tainted blood, Hillsborough… Britain has witnessed a long line of injustices where walls of silence and lies have kept the powerless from hindering the powerful from telling their whole truth. To that list, in the part where further disclosure is still urgently required, we should add the British nuclear testing scandal. This quietly devastating documentary lays out the case.

After World War II, the US and USSR were engaged in a nuclear arms race, and Britain – desperate to regain its place at the top of the world – felt obliged to join them. While trying to keep up with developments in atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear testing was desirable, but releasing nuclear weapons near ordinary British citizens was not politically viable, so distant lands were sought and human guinea pigs identified .

The locations chosen were Pacific atolls and the Australian outback and coast; the unwitting human subjects were, as well as the local population, approximately 39,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers and scientists. Between 1952 and 1963 they witnessed the detonation of 45 atomic and hydrogen bombs, along with hundreds of other radioactive experiments. Many of those affected, who were stationed at the explosion sites so that the effects on people could be monitored, are interviewed in this film.

Leading the talking heads are British veterans who, as young men in the 1950s and 1960s, had the opportunity to sail halfway around the world to serve their country. For example, when they arrived on Christmas Island or the Monte Bello Archipelago off the coast of northwest Australia, they initially found themselves in paradise, living a life of sun, beer, seafood and beach football, with, as they say, ‘no idea that we surrendered to.” Now they live with cancer and other health problems that they are convinced are related to what they experienced — or the traumatic memories of coming face to face with humanity’s most powerful, terrible creation.

Not every study supports the men’s claims about the negative health effects of nuclear testing, but there is plenty, and in any case the problem is that the picture is incomplete. It will require lawsuits and persistent freedom of information requests to gain access to Defense Department data, the existence of which the Department of Defense had previously denied. But the veterans would still not have enough to claim compensation even if Britain had an equivalent to the nuclear test compensation schemes that exist in other countries.

Here and now we have the men’s own testimony, which is frightening. Their memory of sitting on a beach with their bare hands over their eyes, waiting for an unholy explosion to explode in the sea behind them, is eerie and nightmarish. One man’s memory of being flown on a plane through a mushroom cloud and looking down on a crimson inferno before being turned upside down by the force of the explosion is difficult to comprehend.

Almost more disturbing are the stories of what happened next, especially among the men’s descendants. Children were born with disabilities and deformities; grandchildren show signs of genetic defects. The official line remains that there is no link between this and the tests, and that “no information is being withheld from veterans”. The veterans bitterly and tearfully disagree.

Then there is the small matter of Indigenous Australians whose ancestral homelands were considered uninhabited before the British nuclear tests. At Emu Field in South Australia in 1953, warnings about prevailing winds were ignored and the radioactive cloud was blown towards an indigenous community, including the late Yami Lester, who was blinded by radiation exposure and became an anti-nuclear campaigner. We hear his famous 1999 description of “this black mist coming over the mulga trees and rolling quietly through the mulga trees, black and shiny, oily looking.” Community members reported unusual, serious health problems within hours.

There is also an interview with Australian Air Force veteran and whistleblower Avon Hudson, who risked jail time to draw attention to the effects of the tests at Maralinga, just south of Emu Field. Hudson, a determined but deeply sad man, leads the filmmakers to the program’s grimmest image: the cemetery in the small military town of Woomera, with its rows of small graves. The increase in infant mortality and stillbirth has never been satisfactorily explained.

Hudson fought for a royal commission, which met in 1984 and helped repair the damage done in Australia, but the surviving Britons – now grandfathers, sharp-minded but with faces scarred by worry, and with their time running out – are still waiting for a public inquiry, compensation and the release of their own full medical records. Answering their questions honestly seems like the least we can do.