Veterans are dying while waiting for ministers to announce what evidence they have found about how they were used in nuclear weapons experiments, Parliament has heard
MPs have heard an impassioned plea for ministers to reveal evidence they have uncovered of human radiation experiments on troops.
Parliament was told veterans are “dying by the week and month” without the justice they have sought for decades, while an ongoing government review has uncovered proof that courts were repeatedly misled about what had befallen them.
Tory grandee Sir John Hayes told the House of Commons that the survivors and their families deserved to be told the truth. He said: “Earlier this year, the government announced that there will be a review into the blood and urine tests take at the time of those tests… because of the risk of radiation poisoning.
“The government has said that the review will be published, but we have no clarity as to when. There are tens of thousands of these records which are being examined as we speak… these men are now elderly; they are dying, of course, because of their age, by the week and month.”
Ministry of Defence lawyers have repeatedly told war pension hearings, the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court that there was no individual biological monitoring of the 40,000 UK and Commonwealth troops who took part in more than 600 radioactive weapons experiments during the Cold War.
But the Mirror has uncovered thousands of memos, locked on a secret database at the Atomic Weapons Establishment on the grounds of national security, detailing orders for, and discussion of, blood counts, urinalysis, and chest x-rays, without any clinical reason beyond monitoring men’s exposure to radiation.
The results are now missing from their individual medical records, denying them war pensions, compensation, and accurate diagnosis of health problems.
As a result of our investigation ministers launched a review which has already examined 43,000 files, and an estimated 1.1m pages of information.
Earlier this week we reported that some of the files seen by the review team included requests for blood tests “from the medico-legal aspect” and orders from Bomber Command instructing RAF members of the weapons task force to be subjected to them.
Yet when ministers are asked for an update on what has been found they decline. Veterans Minister Al Carns told Parliament recently: “I will update the house when I am in a position to share the findings of the exercise that is looking at concerns raised with me about some nuclear test veterans’ medical records.”
Survivors of the testing claim a catalogue of cancers, blood diseases and rare medical conditions. Their wives show three times the normal rate of miscarriages, and their children 10 times the usual amount of birth defects. Successive governments have always denied troops were part of the experiment.
Government lawyers told judges in sworn statements that “the planning policy for the tests indicates that the intention was to prevent intake, rather than to allow it and monitor the results” and “no personal records” of medical monitoring were made.
Ministers also told Parliament the MoD “holds no information about blood testing”, only for the evidence to later be uncovered by campaigners.