Keir Starmer has been warned that a state cover-up of radiation experiments on troops could reach Downing Street if he does not act.
Senior government officials have been implicated in the Nuked Blood Scandal, involving servicemen sent to Cold War nuclear weapons tests a BBC documentary on Wednesday uncovers false testimony from civil servants and given to judges, in repeated court cases brought by veterans over decades.
And the Mirror can confirm that the allegations refer to serving Whitehall mandarins, and span multiple government departments. Human rights lawyer Jason McCue, who is acting for hundreds of families suing the government for missing medical records, said: “The cover-up will soon envelop Starmer’s new government unless the Prime Minister draws a line under the lies, and provides justice.”
Although Labour has promised a Hillsborough Law to make it a criminal offence for officials to lie, with a ‘duty of candour’, it will be too late for nuclear test veterans whose cover-up began in the 1950s. McCue added: “Our case evidences a history of the nuclear test veterans being misled across all levels of government. They have been treated with anything but candour for decades.”
The Ministry of Defence insists no information was withheld, but has been unable to confirm full details of the blood testing was provided to any court before the Mirror uncovered it. Providing a false statement to a court, even unknowingly, can constitute the crime of misconduct in public office, which carries a maximum life sentence.
H-bomb veteran John Morris, whose tragic story is featured in the documentary, said: “There’s only one person all these nodding donkeys listen to, and it’s the Prime Minister. When we met him two years ago we were only asking for a medal. Now we’re asking for justice.
“The veterans are dying at a rate of knots and all we want is the bloody truth. Keir Starmer wants to change things, well here’s his chance. It’s on his mat, and he’s got to deal with it.”
The 75-minute documentary features John’s story, and that of other veterans, who served at radioactive weapons experiments in Australia and the Pacific between 1952 and 1967. It also covers the Mirror’s investigation into missing medical records, after we found in 2022 that the troops had blood tests taken at the time and the results hidden ever since.
There were repeated orders for all three armed forces to be medically monitored over more than a decade. In May the Atomic Weapons Establishment was ordered by a minister to declassify 4,000 pages of records including raw blood test data, urine analysis, medical forms, and discussions between officials about publicly denying it.
The documentary’s new claims centre on a 2008 witness statement, sworn under oath before a High Court judge, by the government lawyer defending a claim brought by 1,011 veterans for negligence. Prepared by a cross-agency team of experts, it claimed that no such testing was done and nothing was withheld.
It states: “There is an absence of urine and faecal sampling information… the planning policy for the tests indicates that the intention was to prevent intake, rather than to allow it and monitor the results.”
It adds: “I am told by AWE that those documents which were not made publicly available are essentially classified nuclear technical documents, which, it is reasonable to say, are not likely to be relevant to a claim for personal injury.”
The case, which was eventually defeated when the Supreme Court narrowly ruled it had been brought too late, could have gone ahead if there was recently discovered evidence, in what is known as a Section 33 exemption. Medical orders and data would have needed to convince only one judge for the exemption to be applied and let the case proceed, with multi-million pound payouts likely if the veterans won.
But the witness statement claims: “All of the documents relied on… such as whether to have routine blood tests or issue universal film badges or record exposure on medical records… are irrelevant and inadmissible.”
A source from the veterans’ former legal team said: “We argued at the time we did not have all the documents, and the MoD insisted we did. So the case was thrown out. If we’d had the documents now available, the judge may have allowed the veterans’ claim to go ahead.”
The AWE files also included letters between the MoD and Foreign Office about the blood tests. In 1995, two veterans took a claim over missing medical records to the European Commission on Human Rights. It asked the government whether such medical records were taken, or were classified, and why the results had not been provided to the servicemen.
The official response claimed the bombs were not powerful enough to put servicemen at risk. It told ECHR: “Classified documents do not contain the records referred to in the commission’s question… no information has been withheld from the applicants as there was, and is, no reason to do so”.
Two years later, when extra material was declassified for the case, they were asked to defend their earlier response. A MoD memo accused Foreign Office staff of “adding the leading sentence… it is this statement that is now causing the difficulty”.
The ECHR later ruled the two veterans’ claim that medical records were withheld was “speculative”, and both have since died. Ever since, courts, war pension hearings, politicians and the public have been told by government that the ECHR found “no personal records of each applicant’s exposure to radiation existed, since no individual monitoring of servicemen such as the applicants took place”.
A spokesman for the MoD said the AWE held only “technical and scientific documentation” and that court judgements showed all records were “disclosed properly”. She added: “Ministers are looking hard at the issue – including the question of records. They will continue to engage with the individuals and families affected.”
