Clouds of Deceit (23 page)

This error is important; it was the estimate of doses to local children that led the inquiry to rule out radiation as the cause of their cancer. The researchers worked out how many cancers they would expect in the villages if dissident scientists like Alice Stewart were correct about the risk. Because they found
more
cases than this number, they decided radiation could not be the cause. Two other explanations are equally possible: that the inquiry team had underestimated the dose in just the way it now
appears they did; or that low-level radiation is more damaging even than critical scientists like Alice Stewart have suggested.

The publication of the Black report has not in any way exonerated Windscale or given a clean bill of health to low doses of radiation. The fact remains that, since the 1950s, a substantial body of evidence has emerged to suggest low-level radiation is very damaging indeed. More and more scientists have added their voices to the growing chorus of concern.

Curiously, one person who seems unaware of these developments is the government's spokesman on the bomb tests, junior Defence Minister Adam Butler. The risks of radiation have been known for years, he said in December 1984, categorically rejecting the suggestion that the British didn't know what they were doing in the 1950s.

‘I believe that what I have said … confirms that the international scientific view of the acceptability of the risks of exposure to ionising radiation has not altered, despite the vastly greater body of data on its effects which has been collected and examined during the period since then,' he announced inexplicably to the House of Commons.

The British government's vehemence in rejecting the allegations of the veterans has been strangely unaffected by the mass of evidence which has emerged since their campaign in the UK started at the end of 1982. Official statements betray not a scintilla of doubt; if anything, the line has become tougher since the questions first began.

Several plausible explanations can be advanced for this state of affairs. One is the traditional reluctance of any current administration to admit faults in its predecessors, even if the events concerned happened thirty years ago and no contemporary ministers are implicated. This convention has a logical, if self-interested origin: each government hopes that its restraint in relation to previous administrations will be emulated by its own successors. It is certainly the case that a degree of loyalty is involved; although the bomb was given the go-ahead by Labour politicians, it was tested in the atmosphere exclusively by Conservatives.

The spectre of numerous compensation claims is another important factor. Although the government is protected by statute from claims for compensation by ex-servicemen for injuries sustained during their period of service, any admission that the tests had led to ill-health would inevitably spark off demands that an exception be made for the men who served at the bomb tests. Since 20,000 men took part, most of them servicemen, such claims could be substantial.

The most powerful motivation to resist the veterans' claims emerges clearly, however, when you look at the direction in which the evidence points. The description of the immediate effects of the bombs given by veterans from various tests –
reddening of the skin resembling sunburn - can be explained by heat and blast from the weapons, particularly at the hydrogen tests, where the energy released was immense. In themselves, these effects tell us little about levels of radiation.

Certain bits and pieces of evidence undoubtedly suggest that men were exposed, on some occasions, to much higher levels of radiation than the government has admitted. Alice Stewart's study of the Christmas Island veterans, published in 1982, contained reports of men suffering from cataracts in middle age. Professor Rotblat pointed out at the time that the occurrence of this disease, usually found only in the elderly, suggested exposure to fairly high levels of radiation.

This situation has an exact parallel in the US. The Defense Nuclear Agency insists American test veterans got only a tenth of the level now permitted annually for radiation workers; Dr Rosalie Bertell says some of the men have symptoms consistent with doses sixty times greater than this amount.

Evidence given to the Australian Royal Commission supports the hypothesis that certain individuals at the British tests - aircrew who flew through atomic clouds, for instance - received fairly high doses of radiation. But if these instances are left to one side, the question remains as to whether large numbers of men could have been exposed to high levels of radiation.

It is clear that some people who appear in official records as receiving no dose of radiation at all nevertheless were exposed – the tasks they were given were mistakenly thought to be safe and they were simply not given monitoring equipment, or it was not collected in. It is also clear that the monitoring equipment used was not as reliable as the British government likes to claim. The evidence is that one of the methods used - film badges – may have underestimated individual doses by 40 per cent.

But there is little evidence to suggest that the doses recorded in official papers are out by a significant degree. What seems more likely is that, with spectacular exceptions, the veterans got doses a little larger than the records suggest but still smaller than those received routinely every year by workers in the nuclear industry.

Once you arrive at this point, it becomes clear that the British
government has the strongest possible motive to resist claims by the veterans that radiation has damaged their health. If men exposed to such tiny doses of radiation have suffered elevated rates of disease, what future is there for the nuclear industry, which exposes its workers annually to more radiation than most of the veterans received once in their lifetimes?

The British government must now fear that Conservative ministers did more in the 1950s than explode a series of nuclear weapons in Australia and the Pacific. They may have unintentionally planted a time-bomb under every nuclear power station in Britain.

If the government was committed to a searching and unimpeachably independent study into the veterans' claims about the bomb tests, it chose a curious way of going about it. Instead of selecting a university department to carry out the study, it gave the job to a body with close links to the nuclear industry. It was a peculiar choice for a study whose results could, in the end, do untold damage to that industry.

As if that in itself was not bad enough, the study is too narrow in scope; the largest of the organizations representing the British veterans, the British Nuclear Tests Veterans' Association, has dissociated itself from the study and says it has no confidence in its eventual results.

The government announced its intention to commission the study in January 1983. Its motives were far from altruistic. The veterans' complaints had just been aired in a blaze of publicity in newspapers and on television and the announcement could be interpreted as an attempt by the government to silence the subject by taking action which could not possibly produce results for a matter of years. Having made the announcement, the government took nearly eight months to award the contract.

When it did, it took the surprising step of giving it to the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB). This body, set up by Act of Parliament in 1970, acts as watchdog on Britain's nuclear industry. Unfortunately, its independence is seriously undermined by its close links with that industry; and its structure and history suggest it suffers from much the same problems as
the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Its staff tend to be people who have previously worked for the nuclear industry, and it has taken positions in the past that will not hinder nuclear power.

This very problem was spotted in 1977 by Sir Brian Flowers, who chaired the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. He pointed out that many of the NRPB's staff had previously worked for the body which oversees the development of nuclear energy, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and the two organizations are based at the same rather remote place, Harwell.

‘In making these remarks we intend in no way to impugn the integrity of the present members or staff of the Board,' Flowers said, ‘but rather to emphasize the importance of fostering not only the reality, but the appearance, of independence.' His recommendations - reconstruction at board level and a review of the organization and expertise of the expert body - have never been carried out.

The links with the nuclear industry affect the organization's top level including its director. From 1971 to 1981, the job was done by Dr A. S. McLean, who was also, for the greater part of his time as NRPB director, a member of the ICRP. Before his appointment at NRPB, he held three different positions with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.

This tradition continued with the appointment in 1982 of McLean's successor, John Dunster. Dunster appeared in
chapter 7
as one of the longest-serving members of the ICRP and its committees; in the days before the UKAEA was set up, Dunster worked for the Ministry of Supply nuclear plants at Harwell and Windscale. He later held senior positions in the UKAEA.

In 1958, while working for the UKAEA's health and safety branch, Dunster went to a UN conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, where he provided an illuminating insight into what was happening at Windscale. Discharges from the plant, he said, were part of a deliberate experiment to find out more about the movement of radioactive substances in the environment. Although these discharges were not considered dangerous at the time by the scientists responsible for them,
they are now under suspicion of being the cause of leukaemia near the plant.

The NRPB's own record does not suggest it is a speedy and vigilant protector of the public when it comes to radiation. Although it was set up in 1970, the NRPB did not produce a report into Britain's worst nuclear accident, the fire at Windscale in 1957, until 1983. That report was produced only after an independent environmental research organization, the Political Ecology Research Group, came up with its own report in 1981, suggesting that numerous cases of thyroid cancer could have been caused by the fire.

When the NRPB's own report on the fire appeared, one oversight quickly became clear. The NRPB report included estimates of the number of cancers likely to have been caused in the population of the UK by the radioactive substances released by the fire, but failed to consider one of the most carcinogenic, the isotope called polonium 210. After I pointed out in the
Sunday Times
that polonium 210 had come out of the pile during the fire, the NRPB was forced to issue an addendum to its report, increasing its estimate of the number of cancers probably caused by the fire. What made the omission of polonium 210 from the first report even odder was that traces of it were found near the plant immediately after the fire by John Dunster, then a health physicist and, by the time of the report, the NRPB's director.

But it was not only the choice of the NRPB to carry out the study of the veterans that sat oddly with the claim that it was to be an independent survey. The scientists originally chosen to do the work at NRPB included Dr John Reissland, a public critic of Alice Stewart's work on low-level radiation. In 1978, Reissland published an assessment of the Hanford study - the important study of nuclear workers in the US published by Stewart with Thomas Mancuso and George Kneale - which dismissed most of their conclusions. ‘There is wide agreement that the Hanford study … does not represent a valid statistical interpretation of the actual data,' he wrote. Reissland's conclusion is disingenuous: it would be nearer the truth to say that the Hanford study is controversial, with no general agreement on
its conclusions. The choice of Reissland to look into the veterans' claims looked at the very least combative, given that their cause was first championed by Alice Stewart.

After the study was set up, Reissland's death in a fire at his home necessitated a change in the team carrying out the work. This event, and other problems, means that the study will be published later than planned - at the time of writing, it is unlikely to appear before late 1986.

The veterans themselves are highly critical of the study. It will look at only two issues: whether there is a higher death rate among the veterans than in a comparable group of servicemen who did not take part in the tests, and whether more of the veterans have contracted cancer than men in the comparable group.

Several problems are immediately obvious. First, there is to be no attempt to contact individuals. This means that the researchers will rely on death certificates for the cause of death, yet some cancers are well known to be under-reported as a cause of death. This method could lead to cancers being missed.

Second, the study is confined to looking at only one disease – cancer. It is impossible to differentiate between cancer caused by radiation and cancer caused by some other agent. But the study has excluded an examination of the incidence of cataract – a disease which can be caused by radiation - among the veterans. This condition, which usually occurs only in the elderly, would be a significant indicator of radiation-related problems if it was found to have occurred among the veterans, most of whom are only in their middle years.

Third, the study will not look at genetic effects. A number of men who took part in the tests have reported deformity or illness among their children. This is a difficult area: although scientists have no doubt radiation can cause genetic effects, they have not yet observed them in an irradiated population. But if studies on people who have been exposed to radiation exclude consideration of genetic effects, that situation will never change. The NRPB study ignores the opportunity to -look for genetic effects among the veterans.

All in all, the veterans believe the study is being carried out by
the wrong organization and with the wrong terms of reference. They also think it is a way of stalling their claims: the government has made it clear it will not change its position until the NRPB has reported. At the moment, that report is not due to appear until nearly
four years
after the British veterans first aired their complaints in public.