Meet the nuclear veterans and families battling the Ministry of Defence
Nuclear veterans will sue the Ministry of Defence for blood records taken during atomic weapons tests and which have been hidden ever since.
The Mirror, which first revealed the nuked blood scandal in November last year, has uncovered proof of hundreds of documents about blood tests that are withheld at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, an agency of the MoD. These are the powerful stories of the nuclear veterans and their families.
Brian Unthank is covered in scars. There’s a curved one six inches long on his calf, dozens of small ones across his face. He takes off his shirt to show scores across his back.
“They’re always bigger underneath than on top. There was a small one on my nose and when they cut it open it was a lump the size of a £2 coin,” he said. “They cut my nose down one side, flipped it open, cut it out, and glued it back again.”Brian, 85, has had 90 cancerous tumours removed and is waiting for operations to remove another two.
“When I first went to the doctor, he couldn’t understand why I had so many. I told him I was at Christmas Island for the nuclear bomb tests, and he said ‘aha! That’s why’,” said Brian. “Then he told me I had to make sure all my family must tell their doctors I was at Christmas Island too, because it could affect them for 100 years before it washes out. He’d heard rumours about it, but had never seen any evidence until then.” But there are scars you can’t see, too. “My first wife had 13 vicious miscarriages,” he said. “It racked her. It ripped us apart.”
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Brian Unthank at home in Erith, where he's waiting to have another two cancers removed (Tim Merry/Daily Mirror)It was four years before she could carry a child to term, but the marriage crumbled. Brian remarried, and of his six children, four have birth defects. One girl was born with two wombs, a boy had two holes in his heart, and another had Duane syndrome, born with his eyes locked in opposite directions. A fourth child has skeletal and stomach issues which doctors cannot diagnose. Of his 10 grandchildren, one needed surgery as a baby to remove a malignant melanoma from his forehead. He’s not sure about the others - since the tests and the end of his first marriage, his family splintered.
“I honestly don’t know what caused it all. But I think we should know - and we’re not being told,” said Brian. “There’s a pattern of men who were there, the miscarriages and deformed babies, and now the medical records.”
Five years ago, in the hope of answers, Brian wrote the Ministry of Defence for his service records. The bundle they provided him with is missing 20 years of annual medicals he had as a cook in the Royal Air Force, during which time he witnessed two H-bombs and spent nine months living in the fallout. There is a list confirming they took place every year between 1958 and 1978, and are logged on a MoD computer as his personal data - but the RAF has not provided them.
You can donate to help the Nuclear Test Veterans' search for justice by clicking this link.
Brian prepares to march at the Cenotaph last November, surrounded by daughters of his old comrades (Daily Mirror)“Either they’ve got them and are holding them back, or they’ve lost them, or they’ve destroyed them,” said Brian. “But if that’s the case I don’t understand why they’ve got notes about minor ailments I went to the medic with in the same period.”
Brian, of Dartford, Kent, signed up aged 17 in 1956. Records show he was given a Special Medical Examination in August the following year because he’d been put on the preliminary warning roll for deployment to Christmas Island. It was just two months after the UK government had exploded three nuclear weapons in the Pacific, and told the world they were H-bombs. In truth they were failures, and there was a race to try again before a testing ban.
Brian was to be part of the reinforcements, and was given a full medical before he left to make sure he was in tip-top shape. It checked his urine, blood pressure, reflexes, lungs, heart, hearing, eyes, and even noted that his gums were healthy. “We flew in a Super Constellation over the North Pole to Canada to refuel, then on to Honolulu where we stayed in a hotel on Waikiki beach,” he remembered. “I was 19, it seemed like a holiday. We got 200 free cigarettes a week and all the Tennant’s we wanted. No-one mentioned nuclear bombs. We had no idea what we were doing or where we were going.”
Brian Unthank salutes the Cenotaph during a protest in Whitehall (Humphrey Nemar/daily mirror)
Brian witnessed the UK's first hydrogen bomb, the 1.8 megaton Grapple X, at Christmas Island on November 8, 1957 (Wikimedia)For nine months, it was Brian’s task to feed more than 4,000 UK and Commonwealth troops, plus civilian scientists, sent to the island in the race to detonate a hydrogen bomb. He recalls being told to kneel beneath a palm tree outside the mess tent for the first explosion, codenamed Grapple X. It was detonated on November 8, 1957, and had a yield of 1.8 megatons - 120 times more powerful than the weapon which destroyed Hiroshima.
“I was wearing a shirt, shorts, socks and boots. Maybe a floppy hat,” he said. “We had to kneel down with our knuckles in our eye sockets. They counted down, and I saw the white flash. If you live to be a million years old you’ll never ever fully describe its brilliance, the depth of it, the intensity. I could see every bone and blood vessel in my hands.”
Told to stand and turn to look, Brian saw “a ball of fire, black, white, red, and a big black line, hurtling towards us”. It was the pressure wave, and it threw him to the ground. The second test, Grapple Y, which took place five months later in April 1958, was nearly double the size. That time, the three-megaton blast blew apart the sandwiches and crushed the tea urns Brian and his team had prepared to feed the troops afterwards.
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Sqn Ldr Terry Gledhill, on the left, prepares to board his plan ahead of a mission into the nuclear clouds (Jane O'Connor)Between tests, he camped about 20 miles from Ground Zero, close to the beach. “We hung a hawser cable from a palm tree outside our tent, hooked some meat on it, and tossed it over the reef,” he said. “We caught sharks, and if they were big enough we served it in the mess. If not we’d eat them ourselves. It was delicious - tasted like beef.” He had no warnings about radiation, no instructions about avoiding eating the seafood, and no way of avoiding any fallout which may have come in the rain which followed at least one of the bombs.
He returned to the UK in May 1958, and three months later his mouth began gushing blood. “It was just pouring out, running down my chin. They said I looked like Dracula,” said Brian. His medical notes record a “brisk haemmorhage” from the gum behind his lower front teeth, which came on while visiting his girlfriend one evening and lasted for two hours.
The medic noted twice in the notes he had just returned from Christmas Island, and “he has noticed that he bleeds more profusely and for a longer time ever since he went”. A blood test found he had a high number of white cells, less than the usual number of platelets which help clotting, and a lowered ability to fight infection. All three can be caused by exposure to radiation.
The memo about 'gross irregularity' in the blood samples of Sqn Ldr Terry Gledhill which first revealed the scandalIt kept happening until 1963, when he had all his teeth removed. He was just 24. His file includes trips to the medics for repeated “indigestion” and gut pains. Each time he was treated with Gaviscon, but the records show it lasted for more than a decade. He scratches his skin constantly; he says it became itchy after the tests. The annual medicals between 1958 and 1978, which would have blood, heart, urine and other tests covering the period in which he lost his teeth, his wife miscarried, and he had repeated bouts of pneumonia infections, are missing.
His first skin cancers appeared in 1987, the year he left the forces. The type Brian has, basal cell carcinomas, are rooted in the deepest layer of skin, and are the most serious. The parts of the human body most sensitive to radiation are the blood, skin, and gut.
Brian pictured at home with his second wife Marion (Tim Merry/Daily Mirror)Now second wife Marion has health problems of her own, but even though he knows they’re unlikely to be linked to radiation Brian can’t help worrying he is the cause of it. He said: “I think well, if I put my first wife through all that, and my children are like that, have I somehow infected her, too, just by loving her? Doctors say they just don’t know. Well, of course they don’t.”
There has never been any official analysis of miscarriages, birth defects, or long-term chronic illness suffered by the veterans. A survey in 2007 found they showed 10 times the normal amount of congenital defects, triple the usual miscarriage rate, and 5 times the national levels of infant mortality. Brian served in Cyprus, Germany, and Singapore, as well as at bases across the UK. He once served tea to Prince Phillip. His service record notes his conduct was “exemplary”. He said: “I loved the RAF. If I could, I’d still be in it. Finally getting a medal after all these years means a lot, but to me and my family it would mean even more if we could get some answers.”
Operation Grapple veteran John Morris with Salford and Eccles MP Rebecca Long-Bailey, who is leading the Labour charge for nuclear test veteransJOHN MORRIS, 86, of Rochdale: Witnessed three atom bombs and an H-bomb while working in the laundry at Christmas Island in 1957. Had blood tested throughout. Son Stephen died aged four months. Developed pernicious anaemia aged 26, but refused a war pension for lack of evidence. He said: “I’ve lost a child, I’ve had cancer, and I’ve had a blood disorder since I was 26 years old. All the MoD has given us in return for securing the nuclear deterrent is a bunch of lies. We just want the bloody truth, and we will fight for that to the bitter end.”
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer with Steve Purse, at Portcullis House, WestminsterSTEVE PURSE, 49, of Prestatyn: Dad David was in charge of the airfield at Maralinga in 1963 during a series of toxic plutonium experiments. Steve was born a decade later with stunted limbs, curved spine, and one leg was bent 45 degrees the wrong way. He cannot straighten his arms, needs crutches or a wheelchair, has underdeveloped lungs and as a child suffered from fluid on the brain. He said: “Dad told me the safety measures were a wire fence. They were exploding and burning plutonium to see where it blew, and it blew straight past the wire and into the food. My whole family has spent 60 years being terrified - of every pregnancy, every sniffle, every trip to the doctor. If the MoD has nothing to hide, it can give us the answers we’re seeking.”
Ex-RAF ground crew John Folkes holds a photograph showing the plane he was ordered into as it prepared to fly through the mushroom cloud (Tim Merry/Daily Mirror)JOHN FOLKES, 86, of Broadstairs: John was 19 when he was ordered into the ‘rumble seat’ of a sniff plane sent to sample the mushroom clouds. He was later sent into the crater. He has prostate cancer and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the memories. A 14 month period is missing from his military medical records.“I had blood tests taken before, during and after every bomb,” he said. “I want to join the case because this stuff has to come out. It upsets me to think about it, but it’s better in the open.”
LAURA JACKSON, 57, of Cheltenham: Laura was born blind in one eye, had a heart attack at 42, suffered repeated miscarriages, lost her teeth, and had three malignant cancers removed from her face. She only found out her dad Ron ‘Jesse’ Owen was involved in the tests after he died from his third massive heart attack, and her older brother Gordon died the same way just 18 months later. Laura said: “I was heavily pregnant when I found my dad dead on the floor. Now my younger brother Alan has been diagnosed with the same heart condition, and only narrowly survived. You ask yourself if it’s the radiation all the time."
Laura with her brother Alan Owen hold a picture of their father James, who died aged 52 after witnessing 24 nuclear blasts in just 78 days while serving at Christmas Island in 1962 (Phil Harris)You can donate to help the Nuclear Test Veterans' search for justice by clicking this link.
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