Nuke heroes may not all get their medal for Remembrance Sunday
Nuclear test veterans have been told they might not all receive their medal in time for Remembrance Sunday.
It follows an admission last week that the government may have left it too late to ask the King to hold a ceremony honouring the survivors of Britain's Cold War radiation experiments.
The veterans have campaigned for more than five years for the gong, and 1,731 of them have applied for it since it was announced by Rishi Sunak last November. Another 937 families have applied on behalf of a deceased veteran, but production has been hit by delays.
Applications were not opened until five months after the announcement, and the design was not signed off until July. The Mirror reported it was due to a "bitter turf war" between Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, with sources saying the MoD had "pulled the handbrake".
Mercer visited the medal factory at the end of August to see the first medal produced, but now it seems likely that not enough will be minted in time for all those who have applied to get theirs before this year's Remembrance commemorations.
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In the House of Commons today, junior defence minister Andrew Murrison did not deny the process had been hit by delays. He said: "The government is doing everything possible to ensure as many nuclear test veterans as possible receive their medal in time for Remembrance Sunday, and I appreciate the importance of that."
He added that "a presentation event to award the first medals is actively being considered by the Office of Veterans Affairs".
Alan Owen, who founded campaign group LABRATS after his entire family suffered ill health related to the nuclear tests, said: "They've all but admitted they left it too late. We have pressed them for almost a year and there is no excuse. The King was crowned and presented a medal to service personnel who took part in his coronation in a matter of weeks. First we were told there wasn't enough time for a ceremony, now there's not enough time to make all the medals. It's bad enough they've waited 70 years, but this is an insult."
Last week, Mercer told the Commons that he was "straining every sinew" to get the medal to veterans in time for the march past the Cenotaph, and that as a result he had to balance that need with requests for a ceremony with the King, which has yet to be arranged with just two months to go.
Sqn Ldr John Robinson, 89, of Bishop's Stortford, holds the first nuclear medal to roll off the production line. John flew cloud sampling sorties through two nuclear mushroom clouds, and undertook radio and cloud-tracking missions for another two, in Australia in the 1950s.In the same session, Barnsley East MP Stephanie Peacock tackled the government on the nuked blood scandal, asking why veterans were receiving only partial medical records, with parts relating to the tests missing or removed. Murrison had earlier written to her claiming "the Ministry of Defence is not aware of any files being removed from these records".
When asked why, then, the veterans' health records were still missing, he said: "We of course do everything we can to locate records when people request them, and I can reassure her that we could find none on this occasion."
Dozens of veterans report their records are officially missing, falsified, or withheld. A request to meet new Defence Seceretary Grant Shapps to show him the evidence has been ignored.
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