The names are idyllic, evoking heaven on earth: Primrose Island, Crocus Island, Bluebell Island.
But this uninhabited scatter of white sandy beaches and azure lagoons on the edge of the Indian Occean is a crime scene in the most scandalous injustice ever inflicted on British troops by their own government.
The Monte Bello islands were the site of the initial British atomic bomb test, the first in a series throughout the Cold War that exposed more than 22,000 unsuspecting National Servicemen to horrific radiation injuries — condemning thousands to lifelong sickness and agonising deaths.
Soldiers and sailors lined up on the decks of dozens of ships from the British and Australian navies to witness the blast from just a few miles away on October 3, 1952, during a top secret exercise codenamed Operation Hurricane.
‘We had no protective clothing,’ former Royal Engineer Derek Hickman later recalled. ‘You wore shorts and sandals, and if you remembered to grab your bush hat on the way, that was all you had. They ordered us to turn our backs. We put our hands over our eyes and they counted down over the Tannoy. There was a sharp flash and I could see the bones in my hands like an X-ray. Then the sound and the wind, and they told us to turn and face it.’
It’s a story that shames our country, on a scale greater than even the Post Office or contaminated blood scandals. It’s impossible to gauge how many lives across the generations have been affected, but estimates suggest the nuclear tests have resulted in birth defects and congenital health problems for tens of thousands of those men’s children and grandchildren.
British and Australian navies witnessed the blast from just a few miles away during a top secret exercise codenamed Operation Hurricane on October 3, 1952
Yet for more than 70 years, successive governments of all political stripes have refused to make more than the most dismissive acknowledgment of this self-inflicted catastrophe.
And we all bear some responsibility, because we are all involved: Britain’s nuclear capability has been the bedrock of our defence policy throughout most people’s lifetimes. That first bomb contained 7kg (about 15lb) of plutonium, and was stored in the hold of a 1,450-ton Navy frigate, HMS Plym. It lay at anchor off Trimouille Island, about 80 miles off the north-west coast of Australia — so remote that even today it takes two days to get there.
The explosion unleashed a 600mph blast wave, a radioactive wind that reached the men — who had been at sea for four months — immediately after the roar of the detonation.
All that was left of HMS Plym were ‘a few fist-sized pieces of metal that fell like rain,’ said Derek, ‘and the shape of the frigate scorched on the sea bed’.
Reporters watched from a viewing tower a safer 55 miles away. They, too, heard the countdown, spoken by Welsh physicist Ieuan Maddock — earning him the nickname The Count Of Monte Bello.
The West Australian newspaper reported: ‘The flash was followed by a huge expanding cloud which reached a height of 12,000ft within about three minutes of the explosion. By that time it was about a mile across at its widest part.’
The news was greeted with jubilation in London. Despite the UK’s close involvement with the U.S. wartime Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons, America had legislated in the 1946 McMahon Act to keep its nuclear technology to itself.
And there was definitely no prospect of co-operation after one of the British atomic physicists, a German refugee called Klaus Fuchs, confessed to being a Soviet spy and giving the Kremlin the secret of how to process uranium.
After that, the U.S. refused even to provide a test site for British nuclear trials. Our success in building and exploding a bomb of our own, making Britain the world’s third nuclear power after America and Russia, was hailed as a national triumph.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the Commons: ‘The weapon behaved exactly as expected. When the flash first burst through the hull of Plym, the temperature was nearly one million degrees.’
It is inconceivable that our military scientists did not realise the inevitable risks for those men who were taken across the world to witness that explosion and the blasts that followed over the next six years.
The Monte Bello islands were the site of the initial British atomic bomb test in 1952, the first in a series throughout the Cold War that exposed more than 22,000 unsuspecting National Servicemen to horrific radiation injuries, lifelong sickness and agonising deaths
The dangers of radiation, and the fact no amount of exposure was safe, were widely known — indeed, that’s what made it such a terrifying weapon. Most were young men in their teens or early 20s. Some were doing their compulsory two years of National Service, others had signed on.
All would have faced jail had they questioned the mission or refused to take part. But none had any warning of what they were about to experience, let alone the threats it meant for their health.
All had medicals before leaving, including blood tests. Within days, some were showing unmistakable signs of radiation sickness, with men sent ashore to collect samples and ordered into the seas to scoop up the dead fish and seagulls that clogged the waters.
Scientists took urine samples from those who had been on shore, some with respirators and some without, and carefully recorded the data on radionuclides (radioactive forms of elements) they had inhaled. It’s hard to be precise: many of the official documents were removed from public view in 2018 and the test results appear to have been removed from the men’s medical records.
Despite the growing caseload of sickness, no significant safeguards were introduced. Men were still told to turn their backs on the explosions and cover their eyes — the only difference was that during later tests they were ordered to use their whole fists instead of their flat palms.
Today, it seems unforgivably reckless that they were encouraged to go shirtless, in just shorts and hats, both on and off duty, with no sunblock. But the risk of skin cancer was dwarfed by the unquantifiable dangers of this new kind of bomb.
Hurricane was equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT, 60 per cent more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, and the contamination from radioactivity was even worse. ‘It was a plutonium bomb,’ Derek Hickman said, ‘and they’re the dirtiest’.
Despite the secrecy surrounding these operations, the whole country knew that weapons of unimaginable destructive power were being tested. The Fleet Street columnist William Connor watched another explosion in 1958, codenamed Operation Grapple, and described it in chilling poetry.
‘Through closed eyes, through dark glasses and with my hands covering my face, I saw the flash — a boiling red and yellow sun, an oil painting from hell, beautiful and dreadful, magnificent and evil… it was a dress rehearsal for the death of the world.’
After Grapple, U.S. co-operation was restored and Britain detonated dozens more devices in the Nevada desert up to 1991.
But this was, perhaps, a more naive and trusting time. The young servicemen sent to assist as stage hands at these ‘dress rehearsals’ did not conceive that the MoD regarded them as expendable; they trusted their government was on their side.
The fiery results of nuclear bomb testing could have resulted in birth defects and congenital health problems for tens of thousands of testers’ children and grandchildren
I first became aware of this story through a friend, the journalist Susie Boniface, who has been fighting doggedly to win justice for these men and their families for almost 20 years. She’s a force of nature and also the source of many of the quotes in this article, taken from her interviews with survivors.
She put me in touch with another tireless campaigner, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who is a former commander of UK and Nato CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) Forces.
As an amateur historian with a passion for British military stories, I was staggered to learn how casually these young troops were betrayed. In 1952, World War II was still a recent memory and I believe it was an article of faith to everyone in Britain that this country owed our basic freedoms to the men and women who sacrificed everything.
It seemed impossible to me that the next generation, young men who were schoolboys during the war, could be treated as guinea pigs for nuclear experiments.
Yet the lack of basic safety precautions for personnel in all the tests was simply criminal. Britain took part in and conducted limited clean-ups of 45 nuclear explosions and nearly 600 radiation experiments in Australia and the Pacific until 1967.
Of the thousands of blood tests taken after them there is little trace, although a new lawsuit based on Susie’s investigation is now under way.
My father and my wife’s father were both National Servicemen. They weren’t sent to the Pacific, but they easily could have been. Thinking about that really made me angry.
I felt angrier still after meeting Doug Hern, a veteran who was assigned as a young sailor to collect the carcasses of dead birds and fish after Grapple. He suffered a horrific litany of illnesses brought on by the radiation: his teeth fell out, he developed skin problems and bony spurs grew on his ribs.
But the legacy for his children was worse still. One of his daughters born after the tests developed a rare form of cancer and died at the age of 13. Doug, who died last year aged 86, devoted his life to exposing the scandal, trying to force successive governments to recognise what was inflicted on these men and their families.
The shocking reality is that politicians and the Ministry of Defence have played a callous game for decades, waiting for the problem to go away as the generation of veterans succumb to old age. There are few of them left now, it’s true, and the youngest are in their 80s. Derek Hickman, quoted above, died last year in his 90s and still mourning his mates, and the children he vowed to never have.
But the problem won’t go away, because living descendants have paid with their health, too. Eric Denson’s family were one of the worst affected.
Eric was an RAF pilot, ordered to fly a ‘sniff plane’ through the mushroom cloud at Christmas Island, to collect airborne debris after Operation Grapple Y — 112 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
He had to fly through the cloud three times, hurled about by seismic turbulence for 15 minutes. Physically sick for two days after his first flight, he was sent up again in the same plane, which hadn’t even been decontaminated.
Documents uncovered since show he was subjected to an experiment to compare ‘dose badges’ made from camera film, worn on uniforms, with the radiation meter in his Canberra bomber. It showed Eric’s head alone was subject to the equivalent of 167 years’ worth of background radiation.
His wife Shirley said Eric came home changed. A rash spread across his torso and he suffered from blinding headaches and unpredictable mood swings. He became violent and made a series of suicide attempts — on one occasion threatening to kill his whole family, and himself, with an axe.
In 1976, he finally succeeded in taking his own life, slashing his wrists beneath a tree near the family home in Oxfordshire. Shirley won a widow’s pension on the basis his death was due to service, but fought for the rest of her life for formal recognition, to no avail.
In 2021, she, Susie and I asked for Eric to get the Elizabeth Cross — a medal given to servicemen who die as a consequence of their military duties. It would have cost the MoD nothing but a scrap of human decency, yet it was denied.
I fail to understand how anyone could reach that conclusion, when official documents prove Eric was exposed to both radiation and psychological stress beyond imagining. Scientists at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston had drawn up the plans for Eric’s experiment, in a document titled ‘Determination of the whole body dose of radiation acquired by aircrew members while on cloud sampling detail’.
Each of the three crew had film badges attached to their seats —one on each arm, one behind their head and one on the seat pan ‘beneath their testicles’.
The scientists noted: ‘Care was taken to ensure that as little shielding effect as possible was given by the ejector seat and that no equipment of any description shielded the badges.’
One diagram shows the predicted trajectory of gamma rays through the cockpit, tracing a path through the plane and the crew’s bodies. Dotted lines show the rays going through the pilot’s chest, neck and groin.
It is not credible to me that anyone could see that diagram and not question what the effect on reproduction later in life would be. Eric’s reproductive organs were exposed to 65 years’ worth of annual background radiation in just 15 minutes.
The Denson family paid a bitter price. One of the children born after Eric’s return had developmental difficulties. Three of his grandchildren have unexplained spinal problems. One granddaughter had three adult teeth missing, while her son has had three sets of teeth. Another great-grandchild had a kidney defect.
The full body clothing that had to be donned by British troops and Press alike at the detonation of nuclear bombs
A partial list of diseases and deformities suffered by the servicemen’s descendants, compiled by campaigners, makes grim reading. They include children with cancers, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, holes in the heart, cystic kidneys, diabetes, lung defects and thyroid disease. Overall, the descendants report five times the usual rate of infant mortality and the wives three times the national rate of miscarriage.
Britain is shamed by the government’s refusal to act. France, Russia and America have compensated their own veterans, while Australia, Fiji and New Zealand have made reparations to their troops used in our tests.
Former defence secretary Gavin Williamson did promise to back our campaign, but was replaced before anything could be done. And at the 2019 general election Labour’s manifesto pledged £75 million for compensation.
Emily Thornberry, who was then shadow foreign secretary, said it was the government’s duty ‘to correct the injustices of the past’.
In 2022, after a five-year fight, the nuclear veterans finally got a medal — although it was only commemorative and many of those ordered to work in the nuclear clouds of our enemies and allies were left out.
Now Sir Keir Starmer’s Government has an opportunity to revive Labour’s pledge and correct the wrongs of successive governments. For almost all the veterans it is too late for justice, but their families, and their memories, demand it. And as long as it is denied, shame hangs over Britain like a mushroom cloud.
