Confronting the Ministry of Defence over
test veterans' contamination data
The correspondence (3.75 Mb PDF)

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A background statement from Professor Chris Busby

The servicemen who supported the British atomic tests in the 1950s in Australia and Christmas Island were exposed to radiation. As a result, they and their children and grandchildren have suffered harm. Genetic damage shows up in increased rates of ill health (e.g. cancer) and congenital effects in the children and grandchildren. There are many reasons for believing that exposure to fallout - especially Uranium - causes anomalous genetic effects but they can be examined elsewhere. My concern in making this collection of papers is the cover up of documents following a request I made to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in January 2009 under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 2008-9 Rosenblatts brought an action against the Ministry of Defence (MoD), representing numbers of veterans. I was retained as an expert and in 2008 I examined a large amount of paperwork Rosenblatts had obtained. The key question was whether it could be shown that the veterans had been exposed to radiation, and if they had, what was the level, and was it capable of causing the claimed genetic damage and cancer. The MoD view is that none of the vets had been exposed at levels that could have caused any measurable health effect. Their argument is based on recorded film badge doses. Film badges, usually pinned to the lapel, register absorbed gamma ray doses and they were issued to those servicemen who were positioned close to the detonations. The far greater numbers of men who were further than a mile from the detonation were assumed, at the time, to be in no danger and they were not issued with badges. However, there is a problem with this approach. Since the 1950s it has become increasingly clear that internal exposures to radioactive fallout, including alpha emitters like Uranium, cause anomalously large health effects relative to the doses calculated by the current radiation risk model. Uranium was the major component of the bombs; some of them contained over a ton of it as core and as reflector shielding. Alpha and beta emitters do not register on film badges as their radiations are short range. Therefore it is possible that the veterans had been internally exposed to unrecorded doses from fallout following inhalation and ingestion.

The MoD’s position is that if there were significant quantities of alpha and beta emitters these would be accompanied by gamma emitters which would register on the film badges, so that alpha and beta doses could be calculated. In addition, the MoD state that measurements made at the time show there was no fallout in areas remote from the detonation, where many of the veterans in the Rosenblatts action (and others in pensions appeal tribunals) were stationed. Indeed, in many cases, veterans who claimed ill health were not even at the test site areas when there was a detonation.

So a key question is whether there is any evidence of contamination from fallout at the remote sites. There was hardly any relevant evidence among the papers I examined at Rosenblatts. This seemed strange, given the vehemence with which the MoD argued that none had been found - such a claim implies the existence of actual data. There was however a report of measurements carried out by A.E. Oldbury on Christmas Island in 1963. In January 2009 I used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the Atomic Weapons Establishment for all the information they had on radiation levels at test sites.

The Oldbury report itself showed measurements of a runway some 40 km from the Christmas Island detonation site. Oldbury had used two different instruments; one measured beta radiation, the other gamma. The ratio of betas and gammas in fallout changes in a well-known and quite predictable way. This is because of the different half lives of the component radionuclides. The very radioactive components mostly decay away inside three weeks leaving the longer half life components like Caesium-137 (a beta gamma emitter) and Strontium-90 (a pure beta emitter). In addition there will be the alpha emitters like Plutonium and Uranium.

I used Oldbury's data to calculate a beta gamma ratio. It was between 10 and 40 - highly unusual values. For 2 year old fallout it should be 3.5. That means two things. First, that there is some beta emitter present which is not present in fission fallout. Second, that MoD are wrong in arguing that the gamma dose rate will act as a surrogate for beta emitter exposure.

What is the missing beta emitter? It can only be Uranium. U-238 is a pure alpha emitter but it decays through two short half-life beta emitters, Protactinium-234m and Thorium-234, before stabilising at U-234. The nature of the half lives of these isotopes is such that they are in stochastic equilibrium; the activity of each is equal to the activity of the parent U-238. Therefore it can be assumed that about 90% of the activity in the places Oldbury surveyed was from these two isotopes, and half of this activity was due to the parent U-238, entirely missing from the film badge doses. Therefore the veterans were all exposed to U-238. These days, since the Gulf war, this is called Depleted Uranium.

I have acted as an expert witness in several pensions appeals tribunals where arguments about test site exposures has been key to the claimants' success. From 2008 I have used the beta gamma ratio from Oldbury’s report to support this point. There are nine outstanding cases as I write now (I am expert witness in five of them including that of Dawn Pritchard, widow of Gwilim who had kidney failure, a classic Uranium related disease). But in January 2010 MoD suddenly cancelled the hearings without explanation, stating that they would be taking the cases all together. At roughly the same time it was rumoured in the test veterans' organisations that MoD had abandoned its defence of the class action and would be paying out. If this change of heart were real, what would be its cause?

By December 2009 the MoD had consistently blocked my FoI data request using bizarre reasoning and obfuscation. They had, however, sent a list of relevant reports (it's in these papers). Many were relevant and I had asked for them. Curiously the list did not mention the Oldbury report which I already had - the judge in the Pritchard case had asked me for copies of it. When I sent them to him I added a covering letter telling him about the apparently expurgated list of papers and the MoD's failure to cooperate. I asked the judge if he could use legal disclosure powers to obtain the documents I'd requested. I copied this correspondence to Rosenblatts and to some of the veterans. There was then a question of asking the class action judge (Foskett) to get involved. Soon after, at the same time that the tribunal cases were all deferred, I received a reply from MoD. The Oldbury papers were not to be released because of some let-outs in the FoI relating to national security or international relations or mental health (see the attached papers). The others were not to be released because now they were suddenly going to be considered to be released to The National Archive, another exclusion category, but in this case they probably would not be public until after the date of the deferred hearing.

UPDATE:

The latest twist is that the Tribunal judge has ordered the MoD to release the papers I asked for. As at March 7th 2010 I have yet to see them.

The correspondence.