SIXTY FIVE YEARS AGO
Vice Admiral Brooking of the Armament Research Establishment received a disturbing minute about nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific.
It pointed to the all-
Admiral Brooking was told “some
degree of risk must be run by some people if we are to achieve the full purpose of the trial”.
The minute added that an acceptable
dose would in all probability be decided
by the Medical Research Council. But
there was a drawback. The council would
“play for safety to such an extent that we might be quite unable to achieve the scientific purpose of the trial”.
Smoking guns don’t come much more smoking than that.
But when the Prime Minister Anthony Eden was told of this possible genetic time bomb he said, “a pity, but we can’t help it”.
That minute, and Eden’s reaction, became the core of the longest-
It continues to do so under a Prime
Minister who wasn’t born when the experiments
began but who put his name to a
full inquiry in Opposition, only to renege as soon as he was in a position to order
one
Eden was to be the only prime minister to accept the truth of what happened to our Servicemen.
A pity, but we cannot help it, was to be the motto that led to decades of lying,
fact-
I first became involved in this terrible state of affairs nearly 20 years ago as editor of The People, telling how Servicemen were dying in agony and their children were born without vital organs.
The man at the ministry then was Michael Heseltine and we asked what he was going
to do. The answer was to become depressingly familiar. Nothing -
Its findings become a ministry mantra:
“The incidence of illnesses was no higher among Servicemen than the population as a whole”.
But slowly documents are coming to light showing what did go on in the Pacific. Flt
Lt Eric Denson flew through a Christmas Island mushroom cloud, receiving the equivalent
of 6,500 full body X-
He was to pay with his life, killing himself after years of depression and wild mood swings. What did the MoD say to that? Not our fault, guv. It all stemmed from his childhood. He was unbalanced. Strange then that he would have been even considered for the RAF, let alone to fly a Canberra through a mushroom cloud. But the mendacity at the rotten core of the MoD could not have gone unchallenged for so long without the connivance of both Labour and Tory ministers.
Dr Lewis Moonie, so concerned for the veterans that he couldn’t even bother to sign his letter of complaint to us, is the latest to peddle the increasingly discredited ministry line.
Of course it will never be possible to prove veterans have died as a direct result
of radiation poisoning, the Ministry made sure of that by having no personal monitoring
of fall-
A pity, but we cannot help it, said
Eden. But we can. We must care for those who are approaching the end of their lives in pain and poverty.
We must care for those who suffer through accident of birth and are condemned to disability by man’s blind headlong search for political and military might.
We must protect those still to come from our rulers’ short-
No country can call itself civilised if it is not prepared to admit its mistakes, protect its people and defend them against the threat of the common enemy. Even if, as in this case, the enemy is within.
This scandal has stained Britain’s reputation
for too long. Yes, it IS a pity,
but, by God, we can
The National Ex Service Association appeal to all ex service men and women to lend support to this group by sending letters to their respective members of Parliament and asking their friends and associates to do the same.
They have waited too long. They are mostly all dead now
MERRY CHRISTMAS
THANKS FOR YOUR GIFT OF LIFE
AND WE WON’T OPEN OLD WOUNDS
