Report of an independent inquiry onto government policy on compensation for cancer and other illnesses linked to British nuclear tests.
By Albert C Baggs
April 2000
About the Author
Albert C Baggs is a medical writer and editor, journalist, and businessman. He has made ghosted or by-lined editorial contributions, on many topics, to various publications, including Scientific American - Medicine, Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, The Lancet, Ontario Medicine, Time Magazine. Mr Baggs' editorial collaborations have included work with specialists in infectious diseases, bone disorders, endocrinology, respiratory medicine, cardiology, anesthesia, oncology, and military medicine, in connection with promising treatments for serious medical disorders, clinical and battlefield emergencies.
Introduction
In denying pensions to hundreds of former nuclear test personnel who have made service-related disability claims since the 1960s, and in refusing compensation to numerous "A—test widows " the British defense bureaucracy has resolutely disregarded legal and moral admonitions about the duty of care to former military servicemen issuing from concerned parliamentarians, members of the European Commission who referred veterans' lawsuits to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, news media investigators, and other interested parties. Bureaucrats and their political masters have insisted in unison that their opposition to special compensation for A—test veterans suffering from cancer is justified by a Foundation of respectable scientific opinion that emanated from two very extensive mortality studies.
The studies in question were undertaken — with supposedly impeccable scientific rigor by statisticians associated with a government agency, the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB, Chilton, Oxfordshire OX 11 ORQ UK), and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, OX2 6HE UK). Their—inquiries (published as NRPB—R214, 1988, and NRPB—R266, 1993; London, HMSO) concluded, with cautionary references to certain cancers, that UK nuclear tests in Australia and the Pacific between 1952 and 1967 had had no "detectable" adverse effect upon the life expectancy of servicemen.
This rather surprising opinion — which is all the more remarkable because the NRPB-ICRF statisticians did not in fact publish an analysis of the men's lifespans.
Ministerial responses, often sugared with expressions of sympathy, have left the A-test veterans dissatisfied: the bureaucracy, they assert, has for many years wilfully obstructed their efforts to gain even modest pension supplements to compensate for the cancers and other illnesses that they suspect, but cannot prove, are linked to the A-tests.
Generally, the military veterans' grievances may be considered as falling within those complaint categories for individuals against governments that may be contemplated by Articles 8, 10, 12 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 (see Appendix A or the full report).
There have, for example, been objections (some filed with the European Commission, and with the Court of Human Rights, others voiced to journalists who have followed their story)
that service medical records for conditions and treatments immediately following nuclear tests were withheld, tampered with (rendered incomplete or altered) before they eventually were released, or otherwise "lost" without trace, or denied as ever having existed (such misdemeanors by government servants would, if provable, amount to constructive violations of Articles 12 and 19);
that the War Pensions Agency and pensions appeals tribunals (PAT s) generally have lacked competence, initiative, and independence from ministerial influence, in the handling of many claims which have raised questions about real nuclear hazards to which servicemen were exposed during the Cold War (Article 8);
that a supposed remedy against the withholding by officials of information considered vital to a demobbed military serviceman's personal security (i e, health, and pensions), namely, the notorious "Rule 6" of the PAT s (see Appendix B), has not in practice been an effective remedy at all (Article 8);
that the UK security services, without reasonable and lawful purpose, tapped members' telephones or subjected them to other forms of surveillance because of the association's campaign against government policy toward military veterans (Article 12);
These are sombre charges to level against any government; that they should form the basis of lawsuits before the European court against the UK, a tolerant state with a generally commendable record of respect for human dignity, legal and civil rights, is most disconcerting to those who are faced with the challenge of human rights reportage or advocacy; that the apparatus of the UK bureaucracy should be widely suspected of misconduct even toward former military servicemen, who undoubtedly were exposed to extraordinary health risks in the nuclear interests of the state, is a lamentable state of affairs indeed.
An objective review of various parliamentary utterances about the NRPB— ICRF mortality studies suggests that political figureheads at the Ministry of Defense have tended to gild the statistical lilly: they have ponderously insisted that the statistics were thoroughly peered—reviewed and that the conclusions never have been challenged by any "serious scientific criticism".
Suggestions from independent researchers that the statistics about cancer and mortality in the A-test attendees are not scientifically robust have been greeted with discernible contempt. for the Nuclear Veterans, many are convinced that the bureaucracy and/or successive political administrations have been motivated by a desire to protect influential nuclear interests, including the state's, against legal liability for injury to human health.
Discussion
The following discussion recognizes that enthusiastic and hyper reflexive government reliance upon the NRPB—ICRF studies has been pursuant to a policy that in practice, if not in publicly acknowledged intent, has denied compensation to the nuclear test personnel unless medical opinion (given to the War Pensions Agency or Pension Appeals Tribunals) has overwhelmingly favored a particular claimant's case, eg, that his neoplasia most probably resulted from recorded exposure to nuclear radiations.
This official policy is shaky not least because thousands of servicemen in nuclear test zones were never actually monitored for radiation exposure, a remarkably negligent omission received some public attention in 1997 when lawyers acting for the Foreign Office defended three lawsuits at the European court brought by the attorney Ian Anderson (now practicing law in New York state).
In the pages of this independent analysis, it is suggested that UK government policy toward A-test veterans has been insincere, and self-serving. It is suggested that ministerial declarations of confidence in the NRPB—ICRF studies have gone beyond scientific rationality.
Firstly, the adulated process of scientific peer review to which the NRPB—ICRF reports may have been subjected before publication could not, in the case of this subject matter, have amounted to anything more than a formality, a routine and perhaps cursory exercise concerned more with statistical conformities than with close verification of data, objective scrutiny of the methodologic approach by the investigators, and critical questioning of medically improbable conclusions upon which successive governments were publicly to rely.
Secondly, various factors undoubtedly have weighed against searching scientific criticism of the NRPB's efforts; the most obvious being that there are very few radiobiologists, outside of the nuclear industry and government, who have been in a position to advance publicly any serious critique of data that they would not have had the time or resources to independently verify. Besides, radiobiologists as a breed, although they generally are meagrely paid, nevertheless value their jobs and they are well aware that funding and careers can be cut short if they are too outspoken.
Specifically, the discussion in the full report points to methodologic dubiety in the overall NRPB—ICRF approach to the assessment of morbidity and mortality in A-test personnel, and to nullifying deficiencies in the scope of the investigations. It is argued that the studies should have been supervised by investigators drawn from academic disciplines other than civilian cancer epidemiology.
Because they were not, the government-sponsored investigation lacked a realistic military perspective, a clear forensic-pathophysiologic and radiobiologic focus, and probative rigor sufficient for the task. An improbable and confounding hypothesis was pursued, and medically dubious conclusions emerged from what ultimately proved to be — however unintended by the NRPB and ICRF authors — an elegant statistical sanitization of a politically and legally embarrassing legacy: human trauma occasioned by a nuclear weapons program.
It is argued that this sanitization resulted from a spurious comparison of cancer and other mortality in the A-test veterans with cancer and other terminal factors in a cohort of men who had not been exposed to similar hazards. From this conceptually flawed comparison of mortality, which offered little or no leadership or clinical stimulus to physicians whose patients might have illnesses connected with nuclear tests, the political administration and bureaucracy selectively abstracted opinions that would galvanize official dribble to the news media, i.e, that A-tests could not reasonably be blamed for the cancers of those who were upwind, downwind, or sidewise to them.
These A-tests, of course, were sanctioned by Parliament in what was perceived to be the best interests of national defense. That policy is not criticized herein. However, the exercise of nuclear power does not permit the slightest abdication of responsibility: in approving its program of explosions, Parliament became legally responsible for and indebted to thousands of military servicemen whose health was jeopardized by prompt and fallout radiations in test zones. In the United States, Congress has shouldered the nation's responsibility for lives ruined by nuclear radiation. In the United Kingdom, where the engine of compensation for sickly A—test veterans has been running on barely one cylinder, Parliament has yet to fill the fuel tank and unclog the valves.
"Parliament has yet to fill the fuel tank and unclog the valves."
Notwithstanding scientific and more temporal criticisms, it should be emphasized that, for all their inherent flaws and deficiencies, the NRPB—ICRF reports have in fact discredited the government's nuclear " spin ", as notated by the Foreign Office in its defensive submissions to the European court, that military personnel were not exposed to medically significant radiation hazards.
The NRPB-ICRF data clearly show that hundreds, if not thousands, of men received doses of energy from nuclear explosions that any reasonable and objective commentator would accept as being of medical significance, i.e, potentially carcinogenic.
Submissions on this fact seem to have been disregarded by a majority of jurists at the Strasbourg tribunal who, perversely, accepted UK government submissions that the pension appeal rules were indeed fair, that all a sickly veteran had to do to obtain release of his radiation exposure records to the PAT was to dispute MoD's claim that his dose had been zero.
Conclusion
In the following discussion, a comparison is made between the NRPB—ICRF data on British ex-servicemen with peer-reviewed North American data on' a sizeable cohort who may be considered as bona fide scientific controls. This comparison indicates that the incidences of cancer and premature death in UK men who attended A-tests have exceeded incidences in other groups of northern hemisphere men who were chronically exposed to ionizing radiations throughout their working lives.
Most of the acute and chronic radiation—suspected pathologies in military servicemen who observed nuclear explosions would have followed from their exposure to fallout, and ingestion or inhalation of weapon radionuclides and soil activation products; the discussion includes a review of some biological hazards of fallout, and of some issues with which governments and a well—informed, the health-conscious public should be concerned.
Since the close of the Cold War, nuclear weapons tests have become sporadic. Nuclear pollution of the planet, like an aggressive disease, has seemingly gone into remission. But this apparently happy state of affairs should not lull the world into a false sense of security.
For, as Bernard Dixon has said,
'A small bacterium weighs as little as 0.00000000001 gram. A blue v.hale weighs about 100.000,000 yams. Yet a bacterium can kill a whale...
Nfierobes, not macrobes. rule the world.'
(quoted by Garrett L at p411, in The Coming Plague. Newly Emerging Diseases in A World Out ofBalance. 1994, Penguin Books, NY)
In this discussion, the reader is invited to contemplate the possibility that global fallout from the nuclear arms race, through its ionizing effects on genes, their coded molecular products, and cellular or nucleic acid packaging, has powerfully accelerated the capabilities of the microbes to dominate the world.
Can the reader believe that nuclear fallout has insidiously influenced the microbes, enabling them — to plagiarize the eloquence of author Garrett — "to withstand wider temperature variations, outwit more elements of the host immune system, or kill host cells with greater certainty"?
If the lionization (sic) of the microbes by fallout is a bridge too far to cross, then the reader is invited, at the very least, to believe the nuclear test veterans who say that fallout did them no good — and to disbelieve those who say it did the military no harm.
Albert C Baggs BSc
INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL SERVICES
Canada and UK
April 2000
Every MP in the UK should read this independent report which clearly shows that hundreds, if not thousands, of men, received doses of energy from nuclear explosions that any reasonable and objective commentator would accept as being of medical significance, i.e, potentially carcinogenic.
The full report can be viewed here: