It is “grimly fortuitous timing” that “Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story” is being broadcast on BBC Two just as “Vladimir Putin’s finger seems to be hovering close to the red button”, said Carol Midgley in The Times.
The “weighty” documentary shines a light on the nuclear tests carried out by the British government in Australia and the South Pacific between 1952 and 1963, and the “terrible litany” of illnesses and deaths that have plagued the nuclear veterans ever since.
A “well-told reminder of the catastrophic, irreversible devastation” wreaked by nuclear weapons, the documentary suggests the extraordinary “brass neck of our Ministry of Defence”, which continues to deny the link between the atomic testing and the veterans’ subsequent health issues.
While the US, Australia, France, Canada, China and Russia have all paid compensation to their nuclear veterans, the UK has not. Instead, the British government has been “gaslighting” the veterans for years, said Susie Boniface, the investigative journalist, interviewed in the programme, who has spent two decades delving into what happened.
The UK’s nuclear-testing scandal should be added to the long list of “injustices where walls of silence and lies” have prevented the powerless from “telling their whole truths”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian.
This “calmly scathing” documentary carefully sets out the case, starting with the selection of the unwitting “human guinea pigs”. A group of local people and British and Commonwealth servicemen and scientists witnessed 45 atomic and hydrogen bombs being detonated. Many were stationed at blast sites, so the “effects on humans” could be recorded.
A handful of British veterans are interviewed during the show, sharing their “traumatic” memories. They had no clue what they were letting themselves in for. At first, arriving at a tropical archipelago off the coast of Australia and “living a life of sunshine, beer, seafood and beach football”, they thought they were in paradise.
But their painful recollections of “sitting on the beach and shielding their eyes” with their bare hands as they waited for a nuclear bomb to be dropped into the sea behind them is “eerie and nightmarish”. One veteran recalls flying into the mushroom cloud in a plane, “looking down at the crimson inferno below before being flipped upside down by the force of the explosion”.
Almost “more upsetting” is what happened next: many of the men’s children and grandchildren were born with disabilities and genetic defects. The “official line” is that there is no correlation between this and the tests; “the veterans, bitterly and tearfully, disagree”.
For the now-elderly surviving veterans “time is running out”, and the lack of a public enquiry or any form of compensation feels deeply unfair. “Answering their questions honestly looks like the least we can do,” said The Guardian’s Seale.
The testing also had a devastating impact on the Indigenous Australians who lived near the testing sites, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. In one distressing scene, local journalist Colin James visits the Woomera cemetery in Maralinga, and counts the graves of 22 stillborn babies and 34 infants who died before their first birthday. “Officially, they died as a result of heatwaves.”
The “truth does have a habit of coming out eventually”, said Midgley in The Times. “Maybe, like the Post Office scandal, it will take a TV drama to help it on its way.”