Denise’s dad Fred Barker, a former Sapper in the Army told her he had been stationed on Christmas Island when a hydrogen bomb was tested. Denise, his first child, was born less than two years after he returned.
“Dad said he’d always blamed himself for the way I was, but I told him not to worry. It’s the Government that should pay for putting so many men in harm’s way in the first place. It couldn’t possibly be his fault. He was only following orders. I don’t know what the future holds for me. I am still a very slow walker and I get very tired, and I am still very weak down my left side. I always have to think about how I walk and have to tell myself to move my left leg in front of my right. I am scared I will end up in a wheelchair.”
Mrs Valerie Billing, from Ripon North Yorkshire, was still recovering from the shock of being told her baby daughter Claire had been born with a deformed leg, when the doctor asked her if she had ever been exposed to radiation.
She recalled: “I expected to be asked what sort of pills I had taken, things like that. But I wasn’t even sure what radiation exposure meant. How could I, a housewife from Ripon, be exposed to radiation? The doctor said they were considering every possibility because they had absolutely no idea why Claire was born that way. He said radiation exposure was just one of many possibilities. I told him in no uncertain terms that I’d never had so much as an X-ray.”
Mrs Billing may not have been exposed to radiation… but her husband Robert had. He was present at three H-bomb explosions on Christmas Island in 1957-58. It was his job to drive an Army land rover taking scientists out to the test sites to collect samples.
He said: “The scientists were covered head to toe in white protective suits and gas masks. All I had on was a pair of shorts and a bush hat to keep the sun off. I must have been contaminated and it looks as though I have passed something on to Claire. There can be no other possible explanation. I think it’s very significant that one of the doctors asked my wife if she had been exposed to radiation. Of course she hadn’t… but I certainly had.”
Gerald Gollop from Wiltshire was serving with the RAF on Christmas Island when he witnessed two explosions. “One of them nearly took the island apart,” he recalled. Mr Gollop’s health was fine… but his wife had to be sterilised after given birth to two badly deformed babies soon after Mr Gollop returned. The first child, a girl, born in 1960, was so badly deformed, the doctors wouldn’t let the couple see her. The child lived for just five hours. Their second child, born six years later, was also deformed, but stillborn “We went through hell,” said Mr Gollop. “I always thought there might be a connection with Christmas Island, but the doctors just said it was an act of God.”
Young Paul Noble was nicknamed the “matchstick boy” due to a strange illness that made his bones so brittle they would break at the slightest knock. The young man by the time he was 19 years old had broken his legs more than 200 times and suffered innumerable broken arms and collar bones. His mother Margaret said: “We first noticed the disease when Paul began to toddle. As soon as he bumped into something, or just fell over, he would break a bone. He was permanently in plaster throughout his childhood. He had so many he didn’t even seem to mind the pain. Paul can’t do strenuous exercise apart from swimming. The muscles in his legs are completely wasted.”
Doctors offered no explanation for Paul’s condition other than, ‘It’s one of those things’, and they didn’t seem to make a connection when his dad John, a former Army Sapper, told them he had been out to Christmas Island where he witnessed five nuclear explosions. Mr Douglas of Leslie, Fife, said: “I always had a gut instinct about Paul; I always thought there was a connection with the bomb tests. But who was I to argue with the doctors? They just wouldn’t listen.”
The case histories piled up. The story had turned into an oddyssey of epic proportions and one that was growing by the day. In just a week thirty-two of those families independently told of the most appalling problems with their offspring. Between them they had a total of 57 children who had either died, been born deformed or suffered other crippling diseases and illnesses.
On the face of it, it was overwhelming evidence that something was seriously wrong with the children of the men who took part in nuclear bomb tests. Their stories resonated with truth.
These were decent, ordinary people with no particular axe to grind or political point to make. They were deeply patriotic and loathed to criticise the services they once so proudly represented.
But they were resentful of the indifference of the Ministry of Defence and the Government to their health problems which they were convinced had been caused through witnessing nuclear bomb tests.
They were also angry at the posturing of ministers whose only experience of atomic bombs had been gleaned from the newsreels. They felt they had been fobbed off, talked down to and treated like troublesome children.
Most felt no surprise that other servicemen’s children had been affected. For they had long harboured the suspicion that the atomic bomb was finally reaping its grim harvest.
The story hit the newspapers and there was uproar. Scores more veterans told of problems with their children. But the official guardians responsible for the nation’s health were not impressed.
The Cancer Research Institute and the Medical Research Council both agreed that radiation-induced genetic disorders were entirely possible. Laboratory experiments on mice and fruit flies had proved that conclusively.
But most experts dismissed the reports as ‘alarmist’ and were quick to point out that, two per cent of new-born babies suffered some form of genetic disorder. An article in the prestigious New Scientist magazine dismissed the reports as ‘biased’ because the men had ‘selected themselves’ by volunteering information about problems in their children.
Professor Joseph Rotblat recognised a familiar pattern in the expert’s responses. In an interview he warned about the ‘established scientific caucus’ who were more concerned about protecting their government-funded grants than delving into the tricky waters of radiation-induced genetic effects. “It’s all about money,” he said. “You are not going to get anyone to endorse this. They’ll use Neel and Schull.”
Neel and Schull were two scientists commissioned by the US Government to study the effects on children born after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After a lengthy five-year investigation no evidence of genetic disorders was found in the offspring of survivors.
Despite these official assurances, few people were persuaded. The strictly formal Japanese community shunned survivors of the bomb as being “unclean.” Marriage was often impossible; many families left the city to start a new life elsewhere. Those that did escape eradicated all evidence they had lived in Hiroshima.
A 1965 survey of atomic bomb survivors asked couples if they had experienced “adverse discrimination” in marriage. Of those in the unmarried 35-39 age group, 21.4 per cent reported discrimination. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that few reported incidents of damage to their offspring.
But the Hiroshima/Nagasaki cohort were not the only radiation exposed groups to be studied. Early radiologists who absorbed relatively large cumulative doses such as the New Jersey radium dial painters who in the 1910s and 1920s ingested radioactive materials in the workplace all suffered illness and early death. Uranium miners and patients treated with radiation were other affected groups.
Ionising radiation, the same as produced by atomic bombs, was well known to cause biological changes in both humans and experimental organisms. Academic papers available at the time showed that animals exposed to even very low levels of radiation could produce genetically damaged offspring.