Mr Moonie continued in a similar vein for six pages, before finishing: “I do not believe that the information presented in the dossier provides evidence that would lead us to review our policies on war pensions.”
In the wake of this, Tony Blair pulled out of planned discussions. It was another crushing blow for the veterans, and there were howls of protest from all sides of the political divide.
Labour MP Dr Ian Gibson joined forces with Tory MP John Baron and forced a parliamentary debate. Representatives from the National Radiological Protection Board, now calling itself the Health Protection Agency, agreed to attend the meeting.
But the new organisation, under the thumb of the Ministry of Defence, was as intractable as the old. The same old arguments where wheeled out: no evidence of radiation exposure; statistical studies found no discernable difference in the health of test participants; the men were never in any danger…
The press lost interest, the MPs ran out of words and the initiative once again slipped away from the veterans.
Somehow the campaign staggered on, kept alive by Shirley Denson and Dennis Hayden, a veteran of the Australian bomb tests, and a few other stalwarts who formed a breakaway group which fought increasingly fruitless skirmishes with the Ministry of Defence.
They were derided as “Sunday afternoon revolutionaries” in some quarters for their zeal in trying to keep the campaign in the news agenda, but they ignored the jibes and carried on regardless.
Meanwhile the suffering of the innocents continued unabated. As the politicians argued, a tiny baby boy was being laid to rest in a corner of windswept country graveyard in Swansea.
Around the small white casket were his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. The infant was called Joshua and he never had a chance to see the world: he was still-born at 25 weeks, a tragic signal that the genetic scourge had jumped to the fourth generation of British servicemen who took part nuclear bomb tests 50 years earlier.
Joshua’s family decided to bury him next to his great-grandfather John Condon, an RAF serviceman who died of leukaemia, aged just 24.
Mr Condon died of leukaemia two years after he worked on the Valiant and Canberra bombers used in the H-bomb tests at Christmas Island. He was stationed at Burtronwood, the giant bomber base near Liverpool, as the bombers returned “red-hot” to the UK, and it was his job to strip down the highly-radioactive engines.
Very soon he fell ill, and was diagnosed with the incurable blood disease. His widow Margaret was left to bring up their one-yr-old daughter Diane alone.
Seven years after her husband died, Margaret was also diagnosed with leukaemia. Astonishingly it was the same rare form of the disease that had killed her husband. It was only when she made enquiries at the hospital that treated him that she learned his illness may have been linked to radiation exposure.
But she was still at a complete loss to understand how she could have contracted the same disease until told she may have been contaminated by washing her husband’s overalls which he brought home after work.
Mrs Condon wrote to the Ministry of Defence, and was reassured that her husband had never been contaminated, and it followed, therefore, that she could not have been affected.
But tragedy struck again when their daughter Diane developed a cancerous tumour and her unborn baby was aborted. She was given chemotherapy treatment and appeared to have beaten the cancer, but miscarried twice more before giving birth to a healthy daughter, Rebecca.
The family were relieved that Rebecca was fit and well, until she became pregnant at 18. At about 23 weeks she went to the doctor because she was concerned about not being able to feel her unborn baby moving. Tests revealed the devastating reason: the baby was dead.
A reason was never given for the child’s death, but the family believe they know. Rebecca’s mum Diane, has no doubts: “We all know the reason. There was never any illness in the family before my dad contracted leukaemia. But now it is just one thing after another. It just seems to go on and on.”
It is of course impossible to establish whether there is a connection with Mr Condon’s exposure to radiation and the tragic series of illnesses in his family. But the Condon case is by no means unique. Evidence of trans-generational genetic disorders pepper the files of the nuclear tests veterans association.
A prime example of a “nuclear family” is that of Archie Ross. Since returning from Christmas Island he has suffered cataracts which doctors confirmed were almost certainly caused by ionising radiation.
As we have seen, soon after he returned to the UK, his wife gave birth to Julie who had a range of physical disabilities that persist to this day. But Mr Ross also had another daughter, Tracy, who was born perfect.
The family was again thrown into turmoil when Tracy married and gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby, Jacob. The odds against these events occurring naturally are incalculable. But no official study has ever been proposed to investigate this dreadful phenomenon.
MARK OF THE BOMB
In 2006 the veteran’s campaign was given an unexpected boost from the other side of the world. Seemingly out of the blue, a new scientific technique established that exposure to A-bombs could leave a fingerprint in the DNA of the victim.
New Zealand servicemen who witnessed the Grapple series of tests at Christmas Island had without fanfare commissioned a study by Professor Al Rowland of Massey University to examine this novel concept.
They asked him to investigate if sailors, on board two ships that steamed through fallout zones, had suffered genetic damage. Rowland said that after the passing of 50 years he wasn’t sure there would be anything to find. But after meeting the NZ veteran’s charismatic chairman Roy Sefton, he said he would give it a go.
Rowland concentrated on new scientific tests which looked at translocations, the exchange of genetic material, between different chromosomes. Translocations show evidence of genetic damage and are therefore important indicators of cancers and other illnesses.
Under strict scientific disciplines, blood was taken from 50 of the NZ nuclear veterans for comparison with 50 servicemen who had not been at the tests.
The study identified crucial differences: the veterans had far more cancers and skin problems. And the level of translocations in veterans was three times higher than in the control group.
When the results were published they couldn’t be faulted. The study was successfully peer reviewed by respected scientific journals. Rowland was unequivocaclass="underline" this was proof that servicemen had been exposed to radiation from the Grapple bomb tests.
The news was a huge boost to the flagging fortunes of the British veterans, especially when even the MoD was forced to admit it couldn’t fault the procedures used by Rowland.
The breakthrough was a remarkable testament to the tenacity of Roy Sefton who set about gaining support for the study after he became ill.
He was just 17 when he was sent to the Pacific aboard the frigate Pukaki which, together with its sister ship Rotoiti, was to monitor British H-bomb tests for the New Zealand government.
By the time he was 30, Mr Sefton could hardly walk and his joints ached that much there were times he couldn’t touch anything without feeling pain. But he soon discovered he wasn’t alone.
At least six of his shipmates died in their 20s, from cancers associated with radiation poisoning. Professor Neil Pearce, a distinguished epidemiologist analysed the health records of the New Zealand veterans and found a small, but significant increase, in death rates. He also discovered the men died from cancers typically associated with radiation.