March 14, 2012. 9.59 GMT.
The end when it came was swift.
Lord Wilson of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United Kingdom, stepped up to the rostrum and delivered the coup de grace: “I consider that each of the appeals should be dismissed,” he intoned, like a priest reading the last rites. “I consider that the actions have no real prospect of success.”
The veterans had lost by 4-3 he said, adding: "Putting aside the law for one moment, all seven members of the court would wish to record their personal sympathy for the veterans. It must be bad enough for the nine veterans, and the other claimants, to learn that they have lost this final round, but to learn that they have lost by the narrowest possible margin must make it even worse."
The judgment was received in silence by the small band of nuclear veterans and widows outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Most had had enough of sympathetic words. There had been many disappointments, but this latest really did feel like the end. There were no champagne corks popping that day as the routed army of cold war warriors quietly dispersed and melted away.
The Ministry of Defence relished the moment. Jubilant Andrew Robathan MP, the latest in a long line of defence ministers for Veterans Affairs, immediately fired off a gleeful letter to all members of parliament informing them of the decision.
The Supreme Court ruled by a majority decision that all nine lead cases were statute barred and declined to allow the claims to proceed. Perhaps of greater significance is that ALL (his emphasis) the Justices recognised that the veterans would face great difficulty proving a causal link between the illnesses suffered and attendance at the tests. The Supreme Court described the claims as having no reasonable prospect of success and that they were doomed to fail.
The triumphal tone of the letter was the final kick in the teeth for the veterans. Their legal team struggled to put a brave face on the disastrous result. There was talk of regrouping and taking the fight to the European courts. But just getting to Strasbourg to fight the battle normally took at least three years, and time was not on the side of the veterans. It was their darkest hour.
The verdict came as no surprise to Ken McGinley. He rightly guessed that his triumph before Judge Foskett was a false dawn. Despite the celebrations, he knew in his bones that it had not been enough.
After 30 years of struggle he had still not found the ‘smoking gun’, the knock-out punch… the one piece of crucial evidence that would finally nail all the lies. And he also knew the British people had wearied and grown tired of the nuclear veterans.
He had noted the empty press benches (the various proceedings had engendered little interest from Fleet Street’s finest); the heady and intoxicating oxygen of publicity had evaporated. After the Supreme Court ruling he had few words left to say and he slipped quietly away, anxious only to return home to his wife in Johnstone.
THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
There is a famous Sherlock Holmes short story, "Silver Blaze", which focuses on the disappearance of a racehorse and on the apparent murder of its trainer by an intruder. The tale is distinguished by Holmes deducing that the mystery hinged on what he called: “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
In the story a puzzled Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard points out that the dog did nothing in the night-time, to which Holmes replies: “That is the curious incident.” The point being made of course is that the dog didn’t bark because it knew who the intruder was.
Sherlock Holmes doubtless would have found the “curious incident of Grapple Y” just as intriguing. For like the dog, the lack of fanfare or fuss when this most important of bombs was detonated, was notable to say the least.
This, after all, was Britain’s ever biggest bomb. If ever there was a case where the dog should have been barking loudly and urgently, this was it. But the government of the day treated it as a matter of little importance. In fact the silence was deafening.
The press, was also uncharacteristically subdued. Instead of trumpeting it to the heavens, the following anodyne article that appeared in the Times (The government’s traditional mouthpiece) on April 30, 1958 was typical of the way the incident was reported at the time:-
A British nuclear device was successfully exploded at a high altitude over the central Pacific yesterday. It was announced last night that Mr Aubrey Jones, the Minister of Supply, had received a report from Air Vice-Marshal Grandy, task force commander, Christmas Island. It was stated scientific measurements were being collected for accurate evaluation, and that early indications were that fall-out would be negligible.
Considering that Grapple Y was the culmination of Britain’s H-bomb tests which the year before had been afforded banner headlines and spread across acres of newsprint as a “dress rehearsal for the death of the world”, this was a remarkably muted response.
The official record of the event was also notable for a complete lack of drama. Group Captain William Edmund Townsend of the Royal Australian Air Force, one of several official observers specially flown to Christmas Island for the Grapple Y test, reported:-
After breakfast, we were taken to witness the shot. It was learned this was a “clean” hydrogen bomb. The air burst precluded any water or dust being drawn up from the surface which may give possible radioactive fall-out and it was not anticipated that any fall-out from this bomb would occur.
He makes his glimpse of Armageddon sound like a stroll in the park. It is interesting to note, however, that Townsend reports he “learned” that it was a clean bomb; in other words he was acting on information received rather than what he observed.
There is no mention anywhere of the storm clouds that gathered after the burst, much less about any ensuing rain. Like the dog in the night-time, Townsend, a dyed-in-the-wool establishment figure later awarded the CBE, was curiously silent on that score.
In the absence of an inquisitive Sherlock Holmes, Grapple Y faded unheralded into history; an event of little consequence.
It was 50 years before it was brought blinking back into the daylight when John Large, a consultant nuclear engineer internationally respected for his work in assessing the risks posed by nuclear explosions, identified Grapple Y as a possible cause of contamination on Christmas Island.
His interest was aroused after one of the few photographs of the bomb was published in a scientific journal. It was a classic picture of a nuclear explosion complete with majestic mushroom cloud. But what made it unusual was the stem of the cloud which was oddly striated with a series of tooth-like ridges round the edges.
Large was convinced this was caused by the explosion sucking up large amounts of sand and sea water into the stem. This, of course, was contrary to the accepted wisdom that the bomb was exploded too high in the air to cause fallout. Large made a study of all the available photographs of Grapple Y together with rare video footage and reached the conclusion that the bomb exploded much lower than had been admitted by the Ministry of Defence.
He calculated, from a series of “timed, sequential photographs of Grapple Y” that the detonation height was 1,500 metres, and not the official height of 2353 metres. Large suggested that the troops could have been contaminated by the resulting fallout.
It was a convincing argument that was given a cameo role in the various court hearings. Unfortunately its importance was overshadowed by the Rowland Report which usually received star billing.
It was only after the debacle of the Supreme Court hearing that Grapple Y was re-examined as part of a general review of all the evidence to see what could be salvaged from the wreckage.