‘It goes down the generations’ – Nuke check veterans victims of ‘state cover-up’
Nuclear veterans were told they were victims of “a state cover-up” as MPs vowed to help win their long battle for justice.
A cross-party coalition listened as H-bomb survivors Bryan Jarvis and Brian Unthank, both 86, and Dave Whyte, 87, gave horrifying evidence about their health legacy from Cold War nuke trials.
Bryan Jarvis, of Ferndown, Dorset, fought tears as he said: “I spent five months on Christmas Island, and thought no more about it. Then my daughter had a lot of very traumatic miscarriages. My granddaughter recently had four miscarriages on the trot. It goes down the generations, and I blame myself.”
The MPs heard evidence uncovered by the Mirror ’s investigation of the Nuked Blood Scandal, including decades of Ministry of Defence denials that it had hidden medical information.
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Finally this May it published 4,000 pages of evidence about secret blood testing of thousands of troops, civilians and indigenous people. Ex-RAF cook Mr Unthank told how he’s had 93 skin cancers, his wife had 12 late-term miscarriages, his son was born with holes in his heart and a daughter had two wombs. Twenty years of his medical records, covering the period, are missing.
Labour MP Ian Byrne said: “This is the Hillsborough playbook. Well, it’s before that, you came first. This is a state cover-up.”
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A representative of Defence Secretary John Healey’s attended with Labour, Tory and SNP MPs. Tory grandee Sir Julian Lewis suspected years of refusal to admit the truth was down to fears of big payouts, and officials advising ministers that any admission would be “the thin end of the wedge”.
Former sapper Mr Whyte, of Kirkcaldy, Fife, said: “I don’t blame MPs. I blame the civil servants, they’re behind everything. I’ve been asking for my medical records since 2000, and parts of them are missing and falsified.”
The MPs pledged their support for a public inquiry, compensation, plus a memorial of national significance to commemorate the bomb tests and their aftermath. Campaigners have urged Veterans Minister Al Carns to force declassification of thousands more documents, withheld under claims of national security at the Atomic Weapons Establishment.
