Thread by @fleetstreetfox

EXCLUSIVE: Successive UK govts ordered 22,000 servicemen into "serious biological risks" from nuclear weapons testing.

They did not tell the troops.

#medalforheroes

mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

This is a cache of 1,000 classified documents that were opened but mostly unseen, gathering dust in an archive of their own within the National Archives, and resistant to all my efforts to find them.

I was passed a list of file numbers and titles, and pulled 20 of the ones that looked most interesting, a total of 522 pages. It's taken months to comb through them, but the overall picture they paint is horrifying.

Officials were told, and warned each other, of "genetically damaging" levels of exposure. They set "zero risk" safety limits that were no such thing. They set a daily dose limit equivalent to an entire year's worth of background radiation.

A year's worth, in a day, every day.

There were different decontamination standards for scientists and the majority of servicemen. Yet those troops drove the scientists into the blast zones, and lived, ate, and drank, in the fallout areas for up to a year during multiple bomb tests.

Kit and equipment was irradiated, even when buried below ground. Tins of food became radioactive on the sub-atomic level - the tin itself began emitting neutrons.

And these were tins buried 3ft underground during the explosions.

Anyone for spam? No? I'm amazed.

Radiation was found in troops' urine. Scientists complained about "unnecessary margins of safety". And when they went into the contaminated forward areas, they removed windshields to prevent them being covered in fallout dust.

So where do you think the fallout dust went?

When they cleaned the Land Rovers afterwards, they used a conventional vacuum cleaner.

When the filter was clogged with fallout, some poor schmo had to manually bang and beat it. This, the papers say, was "somewhat hazardous".

In the UK, thanks to radon gas decaying from granite rock, sunshine, and a smattering of diagnostic x-rays, we each get an average of about 2 milisieverts of 'background' radiation every year. This is a low dose, but nevertheless thought to contribute to thousands of deaths/yr.

The official @defenceHQ line is that, as the nuclear weapons tests happened elsewhere and no troops were exposed to extra radiation, servicemen were safer next to the nuclear detonations than at home with their mum.

This is utterly mad, of course, but it gets worse.

These papers show that at least some of the troops were exposed to CENTURIES' worth of radiation, compressed into minutes or hours. One captain ordered into the blast zone to collect soil samples got 50R/hour - equivalent to 219 years of background.

A frequent refrain to these stories are that these were experiments, they didn't know what they were doing, standards are different today, etc blah etc.

These documents show they knew. They knew at the time. And they did it anyway.

They used phrases like 'zero risk' when a more accurate one would be 'increased risk'. They issued warnings about gamma radiation, which disappears quickly, and not about alpha radiation, which is much weaker, and can hang around for, ooh, 4 billion yrs or so.

This is what happens if you get too much alpha radiation in your tea: mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/a…

This is not unimportant. If they knew it then, and did it anyway, what do they know NOW, and are they still doing it anyway?

What did they know about Gulf War Syndrome, Sea King toxins, Deepcut, heaven knows what else?

A state - or a Whitehall department - that can scrutinise itself, see where it went wrong, make amends and do better is working well and in our interests.

One which sees what went wrong, then hides, ignores, lies or dissembles about it, is not.

And if what the MoD tells me is what they tell others who inquire, but who may have less knowledge of this story, then it is intentionally misleading the media, a Cabinet Office medal committee, and I wouldn't be surprised ministers too, about the science and the facts.

If they did it then, they can do it now. If they did it to those troops, they'll do it to others. And if those working in govt today, who were not in any way involved in this, are nevertheless incapable of questioning their roles or their predecessors, it'll keep happening.