There’s a certain irony in the fact that, hot on the heels of Mr Bates vs the Post Office hoovering up at the National Television Awards, Britain’s Atomic Bomb Scandal (Channel 4) drops on our screens. For while it took 20 years-plus for Alan Bates to see light at the end of the Horizon tunnel, that’s a sprint compared to the marathon battle for justice waged by the servicemen and their families caught up in Britain’s atomic bomb testing.
It’s seven decades since a generation of fresh-faced sailors, eager for adventure and entirely unaware of what they were getting into, set off from grey post-war Britain for a stretch of exotic national service on the South Pacific atoll of Christmas Island. But naked sunbathing and liaisons with the locals took a dark turn: they were there as bystanders to a set of experimental atomic explosions as Britain tried to keep pace in the arms race.
Not that the sailors felt the heat at the time. Peter Lambourne, who has seen all of his Christmas Island comrades die prematurely as a suspected result of exposure to radiation, recalled the innocence of the time. “You think, ‘Hey, I’m 18, they must know what they’re doing’.” Words that stood in stark contrast to his description of the blasts they were exposed to. “You could see the spine of the guy next to you, like an X-ray.”
The fallout from the Christmas Island tests, recalled in graphic detail but with admirable restraint in this sobering documentary, has been harrowing. Cancer rates five times the average among those who were there, plus many of their children being born with disabilities and deformities, point to powerful evidence that the blasts had a devastating impact on the unwitting guinea pigs to an officially sanctioned experiment.
Yet, while the US, China, France and Russia have paid compensation in similar cases, successive UK governments have stonewalled and denied culpability. The descendants featured and still fighting for, at the very least, an apology, aren’t holding their breath that the current incumbents, despite pledging support prior to the election, will change that track record.
Who knows, maybe Mr Bates screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes is busy beavering away on the backstories of the families who have been put through emotional and physical agonies in the – it bears repeating – seven decades since the tests. You can only hope so, if this powerful report is anything to go by, it’s the only hope of getting governments to do the right thing.
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