Claims by a University of Dundee researcher that Australian servicemen were used as guinea pigs in British nuclear weapons trials are attracting massive interest from the Australian media today (Friday11/5).
Ms Sue Rabbit Roff senior research fellow at the University's department of medical education claims that she has found evidence that Australian personnel were used to test the capacity of certain clothing to protect against radioactivity in the 1950s. The claim is based on a document Ms Roff - who has long campaigned on this subject - has unearthed from the National Archives of Australia.
She said: "This document lists 24 Australian personnel who were used directly for clothing trial experiments to see what sort of clothing would be more protective to men in a nuclear war situation.
"The men were asked to wear particular types of clothing and to crawl and walk through ground zero some hours and days after the detonation of nuclear and atomic weapons at Maralinga.
"This puts the lie to the British Government's claim that they never used humans for guinea pig-type experiments in nuclear weapons trials in Australia - a claim they made very strongly and ferociously in the court at Strasbourg in 1997.
"The second significance is that it gives us a very interesting sub sample of men who were at the nuclear weapons tests who could be tracked down and traced over the years to see what their health outcomes were. Did they die early? Did they die of cancer? Did they die of cancers that we know can be caused by radiation? Were their children healthy? Were their reproductive outcomes satisfactory in health terms?"/ends
Contact Sue Rabbit Roff at 01382 631958 email s.l.roff@dundee.ac.uk