Submitted by aka.attrition
The men who watched nuclear bomb tests: ‘It was so bright I could see the bones in my fingers’
Veterans of British nuclear testing in the Cold War say they – and their children and grandchildren – are still living with the health effects. And 70 years on, they want to see recognition of their part in the missions.
RAF veteran John Lax is about to describe what it’s like seeing a nuclear bomb being detonated. “Even if I tell you what it was like,” he tells i, “you probably can’t really imagine it unless you’ve witnessed it yourself.”
Now 81, Lax was a 20-year-old air wireless mechanic when he was sent to take part in Britain’s nuclear testing programme in the Pacific in 1962.
Like many servicemen, he didn’t know there would be bomb tests when he arrived on Christmas Island, then a British territory, now a republic named Kiribati.
“We were told to put on long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt,” he says, “and we had these dark goggles which meant you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. Then we had to go and sit on the football pitch with our backs to the detonation, because if we’d faced it, the fireball would have burned our eyes.
Continue reading “So do they or don’t they exist .. Nuclear Bombs, that is?”
