Legacy of nuclear test still remains for navy veteran after 60 years

Sunday, 26 May 2019

The dawn of the nuclear age changed mankind forever. New Zealander Neil Balloch was there to bear witness to this.

Neil Balloch joined the New Zealand Navy in 1955 as a 17-year-old who wanted to see the world.

Two years later, near Christmas Island (Kiritimati), he saw something he would never forget, and it changed his life forever.

In 1957, Balloch was transferred to the HMNZS Rotoiti, a 93-metre long loch-class frigate that had served in the British Royal Navy during World War II.

Little was given away about the purpose of the mission, other than the vague clue they were heading north.

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'I didn't know where we were going,' Balloch said. 'We had to hand in all our cameras, and all our letters were not to be sealed because they were censored – that was my first experience of anything like that.'

After stopping in Fiji to pick up some extra crewmen, the crew were let in on the secret: they were to witness the detonation of a bomb named 'Grapple X'.

The test was part of Operation Grapple, a project that aimed to develop Britain's first thermonuclear weapons.

Neil Balloch is one of more than 500 New Zealanders who were involved in nuclear testing in the 1950s. He says there needs to be recognition for the radiation damage suffered by those who served.

Britain had detonated its first atomic bomb in 1952, but was well behind the United States and the Soviet Union's more advanced and vastly more powerful hydrogen bombs.

At the time, all Balloch and his crewmates knew that it was a bomb similar to those detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

The Rotoiti was at the site as a weather ship, helping to figure out the right time to launch the test.

Everyone was allowed up on deck, as the ship sailed towards where the bomb was going to dropped, about 30 kilometres away.

'There was no protective gear as such, I stood there in my working clothes like the rest of the crew.'

On deck, the crew could hear the pilot tasked with dropping the bomb over the loudspeakers.

'We heard someone on the aircraft say 'approaching bomb site', 'bomb gone', and then they started to count down. We had to turn away, cover our eyes and not look at the bomb.'

When given the all clear to look back, Balloch said the sight was one he would never forget.

Crewmen stand and turn to face the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb during Operation Grapple

'It was frightening, and I mean frightening.

'There it was in all its glory. It was all colours, yellow, red, black, grey, this ball that was going up from the flashpoint, it was scary.

'There was a huge rolling noise, talk about thunder coming towards you. Particularly to a 19-year-old, that was not nice.'

Several hours later the ship was headed right through ground zero of the explosion.

While most of the crew were sent down below, about 10 had to go on deck to hose the ship down, wearing white plastic suits, gloves and gas masks.

'It was supposed to have got rid of the radiation that was there. The ship had sprinklers in the mast and out on the deck, but they had rusted up and were not working.

Balloch served on the HMNZS Rotoiti during Operation Grapple in 1957.

'We were in plastic suits, which made no affect at all to the radiation that was there.'

Balloch said they had no idea what affect the radiation was having on their bodies.

The crew spent a while longer around Christmas Island, sending up weather balloons, having beers on the sand on the island, and catching fish.

'We noticed one night all these flying fish, and we put a thin net up by one of the big lights on the side of the ship.

'They flew into the lights, we caught them and took them up to the chef, and we all had fish and chips afterwards. There's still arguments now that those fish were also irradiated [in the explosion].'

The implications of what had happened to them only began to surface in the 1980s, Balloch said.

'When our association was formed, the New Zealand Nuclear Veterans Association, they asked for medical conditions of ourselves and of our children.

'So many of us had all the same things. A lot of the lads were suffering from leukemia, cancers, or had deformed children … I seem to have copped a lot – I've got cancer inside of me and cancer outside of me.'

Now living in Nelson, 81-year-old Balloch said the fallout of the explosion in 1957 still affected him today – mentally as well as physically.

'It's scary, I still have nightmares about it. I'm currently being treated for PTSD. If somebody says something [that triggers it], it clicks and I begin to panic.

'When a friend rings me to say we've lost another one [of the crew], it all comes back to me then. A lot of people don't know just what happened.'

The remaining veterans deserved recognition for what happened to them during the nuclear tests, he said.

However, recognition for the 562 Royal New Zealand Navy sailors who served had been hard to come by.

A lawsuit filed by New Zealand, Australian, Fijian and British veterans against the British Ministry of Defence failed at the Supreme Court in 2011.

Closer to home, efforts to recognise the damage caused by the radiation had not been successful.

In a 2007 Massey University study, samples were taken from 50 veteran sailors involved in Operation Grapple. Researchers discovered they had suffered chromosome damage higher than that of clean-up workers at Chernobyl.

They linked it directly to the Pacific bomb testing, saying the result was 'indicative of the veterans having incurred long-term genetic damage as a consequence of performing their duties relating to Operation Grapple'.

While the research and its findings were upheld by a Government-appointed panel, a 2011 decision by the Minister of Veterans' Affairs turned down their recommendation that Government acknowledged nuclear test veterans were put at risk though exposure to nuclear radiation.

In a lay summary of the findings released in 2013, the ministry concluded the 'poor choice of exposed and control subjects' made it difficult to understand the differences in radiation between the groups and draw accurate conclusions.

New Zealand Nuclear Veterans Association chairman Roy Sefton said there wasn't a way forward for veterans and their families until the Government officially recognised the research.

'It's a matter of principle and decency, the public should be aware that these veterans were in fact irradiated at Operation Grapple.

'Even if we don't succeed, we're sticking to our guns because we're totally convinced.'