Written question asked by Dai Davies (Independent (affiliation)) on Friday, 19 October 2007, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 23 October 2007. It was answered by Derek Twigg (Labour) on Monday, 29 October 2007 on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.

Nuclear Weapons: Testing

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what records his Department holds on how many (a) British service personnel, (b) medical auxiliaries, (c) UK Atomic Energy Authority personnel, (d) Atomic Weapons Research Establishment personnel and (e) others took part in the British nuclear testing programme in the Pacific and Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.

Answer: MOD does not hold statistics on overall participation in the tests. Three studies by the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB, now part of the Health Protection Agency) into mortality and cancer incidence among UK nuclear test veterans included 21,357 participants identified from MOD archives. This can be taken as a lower limit on the total number of people who participated in the tests. The NRPB studies count a total of 27,505 'involvements' from the 21,357 participants. The number of test involvements was greater than the number of participants because some people attended more than one test.The 27,505 involvements are broken down as follows:"Royal Navy: 7,219""Army: 7,462""RAF: 11,220""AWRE: 1,604"The figure for AWRE staff includes a small but unspecified number from the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.

Secondary information