‘Who knew anything about radiation?’
When Neil Balloch was 19, he witnessed a sight he would never forget - the detonation of a nuclear bomb named Grapple X.
Balloch had signed up to the Royal New Zealand Navy as a 17-year-old in 1955, hoping to see the world.
Posted to the HMNZS Rotoiti, Balloch and his crewmates were sent to watch a test near Christmas Island as part of Operation Grapple, a project that aimed to develop Britain’s first nuclear weapons.
The Rototai was at the site as a weather ship, assisting to calculate the right time to launch the test.
“It was part of the Cold War, when England and America were still testing bombs, and we were on Christmas Island to put up balloons so they could test the wind direction and strength, but also hunt for Russian submarines,” Balloch told Stuff.
Interviewed in 2019, the Nelsonian described the bomb as “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.”
On Friday, the now 86-year-old Balloch was awarded the Nuclear Test Medal, presented by the British Defence Advisor to New Zealand, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Dines.
At Nelson’s Garrison Club, Balloch said he was “very, very honoured”.
“But at the same time I am very sad, because my colleagues have passed on. I brought my poppy and these are the people I am respecting today.”
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the implications of what had happened to the more than 500 New Zealanders involved in nuclear testing would come to light.
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.
Balloch said many had leukaemia, cancers, or had deformed children.
His own grandson was born with a severe cleft palate - he had “no top plate, no gum, and very little lip.” After 14 operations he’s OK, but Balloch himself has cancer, and has had pneumonias and bloodclots. “My lungs are a mess,” he said, “we were definitely guinea pigs. Who knew anything about radiation, I was only a kid.”
In November 2022, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a new Nuclear Test Medal, recognising nuclear test veterans’ “contribution to our safety, freedom and way of life”.
They may have participated in operations that “helped keep the UK and our partners safe for over seven decades” as Dines put it, but the health concerns of nuclear test veterans have been perennially brushed under the carpet.
According to the House of Commons Library, an impartial research and information service based in the UK parliament, the Government has stated that numerous studies “have consistently demonstrated that cancer and mortality rates for the Nuclear Test Veterans are similar to those serving contemporaneously in the UK Armed Forces who did not participate in the testing programme, and lower than for the general population”.
Asked if the British government acknowledged the suffering of veterans for years after the tests, Dines said independent studies commissioned by the Ministry of Defence found that overall, the mortality of the test veterans remained within the mean of the population.
“At this stage there’s no intention to change the United Kingdom’s position on that,” he said.
Balloch, however, won’t be giving up the fight for recognition of the radiation damage that he and others suffered, and plans to travel to the UK in March to discuss the next steps with British nuclear test veterans.
In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled against a class action lawsuit filed by over 1000 Kiwi, Australian, Fijian and British veterans and family members on the grounds that the case was not brought within the statutory timeframe.
A new legal case was launched by veterans in September 2023 for access to medical records held by the Ministry of Defence.
However, Balloch said so far, little information was being divulged.