Prince Philip in plan to set foot on nuke ground zero
Royal flew over site in wake of A-bomb test
PRINCE Philip was flown over Britain’s nuclear test site and came close to being landed in the middle of a toxic fallout zone.
Newly discovered documents show the Duke of Edinburgh visited Christmas Island, in the South Pacific, just months after Operation Grapple, a series of four atomic and hydrogen bomb explosions during the Cold War.
Doug Hern, historian of the British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association, said: “These documents show a great deal of care being taken over the protocol of the Prince’s visit, but... a shocking disregard for his safety.
“But it was the same for us. We were allowed to spend our weekends off in the bombed area, where we caught crayfish on the reef, drank beer at barbecues on the beach and slept out under the stars. And not far away were these patches of sand that had been vitrified, turned to black glass almost.”
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The revelation could help a campaign to recognise the veterans and award them medals. Up to 22,000 servicemen were involved in the tests.
Comedian Al Murray, who is backing the medal campaign, said: “The idea of landing a prince and decorated war hero at the spot where only six months earlier we’d fired off nuclear weapons to see what would happen now seems like a massive risk. We’d never dare to do it today.”
The documents detail plans for the Prince’s three-day visit in April, 1959.
But on the second day, they show plans for a “forward area recce” by Philip in a helicopter to view “ground zero”. The last test had been an atomic weapon code-named Burgee, 194 days earlier, which had a yield the same as that which killed up to 80,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
The same area had been used for testing dozens of nuclear bombs, with the largest 100 times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima.