Labrats

The Summer Edition of ATOM will be sent out next week to all our Associate members.

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NEW EPISODE: A Very British Cover-Up

This week the Project Merlin podcast examines the links between Hillsborough and the nuclear veterans, with special guests Charlotte Hennesey and Lydia Hayes.

Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/033AXfDO1YOm70QxqYnWiI

iTunes:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/project-merlin-unlocking-britains-nuclear-secrets/id6785427464

Amazon:
https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/372fc560-5170-48da-ad99-76b73f3b4c9b/project-merlin-unlocking-britain%E2%80%99s-nuclear-secrets

YT:
https://www.youtube.com/

Project Merlin: Unlocking Britain’s Nuclear Secrets Podcast · The University of Liverpool and Research England Policy Fund · Academic Dr Jon Hogg, investigative reporter Susie Boniface and special guests explore the biggest declassification of nuclear secrets in British history. Each week they examine one of 28,000 newly released files, made public...

Our campaign t-shirts are now available to purchase from our website. All proceeds help with the fight for truth and justice.

Andy Burnham's Nuclear Test T-Shirt | LABRATS Black T-shirt with Andy Burnham's Nuclear Test Logo. Truth and Justice for the Nuclear Test Veterans.

*Trigger Warning*

The Weight of a Single Morning: Remembering Hiroshima

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the city of Hiroshima was going about the ordinary business of a Monday. Streetcars were running. Schoolchildren were clearing firebreaks as part of the war effort. Office workers were settling into their desks. Then, 1,900 feet above a T-shaped bridge near the city center, a single bomb dropped from the American B-29 *Enola Gay* detonated with a force equivalent to roughly 15,000 tons of TNT.

In the time it takes to draw a breath, the world's understanding of what a single weapon could do changed forever.

A City Erased

The blast released heat estimated at several thousand degrees Celsius at ground zero, instantly vaporizing or incinerating everything within a half-mile radius. Nearly five square miles of the city were flattened. Of Hiroshima's roughly 76,000 buildings, the vast majority were destroyed or severely damaged. People close to the hypocenter left only shadows burned into stone — the outline of a body, a ladder, a hand on a bank's steps, all that remained where a person had been standing.

Estimates of the dead vary, which is itself part of the horror: so many records, and so many record-keepers, were destroyed along with the city. By the end of 1945, historians generally agree the death toll had reached somewhere between 90,000 and 146,000 people, out of a population of roughly 350,000. Many died instantly. Tens of thousands more died in the following days and weeks from burns, radiation sickness, and injuries that overwhelmed what was left of the city's medical infrastructure — infrastructure that had itself been largely destroyed, along with most of the doctors and nurses who would have treated the wounded.

Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15, ending the Second World War. Whether the bombings were necessary to end the war, or whether Japan was already near collapse, remains one of the most contested questions in military history — a debate that historians, ethicists, and policymakers continue to weigh nearly eighty years later. But the human cost of that single morning is not contested. It is simply too large to argue away.

The Long Aftermath

What made Hiroshima different from the firebombings that had already devastated Tokyo and other Japanese cities was not only its scale but its aftermath. Survivors — known in Japan as *hibakusha*, "explosion-affected people" — carried the bomb's effects for the rest of their lives. Radiation exposure led to elevated rates of leukemia and other cancers for decades afterward. Many hibakusha faced social discrimination in the years that followed, as misplaced fears about contagion and "tainted" bloodlines led some Japanese to avoid marrying survivors or their children.

Among the dead was Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when the bomb fell about a mile from her home. She survived the blast itself but developed leukemia at age eleven. In the hospital, she began folding paper cranes, inspired by a Japanese tradition holding that a thousand cranes granted a wish. She died in October 1955. Her story, and the cranes that followed her, became one of the enduring symbols of the bombing — not of politics or strategy, but of a child's life cut short by a decision made by people she never met.

What Remains

Hiroshima was rebuilt. It is today a modern city of over a million people, known for its streetcars, its oysters, and the quiet dignity of its Peace Memorial Park. At the park's center stands the skeletal dome of the former Industrial Promotion Hall — one of the few structures left standing near the hypocenter, deliberately preserved as it was found, its twisted iron frame open to the sky. It is one of the most recognizable ruins in the world, and one of the most solemn.

Every August 6, the city holds a memorial ceremony. A bell tolls at 8:15 a.m., the exact moment the bomb detonated. Paper lanterns are floated down the Motoyasu River at dusk, each one carrying a name, a wish, a small light moving against dark water. Survivors, now in their late eighties and nineties, still sometimes speak — their numbers dwindling every year, which lends their testimony a particular urgency. Soon, Hiroshima's living memory of that morning will belong entirely to history rather than to anyone who can still describe it firsthand.

Why Remembering Matters

The physics of the atomic bomb has not changed since 1945. What has changed is scale: the weapons in current nuclear arsenals are, in many cases, dozens or hundreds of times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb that leveled a city and killed tens of thousands of people in an instant would today be considered a modest weapon by the standards of a modern strategic arsenal.

That fact is worth sitting with. Hiroshima is not only a historical event to be studied — it is a unit of measurement, the smallest and most human-scaled increment by which we can grasp the destructive power that nations have since built by the thousands. Every time a diplomat, a general, or a head of state discusses nuclear deterrence, arms control, or the unthinkable prospect of nuclear war, Hiroshima is the ruler against which everything else is measured.

To remember Hiroshima honestly is not to assign easy blame or offer simple lessons. It is to hold two things at once: the reality of a war that had already cost tens of millions of lives, and the reality of what happened to one ordinary city on one ordinary morning, when the abstract idea of a weapon became, for a few hundred thousand people, the last thing they ever knew.

The shadows on the stone are still there. So is the dome. So, for a little while longer, are the people who remember. What we do with that memory — whether it fades into a paragraph in a textbook or continues to shape how the world thinks about the weapons it still holds — is still, in some sense, being decided.

Today we mark 81 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and we just ended a few hours ago the livestream from the Hiroshima Peace Ceremony. If you missed the brilliant insights our Japanese colleagues shared on the A-bombs that survived the day, as well as the moment of silence from the Hiroshima Peace Park, you can catch up here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9aAJgQDRL8

We have received lots of questions regarding the call for a special tribunal, so we have asked McCue Jury & Partners to prepare a summary document of the confidential briefing paper which was sent to the UK Government.

Read it here:

Why a Special Tribunal? We have received lots of questions regarding the call for a special tribunal, so we have asked McCue Jury & Partners to prepare a summary document of the confidential briefing paper which was sent to the UK Government. TRUTH, JUSTICE & LEGACY SPECIAL TRIBUNAL FOR NUCLEAR TESTING VETERANSThis documen...

The 'Andy Burnhams Nuclear Test' petition has surpassed 2,000 signatures. A big thank you to everyone who has signed it.

You can keep up to date with the campaign by visiting our dedicated web page and signing the petition:

ANDY BURNHAMS NUCLEAR TEST | LABRATS.INTERNATIONAL LABRATS represents nuclear veterans, atomic veterans, scientists, civilians, and their families across the world who have been affected by the Atomic / Nuclear Testing program. We are one big family, connected together with one common bond. Watch videos from Australia. This page is dedicated to info...

The Missing Medical Records Review highlighted additional records that had not been searched. Report by Susie Boniface.

Nuclear test veterans' medical records were gathered by secret government lab EXCLUSIVE: Today the files are held by a private contractor called Restore, which specialises in document storage - a digital version is held by Defence Radiation Protection Services, another part of the MoD, based 172 miles away in Hampshire

Exclusive by Jack Carson from GB News.

Andy Burnham urged to 'hear veterans' voices', campaigners tell GB News as nuclear test tribunal plan delivered to No10 Thousands of British servicemen and civilians participated in nuclear tests in the South Pacific and Australia between 1952 and 1991