'Some boys wet themselves, some wanted their mothers'

Reckless exposure to atomic weapons tests left young men and later, their children suffering from debilitating illness and disability. Zoé Beaty reports on the long fight for justice

- Zoé Beaty

For John Folkes, it all began with a simple command, and a blinding flash. It was September 1956, and he was flying 18,000ft over Maralinga, Australia, secured in his seat by a single lap and shoulder strap, when a 15 kiloton atomic device – as powerful as the weapon that had devastated Hiroshima a decade before – was detonated over the desert plains below.

Two days earlier, the 19-year-old had been told that his job was to head directly into the mushroom cloud and collect a sample of the radiation released by the blast. The flash blazed beneath him, forming an image that would terrorise Folkes’s dreams for the remainder of his life: it was “an inferno”, he recalls, describing “crimson and black smoke billowing up towards us”.

“The cloud was rising, it was coming up faster than we expected, but there was no turning round, no brakes on a plane. That’s when I thought ‘We’re not going to make it.’”

They sped up. Suddenly, all the gauges in the cockpit were spinning out of control. Folkes shared a look with the pilot. “No more than four seconds later, we were hit with this enormous shockwave, which flipped the aircraft over on its back, leaving me suspended in the air on these straps.” Unfathomably, they made it safely to the ground – “By the hand of God,” says Folkes, who is now 89 and lives in Thanet. The moment he stepped off the plane, his hands began violently shaking, and they haven’t stopped since.

Folkes was working as part of Operation Buffalo, carried out by the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment. He was just one of thousands of young men whose lives were treated as little more than collateral damage in Britain’s race to become a global nuclear power.