WASHINGTON -- Veterans representing some 20,000 Canadian, British and Australian soldiers exposed to radiation from U.S. nuclear tests said Monday that, like American veterans, they are being ignored by their governments.
Two Britons and one Canadian scored the lack of medical help or special compensation at a news conference on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the U.S. National Association of Atomic Veterans. An Australian scheduled to speak was reported too ill to attend.
Hearings on the problem open Tuesday in the House Veterans subcommittee on oversight and investigations, chaired by Rep. G.B. Montgomery, D-Miss.
The U.S. atomic veterans' group was established in 1979 to locate and provide assistance to the more than 250,000 ex-servicemen said to have been exposed to radiation during 600 nuclear test detonations between 1946 and 1962, 236 of them in the atmosphere.
About 20,000 members of the Canadian, British and Australian militaries also took part in some of the tests and have formed similar organizations in their countries.
Al Draper, 61, of Ottawa, Canada, said that six months after he witnessed an atomic explosion at the Nevada Test Site in 1958 as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force, he suffered complete paralysis and has only partly recovered.
He said some 1,000 Canadian servicemen participated in nuclear tests in Nevada and at Christmas Island in the Pacific and Australia's Maralinga and Monte Bello Islands. Draper has formed a Canadian organization, now numbering 500 members, to press for fulfillment of promises of help from the Canadian government.
'Nothing has been done by them,' he said.
Tom Armstrong of Stratford-on-Avon, England, who served in the Royal Air Force from 1939 to 1974, said he witnessed an eight-megaton hydrogen bomb test at Christmas Island in the Pacific in 1957.
He began suffering a long series of mysterious health problems starting in 1968. His claim for service disability was denied by the British Government and a 1982 appeal was turned down, he said.
'I feel very bitter,' he said. 'If I had received bullet wounds, I would have received a pension and compensation. But radiation can also kill me.'
Armstrong is treasurer of British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, which represents approximately 13,000 British atomic veterans.
Harold Crosbie, an Australian veteran who also fell ill after attending U.S. nuclear tests, was scheduled but was reported too sick to attend.
Rep. Bob Edgar, D-Pa., said, 'Our government used U.S. troops as guinea pigs and later tried to bury what had happened.'
Rep. Paul Simon, D-Ill., author of a bill to compensate veterans suffering from ailments that may have been caused by radiation, said, 'The nation's atomic veterans problem is now coming home to roost.'
He said so far the Veterans Administration and federal agencies 'have resisted endorsing an atomic veterans aid package.'
The official U.S. position is that there has been no scientific link proven between the diseases suffered by servicemen and their exposure to nuclear testing.
Simon said he developed his compensation plan after meeting Bob Farmer, a constituent from Steeleville, Ill., who participated in a 1946 atomic test in the South Pacific.
Farmer has since contracted cancer since and each of his nine children has a genetically linked disorder, he said.
It was learned that at Tuesday's subcommittee session, an international research group plans to release formerly top-secret Pentagon documents that reportedly show excessive radiation exposure to many of the 42,000 servicemen who participated in two nuclear tests at Bikini atoll in the Pacific in 1946.
