دانلود کتاب افشای تاریخ مخفی آزمایش‌های هسته‌ای بریتانیا

JOURNALISTS WORLDWIDE HAVE spent decades alerting others to what befell thousands of people affected by the British nuclear weapons programme, and I am indebted to them. Thank you in particular to my predecessors at the Mirror, Paul Foot, Richard Stott, and Alan Rimmer, and to my editors Tina Weaver, Alison Phillips, and Caroline Waterston, who gave me the time and space to investigate. For further reading I recommend Grappling With The Bomb by Nic Maclellan, about Pacific Islanders, and Maralinga by Frank Walker on Australian tests and veterans. Joan Smith’s Clouds of Deceit covers the early years of the UK campaign. Thanks to all three for letting me quote their work, and to the family of Flight Lieutenant Joe Pasquini for his recollections from Flying Between Two Suns. I tip my hat to Dr Elizabeth Tynan, who wrote Atomic Thunder: British Nuclear Testing in Australia. They would all join me in paying tribute to the nuclear families who have fought for the truth for a lifetime. Doug Hern’s collection of papers, which he kindly shared with me over the years, and Mike Chainey’s continuing efforts at the National Archives, have been invaluable. There isn’t space to list and honour all those I have interviewed over almost two decades. The nuclear community has always been honest, dignified, and goodhumoured, while enduring and telling me of things that have scarred them deeply, and I thank them for that. I have tried to be kind to the scientists involved in the design of these ferocious weapons, and to explain why they were, and are, felt necessary. William Penney, the mathematician who was ‘Father of the Bomb’, was not responsible for the scandal that came in its wake; he is our Oppenheimer, and in some ways a victim too. People always ask ‘who’s to blame?’ There is only one answer: whoever is currently Prime Minister. They alone have the power to end the longest-running scandal in British history. I have done my best to shout about it to the last six people who held that office, with varying success. Maybe the next will do the right thing. In parts I have written about my own involvement with the campaign, an awkward thing to do, and have done so in the third person: not to confuse the reader, but to report on my own actions with the same attitude as I do others. There are three people without whom this book would not exist: my wonderful dad, who taught me about radiation and the principle of leverage, my fabulous mum who has listened to years of grumbling about people she’s never met, and my beautiful daughter, who has so often had to share me with the veterans, and not complained (much) about doing so.