What was it like to experience a nuclear detonation?

Born in 1936, Bryan Hackett joined the RAF before travelling to Australia in 1956 to be part of Operation Buffalo. While at the Maralinga test site he worked as a clerk and acted as a typist for Sir William Penney, who had overseen Britain’s first atomic test as part of Operation Hurricane in 1952. In this clip, Hackett describes the sheer power of the explosion and recalls being able to see the bones in his hands, a common experience among British nuclear veterans. He also mentions being equipped with a film badge dosimeter to record the level of radiation he was exposed to during the detonation. Readings from these badges were rarely made known to servicemen. Hackett later went to art college and was a practicing artist before retiring.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Bryan Hackett was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

We knew which direction it was because we had to turn our backs to it, and it was exciting time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. And we turned our backs to it, our hands over our eyes closed tight, and ten, nine, so on like that. The first test was a ground test. Three, two, one, flash! Turn round, and the flash went off, you could see the pink bones in your hands, that was so good. And I turned round and saw this puff of smoke going all across the horizon. And as it went across, there was a small bit of cloud in the sky, and as the blast approached, these clouds disappeared, until it hit us, bang. And it tugged at your clothes. Now I stood on a packing case and I nearly fell off, because that was that…yeah. And that was like fifteen, twenty miles away. I forget for sure now. So anyway, the cloud went in, red hot fire went up in the air, okay? And at this time we all had to wear from there up, before then, we all wore badges that recorded any radiation you had. And you had to give that in every now and then and they cleared you an’ all. So, that was that. And, right everybody, you can go back home now. And so we went back to the billets then. But such a, quite a surprise. But the feeling I got, to be honest with you, wasn’t that it was an explosion, but that was like a change in nature. It really struck me as quite strange. It wasn’t just a bomb going off, there was something happened in nature and that really struck me and I still feel like that.

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Ken Sims was born in 1937. In the 1950s he signed up for an extra year in the RAF after being called up for National Service, and he also served in Cyprus. He later joined the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston, which led to him travelling to Maralinga, Australia. Here he assisted the scientific team in tests that became known as the Minor Trials. In this clip he replays his reaction to encountering the remains of a detonation at Maralinga.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Ken Sims was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

It looked like a glazed conical in the earth. Massive. I couldn’t tell you the size of it, I was just there, I didn’t measure it. But I stood on the edge of it, and it was just like glass, and I thought, Christ, the sand and the rock, there’s so much heat, it’s turned it to glass. Enough heat, and I thought, what sort of explosion must that have been. And it really brought it home. Again, if I’d have seen that conical on there I’d have said, oh yeah, that’s where the bomb was let off, but being stood there with it – and you had special gear on because it had just been cleaned and it was, all the radiation had gone, or they said… - and we wanted to see it because it was so big, you know? And it was amazing to me that the sand and the rock, and it was, I can’t really imagine how big it was, but it was a huge, huge conical shape and it was dead smooth all the way round. And I looked at that and I said, please, don’t ever use this thing in terror, just have it as a deterrent. Because the damage it did, and pieces of wood, stakes, knocked through pieces of wood, blown through pieces… the force that that must have had to go through there, you know? You’d see pieces of wood gone through a side of a building or whatever. You’d think, how the hell did that get through there?

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Born in 1938, Anthony Cooke joined the RAF after his National Service. He volunteered to travel to Christmas Island to take part in Operation Grapple. In this clip he describes his reaction to hearing the countdown to a nuclear detonation, then feeling the blast and seeing the mushroom cloud. Cooke also spent time on Malden Island as part of the test series. He later travelled through his work with a firm linked to Imperial Chemicals Industries, including trips to the USSR.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Anthony Cooke was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Fiona Bowler. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

… Christmas Island for the test itself. That was, I say, the end of April. I worked the night before, so I should have been going to bed round about the time that everyone else was sort of getting excited, but they wouldn’t let me go to bed in case there were any issues. If they had to evacuate they wanted to remove people quickly, so I had to stay awake until afterwards. And we did the countdown, sort of ten, nine, eight, da-da-da-dum, and then the, the heat on your back, and then the sight, and then eventually the mushroom. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it’s… you only ever want to see that once, thank you very much. Scary, scary. Then I went to bed.

And it was scary at the time watching it, you thought this is scary?

Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean the power involved. I mean this was ten times anything that was dropped on Japan.

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Terry Hilliard was born in 1932 and applied to join the RAF at the age of 15. He was promoted to flying officer after his service during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and then participated in Operation Grapple in 1958 with 76 Squadron. He was assigned to fly through radioactive clouds to collect samples after the bomb detonation. In this remarkable clip he relives the experience of witnessing the blast from the cockpit – trying to keep the plane steady while covering his face with one arm.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Terry Hilliard was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Fiona Bowler. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

You can’t describe the flash. It was absolutely incredible, and mine wasn’t the most powerful bomb. But you could literally see the bones in your hand, it was just like looking at an X-ray, it was momentarily. But when it had gone and your arm’s down, your eyes were still seeing these bones, it was retentivity on the retina, and it was, you know, you’re looking into a blackness with this bone in there.

And you’re trying to fly this plane!

And with your arm there, with one hand, at your maximum height where the plane tended to stall or get compressibility, and you were trying to hold, because in those days there was no machinery, no autopilots, no computers, it was all push, pull and rudder and wires going to the elevators and you had to pull them physically and so on. So a bit of electric for little motors, but… And you were trying to hold this thing level and talking to the crew: ‘Are you alright in the back there?’ [laughs] And listen to the radio. And then when they said, you know, the turning point, you had to turn the plane.

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Terry Hilliard joined the RAF as an apprentice in 1947. During Operation Grapple he piloted a plane through a mushroom cloud to collect radioactive samples. In this clip he outlines the different stages of the cloud and the height it reached, as well as the black rain he witnessed at 55,000 feet. Cloud samplers like Hilliard have reported increased rates of cancer and other diseases, thought to be due to their exposure to radiation immediately after bomb detonations. Hilliard retired from the RAF aged 37.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Terry Hilliard was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Fiona Bowler. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

It goes up and you get a stem and the fireball, like a great big fireball, rises fairly fast. It’s through the troposphere, through the ionosphere and it aims up into the stratosphere, but I’m not sure how high it eventually goes, I think it stays in the stratosphere probably.

Yeah.

And the reactions are going on in the fireball.

Yeah.

What’s in the stem is history, that was what was happening minutes ago, of course. So that wasn’t what they wanted, they wanted what’s going now on the filters. So they wanted you as high as possible, if you could be, on the top of the fireball. I never got to the top of a fireball, I was at the bottom of a fireball. But that was enough. And of course, the turbulence, you can see in the photos on the films, all the clouds turning over, turmoil and so on. And trying to fly into that above your recognised speed and keep the crew pacified and then saying… and they had to open and do the shutters with a switch they had, because they used the electrics which ran the pumps in the tip tanks, the extra fuel tanks, which we took off, and the electrics which were out there, they rewired into the filters. So they had switches to open and close the filter things, and they had to open them at the right time and so on.

Yeah.

And the aim was, to get into the densest cloud you could find, because that was more active. But the densest cloud was also the most turbulent. And I came out of one and said, ‘Ooh, there’s a very black cloud just down there’, and I said it on the RT, ‘There’s a very black cloud just down below…’ ‘Don’t descend! Don’t descend! Climb! Climb!’ ‘Yes, yes, I’m climbing, I’m climbing.’ And they just shouted, ‘That’s probably just cirrus, forget it’. Because with all this reactivity going on, it’s forming its own cloud, its own weather, its own rain. One of the problems, they had pouring rain, purple rain, and then black rain. It was filthy, the black rain, at 55,000 feet. I mean it’s unheard of, the meteorologists would have a nightmare.

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Gordon Coggon was posted to Christmas Island as an administrative orderly. He was present for a nuclear detonation as part of the Operation Grapple test series and describes the devastating effects of the bomb on local wildlife. He also talks about how the servicemen responded to this event, and the clothing that they wore to clean the area.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Gordon Coggon was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Jonathan Hogg. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

Later on, we noticed loads of birds had fell out of the sky and they’d been blinded. There was fish, the following morning, not the same day, the following morning, literally thousands of fish on the tideline. We had to pick all them up.

Before the test, you said you were quite worried about what could happen. So how did you feel then when you saw all the fish and the birds that had been injured like that?

Oh, I was upset. I was upset. I thought, well, if they’ve been killed, we could have easily been killed, you know. I was upset more from the fact of the unknown more than anything else. I didn’t know they was irradiated at the time. The fish was. The birds were just blinded, they couldn’t see and they fell t’ground, you know. It was terrible, oh. When we reported it, they said, stay away from them. And then they got, the officer had got several of us, I remember, to go out. There was more than several – half the camp – but I was in a party of several with an officer and the officers were in their white suits and we were in shorts and shirts. They give us gloves. That was it.

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Born in 1932, George Swain joined the Royal Navy after leaving school. In this clip he recounts with palpable excitement what it was like to experience the Operation Grapple detonation. While not a common opinion expressed by veterans, he is not the only one to have enjoyed his time at British nuclear test sites. Swain later worked as a postman. He sadly passed away in December 2024.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. George Swain was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

Flight deck, everybody was in masks and covering, and you felt the blast as it came through. Thirty miles away.

I was going to ask that, I was going to say, what was your experience of the detonation on the day?

It wasn’t a bad day. It was a good day, I loved it. Sun was shining, and they say, ‘The airplane’s coming over’, and it came over, and the person who was giving the commentary, he says, ‘The weapon is falling’. He says, ‘Everybody turn round so you’re facing away from the blast’. And you hear ‘bang’. He says, ‘Right, now you turn round and you’ll see a big red glow in the sky’. I’ll show you in a minute when… whatsname. It was good, it was good, I enjoyed it. I’d do it again. I would. I would really do it again. No… it wouldn’t, if the chance come, although I’m ninety-two this year, it wouldn’t bother me. If somebody says, ‘ere are, there’s a chance you want to go and see it again, I’d be off like a shot. That’s how good it was. I enjoyed my life in the Navy.

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John Morris was born in 1937. As part of his National Service, he was assigned to the Royal Army Ordinance Corps and contributed to the Operation Grapple nuclear test series on Christmas Island. In this clip he compares his memories of witnessing a nuclear detonation with the depiction of the atomic explosion in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023). He also mentions the scale of the explosion he witnessed in relation to Hiroshima. In recent years Morris has been at the forefront of many campaigns organised by LABRATS (Legacy of the Atomic Bomb, Recognition for Atomic Test Survivors). At a recent reunion, veterans were invited to watch Oppenheimer together.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. John Morris was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Jonathan Hogg. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

An atomic bomb was like a firework, because it, the devastation of an atomic bomb is something that, like I’ve earlier said, it’s almost impossible to describe. Anybody that’s watched the film, Oppenheimer, that film, I went to see that film, and I, it took me back to being eighteen. I often wondered, when I tell the tale about the atomic explosion, were I embroidering it, were I making it bigger than life, was I making it, were I making it up? Is it too, too, too unreal? But trust me, what I saw, and veterans like me, saw and felt was as dreadful as that explosion was in Oppenheimer. And mine, I said earlier, I was twenty miles away from the last explosion, and that was a hundred times greater than Hiroshima, but I was twenty miles away. I had a pair of shorts on, a shirt, and a pair of sunglasses. Now, if anybody said today, I’d like you to go and sit twenty miles from the centre of the sun, you’d soon tell me where to go. I was ordered. I’d no choice, I had to do what I was told.

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Alan Owen is the Co-Founder of LABRATS International, an organisation that supports the communities affected by nuclear testing across the world. He lives in Llanddarog, Carmarthen, with his wife Mel and his son Joseph. Alan’s father James was present at Operation Dominic on Christmas Island and witnessed 24 detonations in 78 days in 1962. He is a fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered IT Professional with a Master’s degree in business administration. He now campaigns for truth and justice for the affected communities and in March 2025 spoke at the United Nations in New York at the 3rd meeting of State Parties of the Treaty of the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.