WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The New Zealand government began an investigation Monday into the involvement of five former New Zealand army officers in British radiation experiments in Australia in the 1950s.
Britain's Ministry of Defense said Saturday it used New Zealand, Australian and British servicemen in the experiments, which involved the soldiers entering an area contaminated by British atomic bomb blasts.
New Zealand's Nuclear Test Veterans Association, which is preparing a class action against the British government for alleged effects of later nuclear testing in the South Pacific, said it too was seeking the five soldiers.
The New Zealanders were involved in Australian tests carried out in Maralinga in the South Australia desert and Monto Bello Island off Western Australia, Veteran Affairs Minister Mark Burton told reporters.
Two other New Zealand men could have been involved in later testing, Burton said.
"Those people are now being identified and once we've done that we will contact them or their families," Burton said.
It was important to know whether they had appropriate health checks but it was too early to talk about possible compensation claims, Burton said.
New Zealand officials had been asked to report to the minister on Tuesday about New Zealand involvement in the tests.
Australia said on Sunday it would raise the matter with Britain and seek compensation if its soldiers were harmed in the tests.
A spokesman for the British Ministry of Defense said Saturday 18 officers had been exposed to low-level radiation to test the effectiveness of protective clothing during a series of experiments in Australia.
But he denied the men had been used as guinea pigs, saying every man had given his consent for the experiments.
Burton put the number of soldiers much higher, saying there were 175 British officers and civilians, 100 Australians, and five New Zealanders at the Australian tests in 1956.
The men's level of exposure was unclear but New Zealand was expecting cooperation from the Australian and British governments with its inquiries, the minister said.
The British admission came after a researcher from Scotland's Dundee University unearthed documents which showed the ministry had tested men.
Britain had previously denied any servicemen had been deliberately exposed to radiation.
The ministry spokesman said officers had been ordered to walk, run and crawl through contaminated nuclear test sites.
Roy Sefton, chairman of New Zealand's Nuclear Test Veteran's Association, said that the association was also tracking the five, their spouses or their descendents to see if they want to join the association's court action.
With financial help from the New Zealand government, the association is close to filing a court claim in London seeking compensation for survivors of British atomic blasts near the Christmas Islands in the South Pacific, which took place after the Australian testing programme ended.
Sefton said the association had long known that New Zealand servicemen were involved in testing protective clothing in Australia.
"The big news really is that this is the first time that the government of the U.K. has admitted using men as experimental subjects in their testing programme," Sefton said
Sefton says he has suffered chronic health problems since he, as an 18-year-old, was aboard a navy ship which steamed through ground zero about four hours after a British nuclear blast in the Christmas Islands.
He said New Zealand had 551 men posted in the islands during the testing in 1957-58.
Soldiers crawling over the ground in the tests could have inhaled or ingested radioactive matter, Sefton said.