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For 12 years the Sunday Mirror has campaigned for the survivors of Britain’s nuclear tests – 22,000 men ordered to watch as the toxic bombs exploded.

Today most are dead, having been denied justice by successive governments who ignored their health problems.

But their legacy lives on in the genes of descendants who suffer 10 times the normal rate of birth defects. Today we relaunch our battle for justice...

At first little Ella seemed a healthy baby, and her great-grandmother Shirley Denson breathed a huge sigh of relief.

At last, she thought, maybe the terrible genetic legacy that had cursed her family for 56 years was finally over.

But at the age of six months Ella was rushed to hospital with what could have been a fatal infection. It turned out she’d been born with a dangerous kidney defect – and Shirley knew then their problems would never end.

She says: “I quake with fear every time I hear one of the family is pregnant. I’m so worried about what will go wrong.

“Because of something dreadful that our government did so long ago, sick little children like Ella are suffering today with deformities and ­operations.”

The Denson family’s problems stem from 1958, when Shirley’s husband – RAF ace pilot Eric – was sent to Christmas Island in the South Pacific.

(Image: Roy Fisher / Sunday Mirror)

He and 22,000 other men, many on National Service, were ordered to bear witness as Britain exploded a series of atomic and hydrogen bombs in the race to become a nuclear power.

Most of the men were mustered on shore in cotton shorts and flip-flops to watch the blasts, but Eric’s task was to fly a converted Canberra “sniff plane” through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. Afterwards he was sick for days and covered with a rash – a classic case of radiation poisoning.

On his return to England, and unaware of any risk, he and Shirley, who already had one healthy child, had another three daughters.

But Eric began to suffer crippling, ­unexplained headaches, and – unable to stand it any more – killed himself in 1976.

Six years ago Shirley, 79, uncovered proof that in the nuclear cloud he experienced the equivalent of 12,000 x-rays directly to his brain. She became one of the few widows to win a war pension from the Ministry of Defence after it admitted poisoning Eric.

But, she believes, there is a lingering genetic legacy – one our government chooses to ignore. Their second daughter Nicola, now 55, was born with a malformed eye and nose and tooth problems. Three of Nicola’s four children have unexplained spinal conditions.

Another of Shirley’s daughters had developmental abnormalities, and went on to have Kimberley, 30, who grew up to find three of her adult teeth were missing.

Kimberley’s son Jamie, eight, had three sets of front teeth.

Then Kimberley had Ella, who was born with a duplex kidney, with two tubes to the bladder instead of one. She also has a bladder reflux. Now aged 14 months, she has to take daily antibiotics and will need an operation aged three.

As well as four children, Shirley has 10 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. Thirteen of Eric’s descendants – that’s 37 per cent – had birth defects or have unexplained medical conditions.

Granddaughter Danielle, 31, and her four children all suffer excruciating joint pain. Her son Daniel, 10, is only just getting adult teeth but they are so filled with holes he is on daily painkillers.

Danielle has just discovered she is pregnant again. She says: “The babies were all born healthy. I thought we were fine. But as they’ve grown more of a pattern’s emerged. Now I’m pregnant and worrying what radiation might do to this one.”

Veterans began reporting illnesses in the 1980s but the UK is the only nuclear nation to insist its test veterans were unharmed.

The MoD has spent £17m fighting the veterans through the courts.

Other governments – Russia, France, America, Australia, New Zealand, China and even the Isle of Man – all recognise and compensate their nuclear vets.

New Zealand, Russia, the USA and China have also awarded their veterans medals.

Research from New Zealand has proved that veterans had three times as much genetic damage as survivors of Chernobyl, but the UK refuses to carry out the same blood tests.

Studies have shown there are at least 10 times the normal rate of birth defects among the vet- erans’ children and eight times in grandchildren.

Professor Chris Busby, of the University of Liverpool, predicts the effects could last for 20 generations.

In a potential breakthrough for our campaign, Prime Minister David Cameron has finally agreed to a meeting to consider the demands. He will sit down next week with Tory MP John Baron, patron of the British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association.

Mr Baron said: “The nuclear veterans and I are pleased the Prime Minister is meeting us. We look forward to a constructive discussion.”

Nige Heaps, chairman of the BNTVA, described it as “a significant step”.

Meanwhile, little Ella’s pain goes on. Shirley says: “Ella is the fourth generation of my family to be harmed by those bombs. If it’s not the radiation, the ­Government should do the blood tests and set our minds at rest. If it is, we need medical research.

“They’ve spent 50 years waiting for us to die. It won’t go away. Sick, suffering little children like Ella need our help.”

A problem that won't go away

There is no way to prove that radiation caused a specific birth defect. But it’s well known that radiation causes mutations, and it has been proven that New Zealand nuclear veterans have three times as much genetic damage as survivors of Chernobyl.

The British government has refused requests to carry out the same genetic research on our own veterans.

Professor Chris Busby did his statistical survey of the vets and their descendants in 2007. It found that children of the vets were 10 times more to get birth defects and five times more likely to die as infants.

He reveals: “The main finding is that the grandchildren are suffering at almost the same rate as the children of veterans. In normal genetics, with each generation the effects would be less as new DNA is added to the family line.

"But with radiation exposure, a kind of instability is passed down – like an alarming message in a bottle passed from mother to child.

"It tells the child to scramble its genes randomly in all directions, so you get many children with strange deformities.

“The genes do it in order to evolve around the radiation.

“But it is terrible that women have this fear hanging over their heads because of what happened to their fathers. And yet there is no concession from the government or military that it happened at all.”

Our demands