By Phil Taylor April 25, 2025

Ivan McCabe never forgets the scorching heat and force of the blast of a nuclear bomb’s explosion.

The 86-year-old retired accountant served in the Royal New Zealand Navy from 1957 to 1964 and stood on the deck of frigate HMNZS Pukaki along with crewmates with their backs to the powerful detonations.

The Navy ship and personnel were there under orders from the New Zealand government which had been asked by the allied United Kingdom government to participate in its nuclear bomb testing programme exercises in the Pacific Ocean.

It was code named Operation Grapple, a set of four series of British nuclear weapons tests of early atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs in 1957-1958 at Malden Island and Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, now known as Kiribati.

McCabe, vice-president of the New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans Association, was age 19 when he stood 12-20 miles from the detonation of nuclear bombs.

He’d signed up for the Navy a year earlier as an eager 18-year-old originally from Central Otago, serving as a cook.

“They were powerful in force, and we weren’t quite sure what we were looking at standing under those mushroom clouds,” McCabe says, of the British nuclear bomb testing.

The Sunnyhills, east Auckland, resident told the Times he was there on duty for the last four tests of Operation Grapple.

Those were the early days of British nuclear weapons development, but they had progressed to the size that each was greater than all the detonations that massacred Hiroshima in Japan at the end of the Second World War.

“That bloody bomb,” says McCabe. “You felt the heat of that and appreciated what those people in Hiroshima had experienced.

“The crew lined up on the ship’s upper deck, just in our anti-flash material garments and anti-glare goggles. They were like old-fashioned sunglasses.

“All the ship’s company were required to have their backs to the blast’s centre. Then there was a countdown from 10. At zero the bomb had gone off, and seconds after that you felt the heat of the bomb on your back.

“We all had our hands on our faces. Many remember seeing the bones in their hands.

“There was a huge rush of air and when we turned around the mushroom cloud was rising, and I remember seeing an RAF bomber flying through it.”

After the explosions, McCabe recalls seeing dead fish and birds.

“In recent times, it has been a question of, why did the New Zealand government of the day deploy us [on Operation Grapple], when it knew the nuclear explosions were detrimental to our health.

“They only had to look at what had happened in Hiroshima.”

There were also British nuclear weapons tests in Australia during that era from 1952 to 1967.

McCabe says after the initial tests were carried out on the land there, at places such as Emu Field (1953) and Maralinga (1956-57) in South Australia, the government across the Tasman told Britain it must move them offshore.

He says it was done because the Australian government eventually recognised that severe damage was being caused to the health of the indigenous outback Aborigine people and the soil.

A Nuclear Testing Medal recognising military service during Operation Grapple and other testing programmes has finally been established in Britain and is available to former New Zealand Defence Force servicemen who were there on duty.

McCabe received his from the British High Commissioner to New Zealand at a ceremony in February last year.

“The medal was initially struck with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and has now been struck bearing King Charles III.

“The medal can be awarded posthumously to a veteran’s legal next of kin.”

One such deceased serviceman, former Royal Navy and NZ Royal Navy man John Priscott, had his medal presented to his son Derek on behalf of his family at a ceremony on Armistice Day, November 2024, by Howick RSA president Barry Dreyer.

McCabe, in his role as NZ Nuclear Test Veterans Association vice-president, is also letting other ex-Defence Force serviceman who were on duty in Operation Grapple, or their families know that they’re eligible for the Nuclear Testing Medal.

Despite their advancing years because the British nuclear testing was almost 70 years ago in the Pacific, and their decreasing numbers, McCabe says the association membership is still fighting for official acknowledgement.

It would like an apology from the New Zealand Government “for deploying personnel to a location that they knew or ought to have known was detrimental to their health and well-being”.

McCabe says the association is also calling for “funding for research of the ongoing health effects of the ex-servicemen’s next of kin. As the veterans now put it: ‘This is the last chance, as at an average age of 85-plus we’re rapidly running out of time’.”

He says there are less than 100 Kiwi ex-Defence Force personnel who served on Operation Grapple still alive.

“This is about the atomic radiation we’ve been carrying in our bodies.”

He says Roy Sefton, a former leader of the association, started its campaign seeking official recognition “because he became aware of health issues affecting veterans in similar ways”.

McCabe says respected health researcher Al Rowland has done medical assessments on many veterans exposed to the nuclear weapons blasts “that studied gene dislocation – when the human genetic systems are disturbed”.

“The research showed that the genes did not reattach. That research has been acknowledged worldwide as gold standard.”

The association, McCabe says, continues to be disappointed at the Government’s response, because of its “dissenting view” from its own medical assessments and Rowland’s research that’s “not been accepted”.

“We are not done with it yet.

“The possibility that children of personnel could be affected was first raised in the study at Massey University in 2007.

“Al Rowland, who led the investigation, said results were ‘unequivocal’ that veterans had suffered genetic damage as a result of radiation.”

There’s also an irritation for the association regarding the participation of the personnel at Operation Grapple, compared to the Navy crews that were sent to Mururoa Atoll in the 1970s to observe French nuclear testing, which was in effect, a protest by the Norman Kirk-led Labour Government.

“That deployment in the 1970s was similar in some ways to Grapple, but completely different as it was in the ban-the-bomb era in the lead up to our nuclear free legislation.

“The association hope that one day the two parts of our nuclear history can be told in an informed and balanced way.”

• The late John Priscott was a long-time Royal Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy man.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1939 serving throughout the Mediterranean where his ship was bombed then torpedoed during World War II.

As a member of the 20-strong skeleton crew, they managed to save the ship which lived to fight again at the D-Day landings.

After the war, he transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy and emigrated to Auckland in 1951.

Aboard HMNZS Black Prince, which escorted Queen Elizabeth II on her 1953 Royal tour, he attended the Spithead review and the Coronation.

He was aboard HMNZS Pukaki during all the British nuclear testing in the Pacific, as well as with Sir Edmund Hillary on his expedition to the Antarctic.

Priscott’s family has now finally received the Nuclear Testing Medal awarded to those that were involved.

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