The Government was accused today of seeking to “snuff out” compensation claims of up to £100 million for veterans contaminated during nuclear and atomic tests in the 1950s.

It has resisted the claims “with the utmost determination and all the colossal resources – legal, financial and scientific at its command,” Benjamin Browne, QC, representing more than 1,000 veterans, said.

Yet even though the Government accepted scientific evidence “of the highest repute” demonstrating a link between the veterans’ exposure to radiation and cancer, lawyers “seek to rubbish that report at every turn".

Mr Browne told Mr Justice Foskett in the High Court in London that “time and again”, governments had told veterans that they had to await compensation until there was scientific proof of the link.

But now that the scientific proof was available, the Government's lawyers argue in a new twist that it too late to bring a claim.

The question for the court, the QC said, was whether it was right that “despite years of prevarication and misinformation accompanied by promise of compensation,” the Government should now be entitled to “snuff out” the claims on the new ground that they were outside the legal time limits, he said.

Many servicemen either died very young or suffered from cancers, skin defects, infertility or reduced life expectancy after a series of atomic bomb explosions on Christmas Island in the South Pacific and in the Indian ocean in 1957.

The atomic, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons tests carried out by the Ministry of Defence were designed to improve Britain’s nuclear capability. But victims and their families believe that long-term health problems and illness were caused by exposure to radiation.

The veterans were given little protection from the tests and in some cases stood on the beach wearing shorts and sandals.

Today Mr Browne said that the Government had maintained throughout that the tests were carried out in such a way that very few, if any, participants were exposed to thermonuclear fallout.

But their own documents showed that they had not understood the risks entailed or “what they were doing” and “that because of that men were poisoned with radiation”.

In one explosion, the yield of the bomb was “probably 70 times higher than the minimum yield anticipated,” he said.

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