VETERANS of Britain's nuclear tests who have suffered from leukaemia, other cancers, infertility, skin conditions and even hair loss all blame their illnesses on radiation.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the British Government detonated more than 20 nuclear devices at sites in the South Pacific and Australia. Taking part were 20,000 servicemen – 1,000 of whom are now fighting the Ministry of Defence for compensation.

Some were involved in cleaning up test sites after bombs went off, others flew planes through nuclear mushroom clouds, but all say that the radiation they were exposed to has irreparably damaged their health.

As a result of their claims, the Government commissioned the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) to carry out studies to see if the veterans suffered more from cancer than other people in the general population.

The Labour Government's Armed Forces Minister, Kevan Jones, highlighted the findings when he spoke in a Commons debate on the issue last December.

"For some years, a number of veterans of the test programme have claimed that their health has been directly damaged," he told other MPs.

"The Ministry of Defence, and successive Governments, have consistently rejected these claims.

"That is based on three comprehensive and exhaustive studies, none of which found a greater incidence of mortality or cancer in nuclear test veterans."

Present ministers have also been quick to point out the "considerable research" the Government has done, only to find veterans did not suffer more from cancer than the general population

In its most recent 2002 study, the NRPB compared a large group of veterans with a large group of random people – and found the levels of cancer in the two groups to be broadly the same.

But soon after the study was published, serious concerns were raised about the way it had been carried out.

In 2003, a senior research fellow from the University of Dundee, Sue Roff, wrote to the British Medical Journal criticising the study.

She highlighted 16 cases of a particular type of cancer that had occurred in the veterans' group, which had not been counted by the NRPB.

If they had been, it would have altered the results showing that more people among the veterans had cancer than among the group of random people.

At the time, the NRPB defended not counting the cancer cases by claiming that to have done so would have biased results.

Furthermore, Roff pointed out that the NRPB study had only taken account of 85 per cent of veterans exposed to radiation during tests. She claimed that many more cancer cases were missed.

She said at the time: "The NRPB studies seriously under-report the incidence of this marker radiogenic condition among veterans of the UK's atmospheric atomic and nuclear weapons tests."

Even sharper criticism was to come from Dr Keith Baverstock, a radiation expert who had worked for the World Health Organisation, the European Centre for Environment and Health and the UK Medical Council.

In 2003, he wrote to the medical journal, The Lancet, citing Roff's work and criticising the NRPB for dismissing as "chance" a high rate of leukaemia among veterans.

In a talk he later gave in Edinburgh, he delivered a fierce attack on the NRPB – accusing them of "misusing" science in their study and branding their conclusions as "deficient".

"Further work needs to be done. It is sad that the NRPB, which should be an independent body, was complicit," he said.

The NRPB, has since been absorbed by the Health Protection Agency, but, at the time, it strongly denied accusations that its studies had been sub-standard and defended the integrity of its conclusions.

Since then, New Zealand veterans who took part in the same nuclear tests as UK soldiers commissioned Professor Al Rowland at Massey University to carry out a study of their own.

It has concluded that the level of genetic abnormalities in nuclear test veterans was three times higher than in the average person.

Alan Rimmer, spokesman for the British Nuclear Test Veterans' Association, which represents former servicemen in Derbyshire, accused the Government of a "selective memory" over the scientific evidence.

"The Rowland report showed undoubtedly that those in the vicinity of the British nuclear tests have been affected by genetic damage," he said.

"But the Government seems to ignore this evidence, instead spending money on NRPB reports that were discredited over the years."