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What is moral injury?
You will see the term “moral injury” dotted around the Campaign magazine from now on. In 2018,
I was preparing a paper on the British nuclear test veterans and came across Henry Vyner, who had interviewed atomic veterans and their families from Nevada during the 1980s. Vyner saw the complexities building up in both veterans and their families, which he described as a type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the onus isn’t on the recipient but on the one who causes trauma. We believe that it shouldn’t be up to nuclear test veterans to convince the government that epidemiological studies and health conditions should be proven as radiation induced. The situation personnel were placed in at the nuclear tests and clean-ups is an ethical issue, and the government should have known better about
the moral consequences involved concerning the involvement of personnel in this danger zone.
Moral injury is not a mental condition; it comes from a situation that has caused an aggrievement to an individual or individuals by an authority that, in essence, is life changing. It can, however, run in connection with a mental condition such as PTSD.
Moral injury is a hot topic of research at the current time and is being used to describe some experiences of military personnel serving in war zones, health workers and clinicians who have worked on the frontline during the COVID-crisis, in terms of being sent to work without adequate protective equipment. Although a completely different scenario, we believe that the nuclear test veterans experienced a military-attributable
moral injury caused by the UK government through being “volunteered” or conscripted into participating in the Commonwealth atmospheric testing programme. This phrase has been mentioned to me on several occasions in context of the nuclear tests by very senior military personnel and senior NHS workers.
The diagram shows the differences and overlaps of moral injury and PTSD, and time and time again, in conversation, nuclear test veterans describe the very words used below.
“Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” (The Moral Injury Project).
The BNTVA 2021 medal application states, “The very fact of participatory service within these nuclear tests causes a ‘perceived radiation exposure’ (if not actual) within “excessive psychological stress”
at the time of being in a risky environment, touched on in Mr R’s consultant’s report. Collett et al. 2020 reveal neurocognitive “anomalies at hippocampal and cortical level” even with limited radiation exposure, as so many mental processes are involved in working within this arduous environment, including witnessing a nuclear bomb or perceived fears from the fallout of ionizing radiation.
The element of moral injury should be noted within the context of risk and rigour. At the time of the British nuclear tests and radiation clean-ups from 1952-1967, this term had not been constructed However, it sums up the effect nuclear bombs have
had on the British nuclear test veterans perfectly, shown in hundreds of accounts of their experiences in the BNTVA archives... These men had been volunteered as test participants rather than giving informed consent to volunteer as part of a full-scale live British experiment. The sight, sound and all-around experience of a nuclear bomb detonation causes a scalable traumatic injury which permeates every human sense (Collett et al. 2020). In the case of moral injury this results in a long- term effect for individuals, a stigma for the participants of feeling different to other people and of being treated differently. This culminates in a mental rigour, comparative to the experience of the military drone operators during Operation Shader.
The drone operators carried out a harrowing day job, returning to their families and normal life after daily work. The transition of this abstract situation contributed to their mental rigour and ina-bility to converse about their experiences with loved ones. This is similar in nature to the nuclear test participants, who were sworn to secrecy concerning the nuclear tests yet underwent traumatic experiences associated with witnessing nuclear fission of up to 7.7 megatons. On return from the tests, personnel were not allowed to share their troubling experiences with friends or family. Wil-liamson et al. (2021) and Jones (2020) define moral injury as, “guilt, shame, intrusive thoughts and self-condemnation". Participants of the British nuclear tests exhibit these negative attributes to this
day, in a similar way to service personnel who have experienced heavy combat conditions against a physical enemy.”
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CAMPAIGN SUMMER 2021