A veteran of the British Nuclear Test programme of the late 1950s is hoping a new TV documentary will finally open people’s eyes to the “scandal” of the way he and his colleagues have been treated by successive governments.

Terry Quinlan, from Baywell, Leybourne, near Maidstone, was an 18-year-old National Serviceman when he was dispatched to Christmas Island in the South Pacific where he witnessed the test explosion of Grapple X, one of the UK’s first nuclear test bombs.

The bomb was 120 times as powerful as that dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.

He and his colleagues were knocked over by the blast, even though the explosion was 23 miles away, and he was injured by a piece of shrapnel that he carried in his chest until 2004.

Mr Quinlan went on to witness four other test explosions - and never once was provided with any protective clothing or even warned of the dangers of radiation poisoning.

Since then, his life has been plagued by ill health. He had two operations to remove cancerous growths within three years of completing his National Service and has undergone six operations on his heart and is awaiting his seventh.

Nevertheless, he may - at 85 - be one of the luckier ones. Many of his colleagues died young from cancer and other causes which may have been the result of radiation poisoning.

Mr Quinlan, who has for decades consistently campaigned for the sacrifice of the test veterans to be recognised, was pleased when last year, the government finally - after 66 years - issued the survivers with a campaign medal.

But the government is still resisting claims for compensation for the veterans’ subsequent ill health, saying there was no proof their illnesses were caused by radiation.

All Mr Quinlan has received in compensation was £3,400 paid to him last year for the shrapnel injury he received. He said: “It barely covered my heating bill.”

Over the last few months, Mr Quinlan, along with other veterans, has been interviewed for a BBC documentary on the fate of the test veterans.

Mr Quinlan, who was invited to the premiere showing of the completed film in London, said: “It’s big. I hope it will shake the public conscience in the same way that Mr Bates Vs The Post Office did.”

The programme also features interviews with two other test veterans from Kent: Brian Unthank from Erith and John Folkes from Ramsgate.

Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal: Our Story will be broadcast on BBC 2 on Wednesday, November 20, at 9pm.

Research has shown that the children of test veterans were 10 times more likely to be born with birth defects or suffer sterility later in life than the average in the general population.

Most of the personnel involved in the tests were National Servicemen - teenagers - with no concept of the dangers they were being asked to run.

Although nuclear weapons were a relatively new invention, the dangers of radiation had first been made public decades before by Marie Curie, the famous French scientist, who had herself died of radiation poisoning in 1934.

The devastation resulting from the two atomic bombs dropped by the Allies on the Japanese at the end of the Second World War was also widely known.