The following is a beautiful homily to honour the life of Joseph Pasquini by

the Rev Marek P Zabriskie, Rector of Christ Church, Greenwich, Connecticut, USA,

delivered on 11 November, 2021.

Joseph Pasquini January 30, 1933 - August 6, 2021.

"My grandfather flew a biplane in World War. As a boy I grew up listening to his stories and have been fascinated ever since by aviators and their escapades. I was also a journalist before becoming a priest and developed a love for listening to people’s stories. So, when I first met Joe, I was deeply fascinated to learn about his life and the journey that Roberta and he had taken together. It was a bigger than life story – something that you might depict in a movie.

I pulled into the driveway of Joe and Roberta’s cozy home one afternoon and left marvelling over the tragic tale of Joe being ordered to fly a jet through a mushroom cloud rising from the 1958 Grapple Y nuclear test. I had not expected to hear such a tale. It sounded almost like science fiction. Grapple Y was the largest nuclear explosion ever created by the British. Joe’s job was to fly through the hydrogen cloud after the detonation and to gain samples of radioactive isotopes and gas samples that existed after each explosion for scientists.

Ever since, Joe suffered nearly a dozen bouts with cancer as have his children. All of this has been blamed on exposure to nuclear radiation. Sadly, unlike the United States government, the British have never acknowledged that the veterans of the nuclear tests are at elevated risk of cancer. The government actually lied about the radiation levels and falsified the official logs. Joe, however, had carefully kept his own logs. He noted, “I didn’t say anything for 50 years because I was sworn to secrecy by the Official Secrets Acts.” Not even Roberta knew about all that Joe knew. “But people need to know the truth about what happened,” he added.

Joe and Roberta’s story made me think of William Lindsay White’s 1942 book that was made into a movie in 1945 starring Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed. It was entitled They Were Expendable. The book and the movie recount the episodes of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three in World War II and the introduction of PT boats into battle following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. PT boats proved to be a great fighting tool, but the crews were viewed as expendable. Clearly, Joe and his colleagues were viewed as expendable to some leaders in their own nation.

Joe was the navigator of “Sniff Boss” – a modified Canberra bomber – which was outfitted to serve as the air control aircraft used for the sampling missions. He was serving in the RAF’s 76 Squadron, which took measurements during the nuclear blast at Christmas Island in the Pacific. The nuclear device exploded at 8,000 feet. Joe wrote a small book about the events that transpired that day – April 28, 1958 – the day that changed his life. Joe noted, “We had our eyes closed, but even with our eyes closed we could see the light through our eyelids. It took 49 seconds for the light to stop. As soon as that happened, we immediately turned back. Fortunately being in the navigating position, I had a little window and I watched the whole thing develop and spread and then start climbing.”

His aircraft circled above the balls of super-heated magma and he witnessed a sight that only a handful of humans have ever seen. He found himself flying between two suns – one 94 million miles above him and a new sun never seen before just eight miles below him. Observers on the ground at Christmas Island watched the nuclear detonation and witnessed an enormous white ball of super-hot liquid radioactive magma, more than two miles across. They said that it looked like a “second sun in the sky,” hanging low over the southern horizon, while the real sun hovered much higher over the eastern sky.

“I think that I saw the face of God for the first time,” recalled Joe. “It was just incredible. It blew our minds away. These were things that had never been seen before, certainly not by English people. After the mushroom cloud passed over them, Joe looked out the window and had yet another surprise. There was radioactive rain. “It’s the only time that I’ve experienced rain at 46,000 feet,” he recalled. It’s almost impossible to fathom that the blast that occurred on that day was nearly a hundred times bigger than the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945.

The process of developing nuclear weapons was fraught with danger and veiled in secrecy. It was part of an arms race that followed World War II. Little was known at the time of the dangers of radiation and radioactive material. Sadly, all of the rules and regulations for protecting personnel were cast aside and ignored.

Radiation cannot be seen, smelt, touched, tasted or felt. It is an invisible form of evil and utterly deadly. It can not only kill and damage the person handling radioactive substances, but also their children, their children’s children and beyond. Many of the people involved in the UK testing program have descendants who have suffered from illnesses and cancers that can now be traced back to Grapple Y and other testing events. For all that they have suffered and endured, none of the flyers received so much as a tin medal to pin on their chest.

I suppose each one of us has a defining day or moment, that if we look back and think carefully we realize on this particular day in this particular place at this particular moment in time our life was forever changed. April 28, 1958 was that day for Joe. The nuclear test known as Grapple Y was something that he would have to grapple with for the next 63 years of his life as the exposure to radiation took a severe toll upon his body, his life and his family.

Most of us would like to think that our country would do the right thing by its own people, but sadly that is not always the case. We may have a lover’s quarrel with our country at times, but Joe and over a thousand of his colleagues and their family members had to sue their own government for what was done to them. They were like laboratory rats exposed to something that no human should ever have had to undergo. Miraculously, Joe outlived almost all of his fellow flyers who perished after suffering from painful and debilitating cancers that robbed them of much of the fullness of life.

Joe told his story in a book he wrote in 2020 entitled The Curse of the Nuclear Cloud Flyers. It’s cover jacket notes that it’s “a story to make your blood boil.” The book came out of a fateful

reunion, where the few remaining survivors of the 76 Squadron Nuclear Cloud Flyers met at the RAF Club in London. During the years following Grapple Y in 1958, the flyers had scattered around the globe and followed a wide variety of careers. Most of the stories that they told at their reunion seemed too outlandish to be true, but after reading a variety of documents related to the nuclear explosion, it became obvious that all of the flyers were telling the truth. Joe’s book was just a compendium of a few of the investigative reports into the event and the barbarism unleashed by the British government on its own military personnel.

The Bible is called God’s “revelation” to us, and revelation comes from a Greek word “alethia” which means to “uncover something” or to take something out of the dark and bring it into the light. This is what Joe’s book did. It was a form of revelation or revealing of the truth so that there would no longer be any secrets. This life-changing event was no longer shrouded in dark secrecy but was brought out into the light of day. The Bible tells us that nothing is hidden that will not one day become known. But it takes someone with courage and conviction to bring things to the light. Joe’s book was the first and only “unauthorized” account of the Nuclear Cloud Sampling operation conducted by the 76 Squadron RAF. It was an act of courage and determination to set the record straight.

The Greek word “paraclete” means “advocate.” It is the word in the Bible that we translate as “the Holy Spirit.” Jesus promised to send us an “advocate” or Holy Spirit to argue our case in the courts of heaven before God and to bring us comfort and guidance on earth. Joe was an advocate for over a thousand flyers and their families who suffered from nuclear fallout. Perhaps one day they will make a movie about that day and the forces unleashed on those unfortunate flyers and their families.

My colleagues and I visited Joe often in the hospital or at Nathaniel Witherell. He had a wonderful dry sense of humour. One day, shortly after entering Joe’s room, I told him that he looked like Don Quijote from The Man of La Mancha. Joe looked perplexed. I meant it as a compliment. He looked like one of the apostles painted by El Greco, the Greek painter who spent his life painting mystical paintings in Toledo, Spain. Most of the apostles produced by El Greco had narrow faces with jaunty cheekbones, wispy beards and penetrating eyes.

Joe’s eyes sparkled. His sense of humour was delightful. I have never seen a man come so close to death, rebound so many times. His wife and daughter were braced for the end only to see Joe emerge from the hospital like Lazarus rising from the dead. If cats have nine lives, Joe had nine resurrections. He was a man of enormous resilience. Each of you gathered here today gave him reason to return from the brink of death time and time again.

And when he surrendered the great gift of life, it was only after contributing much to this world. I imagine that when he began that journey to the next stage of life beyond life that we call paradise, Joe heard God call his name and saw a blazing light and the face of God and a host of flyers from the 76 Squadron along with friends and family who had gone before welcoming him on that distant shore.

“In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you, and whither I go and where I go, ye know the way.”

Thanks be to God for Joe’s life on earth and the prospect of eternal life and our abiding hope in that glad reunion that awaits all of us who live in God’s love, knowing that we shall be reunited with those whom we have loved and lost. Those who lie and die in Christ Jesus never say goodbye for the final time. We shall see each other again.

Thanks be to God. Amen."

The BNTVA would like to thank Joe's daughter, Simone, for sharing this homily with the British nuclear test veterans and their families.

The Grapple Y 3 megaton Commonwealth thermonuclear bomb, detonated on April 28, 1958.