A widow has said she is determined to fight on despite losing a key battle in her legal fight against the Government for its role in exposing British soldiers to fatal radiation poisoning.

Shirley Denson, 78, said it was a “travesty of justice” the highest court in the land did not overturn a legal ruling preventing nine armed forces veterans suing the Ministry of Defence for the nuclear tests in the 1950s.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court voted by 4-3 to not overturn the High Court ruling, although more than 1,000 other veterans who were exposed in the south Pacific will still pursue their claims against the MoD in the High Court.

Mrs Denson, who lives in Morden, has led the a campaign against the MoD, which has consistently denied responsibility.

She said: “We are obviously desperately disappointed but we will fight on.

“It is a travesty of justice that the MoD and the Government have hidden behind a point of law when it is only common sense that being exposed to radiation can cause cancer.

“Britain is the only country which has never admitted what it did to the very people who signed up to defend it.

“That’s why we will never give up this fight because it’s too important and we have the facts on our side.”

Mrs Denson’s husband Eric committed suicide after years of physical and psychological ailments after being ordered to fly through a mushroom cloud following Britain’s biggest nuclear detonation – Grapple Y - in Christmas Island in 1958.

The Supreme Court had spent four months deciding whether to uphold an appeal by the MoD the Nuclear Test victims’ claim should be struck out under the Limitation Act because they did not sue within three years of knowing their injuries were caused by radiation.

The judgement, released on Wednesday morning, said: “...prior to three years before issue, each [claimant] reasonably believed that their injuries were capable of being attributed to the nuclear tests, particularly in light of their many private and public statements about the cause of their conditions... as well as the fact that it was common knowledge from at least the 1980s that exposure to fallout radiation could cause leukaemia...

“The difficulty for the Veterans had been to produce cogent evidence... that the dose of radiation was sufficiently high to establish a causative link with their injuries.”

The three judges who disagreed with the majority decision argued that “knowledge and belief are different concepts” and that “a claimant’s subjective belief is not a sensible basis” on whether the 1980 Limitation Act should apply.

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