British Defence chiefs have admitted that servicemen were exposed to dangerous radiation levels during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in the 1950s.
The dramatic admission, made after years of denials, features in papers filed with the High Court in London by Ministry of Defence lawyers.
The Sunday Mirror newspaper said the court papers revealed that the Ministry of Defence now believed nuclear tests were responsible for the deaths of some British servicemen.
But the ministry insists that only 159 men were affected out of the 20,000 who were present.
Australia's Veterans' Affairs Minister Alan Griffin is looking into the report.
He said, ''I am interested in investigating any information that may affect our veterans, so I've asked my department to liaise with the UK Department of Defence to find out more details and urgently report back to me.''
About 800 ex-servicemen from Britain, New Zealand and Fiji launched a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the British Defence Ministry earlier this year, claiming they had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during tests at sites, including Maralinga in South Australia and Christmas Island.
While the case is not due to start until January, court documents seen by the newspaper show that two British Royal Air Force servicemen, Eric Denson and John Brothers, were irradiated after being ordered to fly through mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs to collect samples.
Film badges worn by the men recorded the amount of radiation they were exposed to.
The newspaper said, ''Eric had a dose equivalent to 190 years of background radiation. John's was 107. The MoD's [Defence Ministry's] maximum safe dose was just 30.''
Mr Denson's widow, Shirley Denson, who is in the group suing the British ministry, said, ''Hopefully, this will mean they have to admit everything else.
''In reality they have no idea who had how much dose. Eric and John had records taken but most had none.
''Those who had film badges for the explosions were made to hand them in and they were never labelled to show who was wearing them.'' Earlier this year, Australian nuclear test veterans said they would monitor the mass compensation claim in Britain as they prepared to launch their own class action against the Federal Government.
The Federal Government announced in June that it would provide free cancer tests and treatment to about 100 Australian police who patrolled the British nuclear test site at Maralinga through to 1988.
Only about 450 of the test veterans are still alive and many claim to have suffered serious illness, including cancer, as a result of exposure to radiation during the 1950s tests. AAP