The Life Scientific: Gareth Collett

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1:04Gareth Collett:Today we have a story worthy of some kind of military thriller, one that's taken my guest around the globe via engineering, explosives, royal protection, war zones, military intelligence and academia. Dr. Gareth Collett is a retired British Army Brigadier General and engineer, specialising in bomb disposal. His 32-year military career involved tours around the world, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Gareth headed up massive operations to stop the spread of improvised explosive devices, IEDs, and clear unexploded ordnance, reducing casualties and helping displaced people to return home. After retiring from the military, he joined the University of Wales Trinity St David as a senior lecturer, while also pursuing a PhD looking at the range of chemicals used in homemade explosives and their toxic impacts.

1:57Gareth Collett:It was following his own diagnosis with bladder cancer in 2023 that Gareth started digging deeper, researching a possible link between bomb disposal veterans and higher rates of urological cancers. That work continues today. As if all that wasn't enough, he's a linguist as well, having spent a year studying Arabic for a posting in Iraq, as we'll hear. So as an Iraqi-born Brit myself, it seems appropriate for me to say, Dr Gareth Collett, marhaba lal-barnamid, welcome to The Life Scientific. Well, I have 10, Habibi. Very good. Gareth, it's not an easygoing field to specialise in, to put it mildly.

2:35Gareth Collett:So what was it that drew you to bomb disposal in the first place? It was a trip that was arranged by my father to come to London in 1982, and it was the day of the Hyde Park and Regent Park bombings. And that rather put a kibosh on the whole day. We weren't allowed to travel down to London as a result of that, so we stayed back in Newcastle. and I really wondered what it would be like to be able to help people in that sort of situation but in particular to do something that could help people in situations where bombs are being laid by nasty people. I also mentioned you've been exploring the potential link between bomb disposal veterans and an increased risk of bladder cancer.

3:13Gareth Collett:Just briefly because we're going to come back to this, what have you discovered so far? Well, out of a maximum sample size of 2 ,300 serving people and veterans in a particular squadron that does very high-end bomb disposal, we were able to get in touch with 688 individuals and found that 12 had bladder cancer. And that's a very, very high statistic. I think it's five times higher than the UK average in terms of Cancer Research UK statistics. So that was a cause for concern, which we've raised with the Ministry of Defence. but it's still obviously an ongoing study to dig deeper into the course yes i learned a new word called epidemiology we were basically told that there was insufficient epidemiological evidence to link explosives to urological types of cancers so we decided to pull our own team of experts together run our own survey and try and prove that there is a link between that profession and bladder cancer and i mentioned you were diagnosed with bladder cancer yourself just a couple of years ago.

4:13Gareth Collett:Since then you've been receiving treatment so how are you doing now? So I'm in remission thankfully. My bladder cancer wasn't muscle invasive. It was one of those that you could treat with what we call immunotherapy and as of today I'm in remission so very very grateful for the expertise of the urologists who've handled my case. We're going to talk more about your research and what comes next but something else I mentioned in the introduction that I have to ask about. Royal protection. What did that involve? Well, when I was a young captain, I had the auspicious task of being the Ammunition Technical Officer for Scotland.

4:48And one of those duties throughout the summer was to look after the royal family during their visits and engagements. And that involved basically checking that any potential bombs that may be laid wouldn't function, or they'd been removed in advance of the royal family's visit.

5:03Gareth Collett:Presumably that means you did have some incidents that you had to deal with while looking after the royal. We had no improvised explosive devices, as we would call it, other than some malign people posting letter bombs to the royal family that we had to deal with. Wow. Well, Gareth Collett, you were born in 1966 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I gather your father and grandfathers all served in the armed forces. Yes, my father had served during the Second World War in the Indian artillery and in the First World War both my grandfathers, which is an amazing story really because my grandfather on my mother's side was in the British Expeditionary Force.

5:40He was shot in the face by a German soldier on a horse during the Battle of Lakato. So that was the end of the First World War for him. But my grandfather on my father's side served all the way through from 1914 to 1918 in the infantry. And I have no idea how many times he went over the top. He never told us anything about his story, just the fact he'd served in the infantry. Incredible. An amazing story of survival, I think, amidst the most horrendous circumstances.

6:10Gareth Collett:Quite remarkable. And you had a clear idea of what you wanted to do, where you wanted to go. For sixth form, you went to Welbeck Defence College, where they had a focus on sciences. But I gather initially that didn't quite click for you. No, so I was very artsy. And to go to an army sixth form college where they said you have to do maths, physics and chemistry was a bit of a shock. And I had to get some extra help to get through the maths. Well, you then went on to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and eventually earned a first class degree in applied science, then a master's in explosive ordnance engineering via Cranfield University.

6:48Gareth Collett:So presumably at this point you have found your scientific feat. Yeah, I think so. They took a while to get there. Well, by this point you are in the army. Your military position was ammunition technical officer, ATO, handling bomb disposal. that must have involved some pretty specialist training to qualify as an ammunition technical officer the course was 14 months long i think there were 52 exams you had to pass in that 14 month period me and it literally was pass or fail fail you're gone and if you could do all that you then went into bomb disposal if you had the aptitude for that so we're going to talk a bit about the science of explosives now, Gareth, obviously without any sort of instruction.

7:32Gareth Collett:But, and this is a very important point to stress, very few people actually make it to this top-level training because to learn how to safely dismantle bombs, you have to first understand how to make them. Yeah, and that's why the vetting that we go through is so significant. To take something apart, you need to know how it works. To give you an indication of the pass rate, only 8 % of those who attend the high-threat course to go to Northern Ireland in my day passed. So a very, very small number, but you're trusted with a lot. You learn about precursor chemicals. You learn about primary explosives, secondary explosives.

8:09Those are propellants and the ones that really cause damage, the high explosive categories. You learn about improvised explosives. You learn about military commercial explosives and how they can all be put together into a particular device to cause a particular effect.

8:23Gareth Collett:So in broad terms, when it comes to disarming an explosive device, how can you make them safe? So we always split a bomb down into its component parts so there'll be a power source of some description there'll be one switch or two switches you'll have the circuitry to put that together there will be a detonator or initiator as we call it which will start the explosive train progressing there will be the main charge or the main explosive and which can be anything from up to half a kilogram to many thousands of kilograms and there'll be some form of container in which everything is housed and that will be to enhance the fragmentation effect so that's really what makes up a bomb and we would look at specific elements of that to determine how we could render it safe the power source is obviously a very interesting aspect if you can take that away the bomb doesn't function but also from my perspective it's the detonator the link between the electrical circuitry and the main explosive charge that actually does the damage.

9:22Gareth Collett:Right. It's a long way from what I would have seen on James Bond or Mission Impossible. You know, pick between the red and the blue wire. So most terrorists use the same coloured wire. That's the first thing. That's right. They just use what's to hand. So that's always a bit of a problem. You've got to know your electronics. They're never made the same way. So the provisional IRAs were very well made devices. They had a build standard and they would perform a particular function. For latter years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the build standard disappears because you have various different entities making those bombs.

9:56And as a result of that, there's an unpredictability in how they function and therefore an unpredictability in how you take them apart and your chances of survival.

10:04Gareth Collett:And I gather you also had to learn to recognise the origins or the makers of these devices by identifying certain signatures. Yes. So most bombers will have a signature, whether they like it or not. So we can pick up specific things from the devices which allow us to identify who the perpetrators are. The emplacer, as I call it, that's the person who's not made the bomb and gets paid a very small amount of money to place the device. They're quite easy to find based on the biometrics and forensics we can recover. If you can get that information, you could identify the bomber. That means you can then arrest or capture that individual.

10:41And if you're really lucky, based on the components and things that are used, you can then identify financiers and suppliers who are external to the country. So it's a very, very complex process which starts off with the bomb being taken apart.

10:56Gareth Collett:In fact, this ties into work you've done recently, writing technical reports for forensic architecture, which is a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that investigates human rights violations using architectural techniques and technologies. Now, you've recently investigated two incidents for them, the Beirut port disaster in 2020 and the strike on Ukraine's Mariupol Theatre in 2022. It must be a bit like being a forensic detective, looking at evidence around a blast and then working back from there. Yeah, so I will look at the damage first, then I will reverse engineer that blast and fragmentation damage to the likely munition that has caused the offence.

11:35and in terms of war crime investigation we can then look at the law of armed conflict international humanitarian law and provide pretty damning evidence to the perpetrator to say actually it was your platform it was your bomb what are you going to do about it then we leave it to the lawyers

11:50Gareth Collett:How might those reports be used then in the future? Mariupol Theatre will be used as a technical report for a war crime investigation it's pretty obvious where the munition came from and what platform dropped it it's pretty obvious in terms of the tenets of the law of armed conflict that Mariupol theatre was the intended target that's probably as much as i can say on here and in the case of the Beirut port explosion it was poorly stored ammonium nitrate which became contaminated with fuels and when you have an oxidizer contaminated with a fuel you get an explosive and that's basically what what happened in that incidence and from that perspective you can work out the quantity that might have been used, where it was housed, how it was housed, and probably what the precursors to the event occurring were.

12:37And had it been stored correctly, that event would not have occurred.

12:41Gareth Collett:And that's why you have to understand these precursors, as you say, the chemicals that are used to make the explosives. So that's one variable. But when you're the person who's about to approach and hopefully disarm a bomb, what other variables do you have to take into account? that's probably three months of the ammunition technical officers course which i'll which i'll sum very very quickly you have to think about environment the location of the device potentially if you get your threat assessment right who might have made it why the device is there and again by reverse engineering you can probably identify what the target is and if you can't identify the target it's probably you of course you've had first-hand experience of this incredibly high pressure procedure going back to the late 1980s when you were posted to Northern Ireland this was during the troubles do you remember the first time you had to disarm a device in the field the first time I had to disarm a device in the field was the first time I had to um what we call do the lonely walk which is very lonely because when you're training there's loads of people around you they're they're helping and checking to make sure that what you're doing is correct but I remember the first device I dealt with I was on my own I remember looking back to the incident control point thinking nobody's coming with me i'm wearing this really heavy bomb suit it's 50 kilograms in weight i'm carrying electronic countermeasures they're probably 20 kilograms in weight i'm carrying the weapons i need to deal with whatever's down there i'm carrying the tool bag that i think i need and then when you get down to it you realize that the next actions you're going to take are going to be wholly reliant on your training and how much you listened so you're trying to remember absolutely everything but your training takes over and that's what i think is so good about doing a lot of training.

14:24Gareth Collett:I suspect a lot of listeners will recognise your description of this long walk towards an explosive device, all kitted up from the Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker. Did you see that film? I did. No offence to the film, but there were so many safety errors and mistakes, it just makes me wince, because a lot of the things that you see on that film, we just don't do. You'll be dead within seconds. But I can't really watch any war films with my family, because I'll be telling them that certain weapon systems don't really work that way. So I'm sort of relegated to the back room when there's any decent war films on.

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15:58Gareth Collett:Well, Gareth, that solo walk sounds hard enough, but as you climbed the ladder, your disposal remit got a lot bigger. In 2006, because of your specialisation in dealing with IEDs, those improvised explosives, you were sent out to help the US Army in Iraq. What particular challenges were they facing that you could help with? Oh, Jim, that was a horrendous time. So we had a lot of experience from dealing with terrorist groups from Northern Ireland. The US didn't so much. So we were classed as experts in the field. So people with my qualifications would be sent to assist the Americans. so I was the deputy commander of a counter improvised explosive device brigade to give you a scale in the period of time I was there we dealt with 67 ,000 improvised explosive devices we had 147 multinational teams trying to deal with those right across Iraq and the casualty rates were significant so we were brought in to try and reduce that casualty rate.

16:56Gareth Collett:This was all part of an operation centralizing all the intelligence available on explosive devices to help wipe out the IED networks. How did you approach that? Well, we tried to fuse everything together. We created a counter-ID operations integration centre and that looked at attacking the network, attacking those people that were placing devices in the ground or using them to malign effect, defeating the device. So if the device was placed, we would then use various kinds of detector to find it. So, for example, we could use synthetic aperture radar, we could use ground penetrating radar but ultimately the best thing that we ever used was dogs and dogs are the best detector known to man and they can turn on a sixpence you know you can train them to detect a particular threat when the threat changes you can train them very quickly to look at that as well and also to prepare the force to make sure that training regimes were put in place to keep people safe This system certainly saw success in Iraq and later on you were called on to do a similar thing in Afghanistan, removing vast networks of IEDs.

18:00Gareth Collett:But I gather that experience was quite different. Can you explain why? It was quite different because people forget that the Taliban have a vote in what goes on in a conflict. They fought out in the open. They didn't mind dying. That's a very difficult opponent to take on. They laid improvised explosive devices in huge volume. So they basically fixed our forces, making it unable for them to move. and also they watched what our media was saying. They looked at the kind of detectors we were using and they would then change the tactics they operated so it came to a stage where we couldn't detect the IEDs that they were using.

18:37Gareth Collett:And I guess for you this is where forensics played a big part because being able to identify a bomb and who made it meant you could figure out how to safely dispose of it. Potentially others laid in the same area as well. Yes. Because of the volume in Afghanistan, it's pointless gathering biometrics and forensics off all of them if you've already identified who the perpetrators might be so that was a massive change and for us yes still have very very highly trained people to do proper biometric and forensic collection but also have people trained who can just blow things up if you know that is an improvised explosive device in location a b or c then all the others around it are likely to be probably going to be the same ones the same people if they just blow the whole of them up you might lose some biometrics and forensics but you're going to save a lot of lives in the process.

19:26Gareth Collett:Well, Gareth, there was a heavy death toll from IEDs in Afghanistan. And as the explosives expert, you gave evidence at multiple inquests in 2010 and 2011. That must have been a difficult experience. It was awful. So six highly trained bomb disposal operators were killed on my shift, not to mention life changing injuries and injuries to all the other combatant units that were deployed there so it was a shocking time and anything that involved an explosive I had to go to the inquest and I think having developed PTSD myself over over a number of years in these sort of atrocities that I'd seen I found those inquests very painful because when a soldier was describing the the situation they'd been involved with in combat I felt physically as if I was next to them going through that sequence of events because I'd seen it so yeah it took its toll how did it had the ptsd manifest itself i think um in the year 2000 in kosovo i was responsible for making sure that um the exhumation of mass graves were done effectively that was one of my roles and i think that's what started um my ptsd for real and then take that through the years of bomb disposal um and i think a casing point was the large market bomb that was in in iraq just before i left the car for that is on display in the imperial war museum um that was three days before i left iraq um and then i flew into brys norton and i was given the keys to my hire car and i drove home and i went straight back to meet my family and tried to behave as if nothing had happened um and it was a very difficult thing to do but you've been able to get support in dealing with all this yes but i had to find it myself and as a retired brigadier i quite often wonder what's happening to private smith private jones yeah it was going through the normal routes being referred to the nhs who then referred me back to the military to say that you probably can't talk about your traumas because of things you've been involved with within the intelligence domain and they were right i couldn't just say what i've been doing to to Nurse Brown.

21:44And in the end, I had to get in touch with a friend from the Special Forces who put me in touch with Help for Heroes. And I got help through a lovely counsellor from that perspective.

21:57Gareth Collett:Well, Gareth, you did return to the Middle East in 2015. You took up the diplomatic posting of Defence Attaché to Iraq. And that's where you learnt to speak Arabic. There you oversaw the demining of several areas but in 2018 you retired from the army tell me was that a difficult decision it wasn't a difficult situation i retired three years early because physically and mentally my body had had enough and i thought i'm not quite sure how much more my body can physically take and actually how much more my family can take so i decided to to leave well here's where we come to the second act of your professional life, Gareth, swapping the army for academia.

22:40Gareth Collett:After a brief stint in Yemen with the United Nations Development Programme, you returned to the UK and in 2022 started as a senior lecturer at the University of Wales, Trinity St David. Now that's quite a shift. Yes, but the university, and it still is today, the only university in the country that runs an ordnance, munitions and explosive apprenticeship. And that's specifically designed to bolster industry. So I thought I'll go for it. And teaching and especially developing young minds, I've really enjoyed. And around this time, you also started your PhD in defence and security, focusing on the regulation of those precursor chemicals we talked about.

23:21Gareth Collett:I gather that decision was partly inspired by the Manchester arena bombing. Yes, again, not going into too many details, but just my amazement of the types of explosives that have been used and how they'd been made. I just thought to myself, how can this still be happening? So my first thought, let's have a look at the regulation, not just the UK regulation, EU regulation, global regulation. And I chose very, very basic chemical precursors. And I proved where you could still obtain them, how you could obtain them and how you could convert them into something nasty by using things that weren't yet regulated.

23:57Right.

23:58Gareth Collett:Am I right in saying that your work around those precursor threats has actually been taken up by the United Nations as a global initiative. Yes, so we now have explosive chemical precursors are part of a lot of the training that is done by the United Nations and indeed Interpol. Another angle of course on these chemical precursors that you were looking at is their toxic impact. What are the specific toxic threats when it comes to bombs? What chemicals does a disposal expert like yourself come into contact with on a regular basis? We have to be very careful in how we unpack this. So I only picked on explosives that we knew had carcinogenic components.

24:34What I call those is the nitro explosives, nitroaromatics, those that are manufactured from benzene and toluene that are known to be carcinogenic materials.

24:44Gareth Collett:So given your own diagnosis with bladder cancer, you started speaking to experts at your university and others across the UK. Tell me about the work that followed so they said right you've got to get a sample size that's the first thing you've got to do to prove something epidemiological how many people have you got and i said there's not many people qualified at our level i think there's been 2300 since 1970 i'll try and get in touch with as many as i can so as a trustee of the felix fund bomb disposal charity i was able to use our charity to do a study that these experts put together and out of 688 that we could get in touch with.