France and Weapons of Mass Destruction - Anti Nuclear Tests Protests

Anti Nuclear Tests Protests

• By 1968 only France and China were detonating nuclear weapons in the open air and the contamination caused by the H Bomb blast led to a global protest movement against further French atmospheric tests.

• From the early 1960s New Zealand peace groups CND and the Peace Media had been organising nationwide anti nuclear campaigns in protest of atmospheric testing in French Polynesia. These included two large national petitions presented to the New Zealand government which led to a joint New Zealand and Australian Government action to take France to the International Court of Justice (1972).

• In 1972, Greenpeace and an amalgam of New Zealand peace groups managed to delay nuclear tests by several weeks by trespassing with a ship in the testing zone. During the time, the skipper, David McTaggart, was beaten and severely injured by members of the French military.

• In 1973 the New Zealand Peace Media organised an international flotilla of protest yachts including the Fri, Spirit of Peace, Boy Roel, Magic Island and the Tanmure to sail into the test exclusion zone.

• In 1973, New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk as a symbolic act of protest sent two navy frigates, HMNZS Canterbury and HMNZS Otago, to Mururoa. They were accompanied by HMAS Supply, a fleet oiler of the Royal Australian Navy.

• In 1985 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk by the French DGSE in Auckland, New Zealand, as it prepared for another protest of nuclear testing in French military zones. One crew member, Fernando Pereira of Portugal, photographer, drowned on the sinking ship while attempting to recover his photographic equipment. Two members of DGSE were captured and sentenced, but eventually repatriated to France in a controversial affair.

• French president Jacques Chirac’s decision to run a nuclear test series at Mururoa in 1995, just one year before the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was to be signed, caused worldwide protest, including an embargo of French wine. These tests were meant to provide the nation with enough data to improve further nuclear technology without needing additional series of tests.

• The French Military conducted almost 200 nuclear tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls over a thirty year period ending 1996, 46 of them atmospheric, of which five were without significant nuclear yield. In August 2006, an official French government report by INSERM confirmed the link between an increase in the cases of thyroid cancer and France’s atmospheric nuclear tests in the territory since 1966.