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French South Pacific Policy 1981-1996

 

 

by Dr W. S. McCallum © 1996

 

  

6. Nuclear Issues

 

 

The problem that our tests give rise to remains. France can understand the feelings that they arouse in certain other countries in the region. But first and foremost she desires her defence policy to be known and understood. In order to guarantee her security, France has no other choice in the present situation but to maintain an instrument of dissuasion, the credibility of which can only be ensured by incorporating all the technological innovations necessary. Do not forget that nuclear dissuasion is no stranger to the peace that the world has known for over forty years. Lastly, you know that every precaution is taken and every check is made, so as to prevent any damage being caused, either to the environment or to people.

Prime Minister Rocard, addressing the Australian National Press Club, Canberra, 18 August 1989.[i]

 

 

A Long-Standing Problem

 

In the 1980s, French nuclear testing held the distinction of being the longest-established divisive issue between Paris and the nations of the South Pacific. Numerous claims and counterclaims were issued concerning testing.  Rocard, speaking in front of an audience that had traditionally not been very sympathetic to French testing, articulated a position which had been uttered by French Presidents and their Ministers since the time in office of de Gaulle. Superpower nuclear rivalry constrained France to keep a nuclear force for its defence, and nuclear testing formed an integral part of modernising that force. Nuclear deterrence was portrayed as an effective peace keeper, as it was claimed the devastation it would wreak had prevented global war for forty years. Any fears the inhabitants might have held over the dangers of environmental damage caused by the tests were groundless because of French precautions against any such risk. Regional governments and non-governmental pressure groups rejected this position. For example the Australian Labor Government, while retaining close ties with the US nuclear defence system in the 1980s, did not see any need for an independent French deterrent to maintain global peace. Three decades after Australia had itself played host to British nuclear tests, the Hawke Government rejected French testing on the grounds that radiation did not respect national boundaries, and that insufficient data existed to confirm French assurances that testing was harmless. Under these circumstances, it was asserted in Canberra that South Pacific states had a legitimate interest in objecting to French activities. As Rocard declared, France recognised these concerns, but national defence policy was a greater priority in Paris.

 

The French case for nuclear testing and the regional anti-nuclear arguments against French activities had been argued in mainly circular, repetitive fashion since the establishment of the CEP in French Polynesia in 1963. The suspension of French testing announced in April 1992 brought about the abatement of this dispute without resolving it until President Chirac finally halted tests in January 1996. The Bérégovoy Government did not suspend testing through any admission of major safety deficiencies. The same may be said of President Chirac's halt to tests in French Polynesia. Nor had those opposed to French testing conclusively proved any such deficiencies, either in 1992 or 1996. Neither party has renounced its position, both preferring to allow the matter to rest in the absence of further tests to provoke differences.

 

This chapter is devoted to examining nuclear issues as they affected French South Pacific policy since 1981. Particular attention is paid to consideration of French statements on national nuclear policy, as past surveys in English have tended to dwell on a non-French South Pacific perspective. In these surveys, analysis has been made of the political stances of regional states to a greater extent than that of France.[ii] Here, French efforts to articulate nuclear policy to the region are discussed, and the effectiveness of the arguments offered in defence of testing are critically examined. The French position, to 1993, and again under the Presidency of Jacques Chirac in 1995, prevailed over the anti-nuclear stances of various South Pacific micro-states, whose opposition to French testing had been as ineffectual as that of New Zealand and Australia. France reserved the right to conduct its domestic policies as it saw fit, independent of any regional protest over them. The prime example of this will has been the French development of a nuclear deterrent through the means of testing facilities in French Polynesia.

 

The strategic justification for French testing and the role the CEP plays in French defence are examined first. There follows a presentation of French claims concerning the safety of underground nuclear explosions at Moruroa and Fangataufa. These claims are examined with reference to the scientific evidence that is available to support or disprove them as the case may be. The extent, and on occasion the extremes, to which France has gone to defend its testing in the face of criticism are outlined. This outline culminates in an overview of the motives for the Rainbow Warrior bombing, its implications for French party politics, and its effect on French relations in the zone. One major international response to French testing in the 1980s, the Rarotonga Treaty, was spurred on by the bombing. The changing French attitude to the creation by the Treaty of a South Pacific nuclear free zone is presented, before the chapter is concluded with assessment of the reasons for, and the response to, the French suspension of testing in April 1992.

 

The Gaullist Legacy: Mitterrand and the Bomb

 

 

When, on 29 May 1981, Charles Hernu announced a halt to French nuclear testing, premature hopes were aroused in the South Pacific that France might be contemplating the end of its testing operations at Moruroa. Prime Minister Muldoon said that at first he thought the suspension might have been in recognition of regional complaints about testing, although this turned out not to be the case.[iii] On 17 June, at his first presidential meeting with a head of government from the South Pacific, Mitterrand informed Muldoon that France intended to continue nuclear testing.[iv] After the meeting, Muldoon commented accurately: "Essentially it seems to me that his policy is no different from that of the previous administration."[v] The suspension had been made so that the new Defence Minister could review the activities of the CEP and assess to what extent experiments programmed by his predecessor would be retained. The review did not last long, as nuclear testing resumed on 8 July.[vi]

 

The continuation of nuclear testing by the Mauroy Government was illustrative of continuity with the preceding government in nuclear defence policy. In 1981, Mitterrand and the PS contested the elections expressing support for the development of the French nuclear deterrent. The 110 Propositions and the Créteil manifesto shared the same reference to the need to assure national security "by the development of an autonomous strategy of dissuasion".[vii] In June, after the presidential and legislative elections, Hernu stated his support for this policy, saying that he would work to modernise the French nuclear force.[viii] Three months later, Mauroy announced the support of his Government for this goal and extended it to tactical nuclear weapons "As with our strategic forces, it is advisable to keep up with technological progress by adapting and modernising the carriers and arms in our tactical nuclear arsenal from time to time."[ix] The technological development and continued modernisation of new weapons required further tests at Moruroa.

 

Chirac was in complete accord with Mitterrand and the PS on the need to modernise the nuclear strike force. Writing on French defence policy in April 1981, he described the nuclear strike force as the key to national defence:

 

NUCLEAR DISSUASION, THE KEY TO OUR SYSTEM OF DEFENCE - Dissuasion must remain an absolute priority for our defence as it alone protects our territory and all our means of defence. [...] Security and being in a position to reply to any scenario [...] entails maintaining the diversity of our dissuasive panoply. It is therefore necessary to pursue the modernisation [...] of our strategic nuclear forces.[x]

 

The year before, Giscard d'Estaing had announced modernisation measures for the French nuclear force. These were not to be implemented, even though Mitterrand and Chirac shared his stress on the need to update its weaponry. Giscard d'Estaing agreed with them on the importance of nuclear deterrence in national defence "there is one central point in our security systems, and that is that any attack on French soil would automatically cause a strategic nuclear riposte."[xi] The three leaders shared the position that nuclear deterrence was France's ultimate response to foreign aggression. What differences did exist between Mitterrand, Chirac and Giscard d'Estaing in this field concerned the question of what modernisations should be made to the nuclear strike force, and how it should be deployed, considerations which led to differences being expressed in the meetings of the Council of Ministers during cohabitation from 1986 to 1988.[xii] At no point did these three or their followers publicly question the need for France to retain nuclear arms. Some proponents of unilateral nuclear disarmament by France were present in the PS, but they were far from positions of national power. This Gaullist, Giscardian and Socialist commitment to the necessity of nuclear deterrence for French defence contributed to a fundamental unity over the nuclear dimension of South Pacific policy in the 1980s.

 

On the acceptance of nuclear deterrence, the PC did not beg to differ, as it did on DOM-TOM policy. On 11 May 1977, Jean Kanapa, a party spokesman, had announced Communist acceptance of the French strategic nuclear capacity, rejecting purely conventional defence systems as being inadequate to protect France.[xiii] However the Communist interpretation of the utility of the nuclear strike force diverged from the positions of the RPR, UDF and the PS. The nuclear arsenal was described as offering the means of protecting France from "imperialist blackmail", presumably of American provenance. Mention of the fact that French nuclear arms were targeted on various cities in the Soviet Union, and that all except the FOST was incapable of striking the American continent, was omitted. The Communists had abandoned their traditional opposition to nuclear defence, partly so that they could avoid characterisations by their opponents of the PC as the voice of Brezhnev, and partly to chase votes.

 

In the 1980s, the views of Mitterrand on the nuclear arsenal reflected an essential continuity with Gaullist nuclear strategy. Although the groundwork for the French nuclear force had been laid during the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle was generally recognised as having been responsible for the integration of that force into the national defence system. Pointing to the inability of France to defend its frontiers from foreign invasion with conventional arms during the Franco-Prussian War, World War I and World War II, de Gaulle adopted nuclear defence as the ultimate deterrent against foreign invasion. Any foreign aggression would be dissuaded by the consideration that France had great enough retaliatory means to cause the deaths of millions and the destruction of various cities. The adoption of nuclear deterrence also permitted de Gaulle to loosen ties with NATO in 1966, confident that in the near future France would no longer have to rely on the American nuclear arsenal to defend its territory.

 

While France had neither the means nor the interest to build a nuclear force as large as the US or Soviet ones, the Fifth Republic could at least dispose of the means sufficient to assure its defence. By the 1980s, Mitterrand shared this outlook:

 

France is not looking to compete with the arsenals of the two largest powers, whose excessive armament acts as a permanently destabilising force on the balance of power and, in doing so, undermines the basis for peace. The principle of sufficiency [...] implies that our armament is, and shall remain, capable of inflicting intolerable damage at any time upon any party attacking us. Through reference to this principle, our defence strategy places at our country's disposal a panoply sufficiently powerful both to constrain a potential adversary to respect our independence and to make our allies take it into account.[xiv]

 

Like de Gaulle, as President, Mitterrand stressed the need to retain the nuclear force to assure the protection of the Fifth Republic, and repudiated American claims to be the ultimate guarantor of the defence of Western Europe. As had been the case with de Gaulle, the possible foreign aggression Mitterrand had in mind when he talked of the need to defend France, was the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. In the early 1980s, Mitterrand presented the Soviet Union as a major threat to French and European security. Without detailed resort to statistical evidence to back his case, he asserted in 1981 that "the supremacy of the USSR in Europe does exist and I see a real danger in it".[xv] He repeated this assumption in later speeches and writing during the 1980s, making reference to a presumed Soviet superiority in conventional arms which rendered necessary the French resort to nuclear defence.[xvi]

 

History has passed by the scenario of a Soviet threat to Western Europe, just as events superseded the alarmist scenario of Soviet penetration in the South Pacific. In the late 1980s, glasnost reduced the tensions existing in Europe. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has withdrawn its troops from Eastern Europe. Before these developments occurred, ongoing testing in French Polynesia was the consequence of the presidential opinion that France was in peril from potential Soviet aggression. Testing for constant modernisation was essential for the defence of France, and its halt could not be contemplated, according to Mitterrand, who wrote in 1986:

 

Every nuclear power is constrained to pursue underground testing and they all do so. In bringing its to an end, France would let itself be overtaken in its knowledge of new arms systems, which would seriously damage the credibility of its dissuasion.[xvii]

 

After his visit to Moruroa in September 1985, Mitterrand declared that France, like the other nuclear powers, would continue testing as long as it seemed necessary:

 

I have convened the South Pacific Coordination Committee [...]. I reiterated my instructions on one hand France, a power present in the Pacific, intends to exercise its sovereignty over matters affecting its national interest. On the other hand, in accordance with this rule, she will pursue the tests necessary for her defence insofar as she deems it necessary, just as the four other nuclear powers - the United States, the Soviet Union, China and Great Britain - do so for their part.[xviii]

 

Until April 1992 this position was consistently repeated on innumerable occasions by French diplomats and Ministers in response to calls by South Pacific nations to end testing. France had no intention of submitting itself to unilateral nuclear disarmament in a period of superpower confrontation.

 

The Question of Safety

 

Throughout the 1980s, French officials insisted, as Rocard did to the audience at the Australian National Press Club in August 1989, that their nuclear testing was necessary in a world divided by superpower rivalry, and that testing presented no danger. Any suggestion that there might be safety problems on Moruroa or Fangataufa was usually met with official denials. French diplomats and visiting representatives repeatedly rejected any negative claims about the safety standards of the CEP, insisting on the infallibility of its technicians. In 1986 Mitterrand described testing as perfectly safe, presenting no danger either to the environment or to the people of the South Pacific:

 

The States of the South Pacific pressure France to renounce its nuclear testing in Oceania. They are fearful of nuclear fallout, the pollution of waters, flora and fauna. To reply to this legitimate concern, in 1975 the French Government substituted atmospheric tests with underground tests. Since then, an inspection system has continuously measured radioactivity [...], analysed air and water samples, and surveyed seismology.

Tests take place at depths of seven to eight hundred metres in basalt rock. They vitrify the cavities created by explosions. No dangerous infiltration has been discerned. Their innocuity is such that immediately after the explosions, which take place directly beneath Moruroa, our sailors and engineers are able to swim in the lagoon.[xix]

 

After the abandonment of atmospheric testing in 1974 detonations occurred either beneath the lagoon, or under the rim of the atoll. Opponents of French nuclear testing have, at various times, contended that the switch from atmospheric to underground explosions did not eliminate the potential for environmental contamination with radioactive waste. They have asserted that radionuclides, or radioactive particles, could seep from test shafts, either by venting to the top of the atoll, or through cracks in the atoll wall. Once released, radioactivity would contaminate the environment, drifting through the ocean or the atmosphere.

 

Such a possibility has been categorically denied by French officials. In a document entitled French Nuclear Tests prepared in the mid-1980s by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence and the French Atomic Energy Commission, the likelihood of dangerous leakage in the foreseeable future was ruled out:

 

The release of radioactive particles into the atmosphere is strictly out of the question, owing to the great depths at which the explosions take place. Thanks to the silica which constitutes the basalt, radioactive particles are either trapped in the vitrified lava resulting from the explosions, or absorbed by the rubble in the chimney.

Radioactive gases cannot be vented through the various geological beds because of the exceptionally long route up to the surface; venting is further impeded by the presence of relatively impermeable strata and by the presence of water in the terrain. Even supposing some gas were to percolate up through the terrain, it could only consist of small quantities of rare, chemically inactive gases, which do not remain in living organisms and have a very fast radioactive decay rate.

The lagoon is separated from the explosion cavities by more than 500 metres, the ocean by more than several kilometers. Radioactive residues could only reach the outside of the atoll from the cavity by a very slow diffusion process within the basalt. [...] Therefore one should not expect to detect any radioactivity whatsoever caused by underground testing within the next 500 to 1,000 years. By that time the low level of activity, coupled with natural decrease and dilution, will have rendered any detectable traces infinitesimal compared with natural radioactivity.[xx]

 

The possibility that nuclear testing might destroy the structure of the atoll base to the extent that leaks would flow through fissures created by explosions was also ruled out in the brochure. It declared that the geological structure of Moruroa was sound. Care had been taken to space the location of tests so that the local fracturing they created would not cause great structural damage:

 

Some fissures have appeared on the outer reef at Mururoa. These cracks run parallel to the shore and are caused by subsidence of the slopes of the island massif under the weight of the overlying coral layers. This is a natural process, which has been observed on other Polynesian atolls such as Rangiroa. These cracks could of course shift under the effect of explosions. However, they are superficial and confined to the outer coral layers. A fracture zone is also observed in the basalt within a radius of 100 to 200 meters of the point of explosion. This is obviously taken into account when calculating the migration of radioactive materials. Because of the depth at which the explosions take place, this fracture zone is far from the surface, and farther still from the fringe of the atoll. So these two fracture zones are totally independent, and there is no possible communication between the two. Several hundred meters of undamaged rock overlying the point of explosion, and several thousand meters between that point and the ocean, guarantee the containment of the radioactivity.[xxi]

 

Moruroa was characterised in the document as being geologically stable and unaffected by the tests. It was not admitted that external subsidence had taken place because of explosions. The importance of any seismic effects testing might have had was downplayed through emphasis on the "natural process" involved in the creation of any local fractures in the reef. Mention that these cracks "could shift" because of nuclear detonations was at best a vague, indecisive statement. Effort was made to point out that the limited nature of fracturing surrounding the bomb cavity precluded any leakage of radioactivity.[xxii]

 

This official image of an atoll externally unaffected by nuclear testing has been contradicted in other quarters. Perhaps the most credible authority in this regard is Admiral Henri Fagès, a former director of the CEP. While not going so far as to admit that it posed a danger, he indicated in 1988 that testing did cause geological instability at Moruroa. Surface subsidence was apparent around shafts where devices had been detonated, and tests produced a shock wave "which spreads through the entire atoll, weakens certain upper parts of the sides of the atoll, and provokes underwater avalanches of debris accumulated over millenia, which are detectable by seismographs and nearby microphones. Some cause the waterline to recede, followed in return by a succession of waves [...] But the overall structure of the basalt massif is not affected. Nor is it affected by the blast cavities, which are spaced sufficiently far apart from one another to refute the widespread, and unfounded, image of the atoll being like "gruyère" cheese."[xxiii] To what extent nuclear tests jolted Moruroa depends on which official source you choose to believe. Further evidence presented below suggests that Fagès was closer to reality than the anonymous authors of French Nuclear Tests.

 

Geography is another argument presented by official sources in defence of French nuclear testing. French authorities have gone to great lengths to point out the comparative remoteness of the CEP test sites. In response to regional claims that tests pose a threat to the inhabitants of French Polynesia and to neighbouring states, they have discounted them through resort to a geography lesson which indicated the thousands of kilometres between major population centres and Moruroa. For example, in a form letter sent in 1991 in reply to protest letters about French tests, Gabriel de Bellescize, the French Ambassador to New Zealand, wrote:

 

The idea that New Zealand could possibly be inconvenienced in any way by our nuclear tests is completely absurd. New Zealand is further away from Mururoa than Paris is from certain Russian experimental sites and even further away than New York or Los Angeles are from the Nevada test range. [...] How can New Zealand, which is on the other side of the Pacific, feel that it is being endangered?[xxiv]

 

Charles Hernu likewise produced this argument to question why New Zealand should be worried about French testing.[xxv] To back this position, French Nuclear Tests supplied maps comparing the number of inhabitants within a 1,000km radius of Moruroa, with the number of inhabitants falling within the same distance from the US and USSR test sites to demonstrate this remoteness.  They showed that around 5,000 inhabitants fell within this distance of Moruroa, compared with 37,500,000 within the same radius of the Nevada test site, and 4,195,000 near the Kazakhstan test range.[xxvi]

 

However illogical they might have seemed to French officials, anti-nuclear feelings were not assuaged by their holders' sense of being distant from Moruroa. The distance argument did not deterred regional critiques of testing. Whether or not these tests took place hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from neighbouring island states, they were perceived by island leaders as morally wrong, and as occurring psychologically if not physically in their 'back yard', due to an energetically asserted pan-Pacific outlook.[xxvii] Moral indignation and regionalist assertiveness however did not form the sole criteria for regional opposition to nuclear testing, as Régis Debray suggested in 1986.[xxviii] Some scientific reasoning could also be attributed to this intransigence. Distance did not prevent low level radioactive fallout from French nuclear tests being scattered as far away from Moruroa as Western Samoa and South America from 1966 to 1974. Opponents to French testing wondered if such contamination might not reoccur if any radionuclides from underground testing leaked into the atmosphere or into the Pacific Ocean. The likelihood of this scenario is examined further below.

 

Finally, an element of distrust can be attributed to the rejection by South Pacific leaders of French reassurances. In the 1950s Britain and the United States had suggested that their nuclear testing in Australia and in the Pacific islands was innocuous. The ill effects of their tests on the health of Pacific islanders and Australian Aborigines living in areas touched by fallout from these explosions had become public knowledge by the 1980s. If officials from London and Washington had either purposely or unwittingly misrepresented the dangers of nuclear testing then it could be assumed by the sceptical that there was little reason why Paris would be any different in the 1980s. This attitude was difficult to dispel by official French assurances.

 

Symptomatic of regional distrust of French assurances concerning the safety of testing was a question frequently posed by South Pacific leaders: "if it's so safe why don't you do it in France?"[xxix] The equally well-worn response was that Moruroa and Fangataufa are parts of France, over which the Fifth Republic has sovereignty,[xxx] and that there was no basis under international law for it not to conduct tests there. Moreover, as there was no danger, why should France resort to the expense of relocating its operations? The sovereignty argument was extremely difficult to refute on the basis of international law, and regional leaders have not done so convincingly. Bill Hayden, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, attempted to cast doubts on the right of France to conduct tests in French Polynesia by singling it out as somehow different from other nuclear powers. On 25 October 1985, he argued that "France is the only country which continues to test outside the home territory of a nuclear weapons State", and called for testing to be shifted to metropolitan France.[xxxi] The concept of "home territory" had no basis in international law, and is open to differing definitions. French representatives would have argued that French Polynesia, as an integral part of the Fifth Republic, was very much "home territory".

 

Even assuming this was not the case, the assertion made by Hayden contained a double standard which he did not seek to apply to the other nuclear powers. The Soviet Union held some of its tests in Kazakhstan, which was not self-evidently Moscow's "home territory". Like the indigenous inhabitants of French Polynesia, Kazakhs had their own culture and identity, distinct from that of the nation which had annexed them. Kazakhstan was a former colony of Tsarist Russia which had been retained by Lenin after the Russian revolution of October 1917. The Bolshevik fiction of a unified Socialist state transcending ethnic divisions was demonstrated by the balkanisation of the USSR from 1991. Regardless of the presence of Russian immigrants, Kazakhs asserted their particularism by declaring independence, whereas French Polynesians had chosen to remain within the Fifth Republic in 1958 and have since shown no sign of majority support for independence. Hayden would not have applied such criteria to the Soviet Union, probably for psychological reasons. It can be speculated that he failed to see any comparison between France and the Soviet Union in this respect because no expanse of ocean separated Kazakhstan from Moscow. Whether or not Moruroa or Kazakhstan qualified as the "home territory" of the governments which administered them in the 1980s, France and the Soviet Union reserved their sovereign right to test nuclear devices in their respective domains.

 

Apart from the status of Moruroa and Fangataufa as French territory, the comparative isolation of the two atolls was usually given as the traditional French response to the frequently repeated question "why don't you test it in metropolitan France?" French authorities have claimed that testing could not be conducted in metropolitan France because of the high population densities there. While French citizens would in no way be threatened by radiation, it was argued that the seismic effects from underground tests could destroy buildings within a 20km to 40km radius of any test site. It was asserted that testing could not be conducted in metropolitan France as there was no unpopulated area of this size.[xxxii] The Australian Government challenged this assertion. Hayden stated in Parliament on 11 September 1985 that sites existed in mainland France where testing could be safely conducted.[xxxiii] He drew his conclusion from a report prepared in 1985 by the Australian Office of National Assessments, which stated that Guéret and Margeride, in the Massif Central, were suitable regions for conducting tests. On what precise criteria the Office based its judgement on the suitability of these locations is difficult to ascertain. The Office of National Assessments did not make its findings public, and as a rule does not circulate its materials outside official circles.[xxxiv] Assuming that the Australian Government has not had second thoughts about the conclusions of the report, it appears incongruous that such information should have been kept classified. The release of such technical data might have served to advance the case of regional opposition to French testing by refuting the claim that this activity could not be conducted closer to Paris.

 

Another motive for conducting tests in French Polynesia, which French leaders tended not to indicate, was that relocating this activity to metropolitan France might have been politically unpopular on "home" territory. Although French citizens did not voice widespread anti-nuclear sentiment in response to the construction of nuclear power stations and the deployment of nuclear arms in their midst, they might have reacted differently to nuclear tests. One political consequence of holding nuclear experiments in French Polynesia has been that they have been physically and psychologically distant from the attention of metropolitan French voters.

 

As well as ruling out any danger to the environment posed by possible radioactive contamination from underground tests, French experts have ruled out the possibility of contamination as a consequence of human error. Fagès stated that testing was completely safe, was carried out with great care, and had never involved any major mishaps: "Its preparation, execution and operation are wrapped in guarantees of efficiency and safety, and there has never been either a total failure, or any accident."[xxxv] Interestingly, here Fagès effectively conceded the occurrence of partial failures in testing.

 

Certain incidents that have occurred since France shifted its testing underground give reason to disbelieve the assurance offered by Fagès that they have been conducted without accidents. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, staff at Moruroa leaked information concerning a series of mishaps which did not reflect well on such assurances.

 

On 24 November 1977, hours after the detonation of a nuclear device, a tidal wave washed over part of Moruroa. The cause was probably that the detonation had blown away part of the atoll wall, although French authorities have been reluctant to admit a causal connection between their testing and tidal waves.[xxxvi] This event was not an isolated one. On 25 July 1979, a nuclear device was exploded after becoming stuck half way down a test shaft. It was detonated at a depth of only 400m,[xxxvii] some 500m less than what was described as a safe depth for explosions in French Nuclear Tests. Three hours later a tidal wave hit Moruroa, injuring six people. The CEP denied the wave was produced by the bomb blast. A geologist at Victoria University in Wellington, Dr Chris Burgess, speculated that the tidal wave had been caused by the force of the explosion blowing away part of the atoll wall.[xxxviii] In October, an official French investigative mission confirmed that the test had provoked the mishap, although no radioactive leakage was supposed to have occurred.[xxxix]

 

In spite of French claims that no radioactivity has leaked from Moruroa into the sea or atmosphere since the beginning of underground testing, radioactive waste has been spilled both into the atmosphere and the sea. On 6 July 1979, an explosion followed by a fire took place in a bunker where, according to the four survivors interviewed by reporters from Le Matin, nuclear detonation experiments were conducted. For economic reasons, it had been decided to reuse this bunker after a detonation had been made, requiring its decontamination of plutonium trapped there. A spark from a machine used in the decontamination process was reported to have ignited radioactive gas present, causing an explosion. One man was killed. Another had his chest crushed by a door which was blown off its hinges. He died in hospital. Four others were badly burnt and were sent with their dead workmates to Paris for analysis. It was claimed by Le Matin that the explosion released an unknown quantity of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. The CEP claimed it was a non-nuclear accident.[xl] There was reason to doubt both sides on this final point. Le Matin might have gone too far in its search for a scoop, while the CEP might have been concealing something.

 

While human error might have caused the release of radioactive gas in this case, natural elements have been directly responsible for the release of solid radioactive wastes into the ocean around Moruroa. The greatest natural danger posed to Moruroa was its location at a latitude where cyclones are regular occurrences, which has led to safety problems. On 11 March 1981 a cyclone ripped off asphalt covering a nuclear waste dump on the north coast of Moruroa. Around 20kg of plutonium debris were washed into the lagoon and out to sea.[xli] By 2 August 1981 the damage caused by this cyclone had still not been attended to. That day another cyclone scattered further radioactive waste into the lagoon.[xlii] By September 1981, civilian technicians at Moruroa were threatening to strike unless the radioactive waste scattered by cyclones was cleaned up.[xliii] On 30 November 1981, three technicians on Moruroa circulated a report among personnel stating that radioactivity levels on Moruroa had doubled since July. The two cyclones in March and August had spread irradiated waste over an area of 30,000 square metres on the north beach of Moruroa. Extracts from the document were published in the London Sunday Times, generating adverse publicity not welcomed by the Mauroy Government.[xliv]

 

Hernu finally admitted the waste problems to the National Assembly on 9 December 1981: "It is correct that waste from a nuclear explosion prior to 1975, carried out on the atoll of Moruroa, was dispersed during the night of 11 to 12 March 1981 by a storm, creating a radiologically novel situation."[xlv] This was a curious euphemism for a nuclear waste leak. Hernu claimed that nothing greatly untoward had happened and that all was being taken care of "Continuous radiological surveillance is carried out on all categories of personnel and now we have the situation totally under control."[xlvi] Concerning the above cases, the CEP has concluded that the radioactivity released into the air and sea did not pose great danger to the environment, although as opponents such as Greenpeace pointed out, the public only had the CEP's word on that.[xlvii]

 

These incidents have tarnished French assurances about the safety of the tests. French representatives would have preferred to avoid mention of the hazards posed to test personnel by the device exploded under irregular conditions, the gas explosion, tidal waves and passing cyclones.[xlviii] French technicians at Moruroa have been proven humanly fallible by these misadventures. On the basis of these known problems, opponents to testing have been led to speculate that there might be other mishaps or safety irregularities which the CEP is either not aware of or is unprepared to publicise.

 

Since 1981 France has worked to counter such doubts by opening Moruroa to visits from scientists and regional leaders. This policy, implemented under Mitterrand from 1982, differed from that existing before his election. Under Giscard d'Estaing French and foreign journalists had periodically been permitted to visit the test facilities. Foreign requests for technical inspections of Moruroa were politely refused on the grounds of maintaining security and guarding national defence secrets.[xlix] Mitterrand projected his policy of openness as a model other nuclear powers should adopt. At the UN General Assembly on 28 September 1983, he invited other nuclear powers to follow the example of France and allow independent missions to their test sites.[l] This idea was not taken up. The invitation made by Mitterrand to have Moruroa independently investigated displayed a certain openness, while failing to answer various safety questions about the atoll.

 

The first independent report prepared on Moruroa under Mitterrand was made by Haroun Tazieff, a French vulcanologist who led a mission there in June 1982. This mission was described by its members as being of an exploratory nature and the report emphasised that its findings were by no means conclusive.[li] The mission lasted just two days, from 26 to 28 June 1982, inadequate time for anything more than a passing overview of test operations. The Tazieff mission returned from Moruroa with the conclusion that no urgent measures needed to be taken about safety there. The report concluded that a significant, although not dangerous, level of artificial radiation remained in the environment around Moruroa as a result of the atmospheric testing that had been carried out until 1974. It was judged that the effects of atmospheric testing represented neither a threat to the health of test site workers nor to the French Polynesian population.[lii] The sea walls and platforms erected in response to the danger of natural and artificially induced tidal waves at Moruroa were described as adequate safety precautions for personnel on the atoll.[liii] Contrary to official claims the report indicated that testing had caused some local subsidence in the coral of the atoll, and that testing was responsible for the odd tidal wave. The possibility that subterranean explosions might lead to the leaking of radioactivity into the environment was not excluded, although the mission had not spent enough time on Moruroa, or had the equipment necessary, to conduct a geological survey.[liv] The report also claimed that there were risks of slight radioactivity escaping during test explosions, but doubted that this was sufficient to harm workers on Moruroa.[lv] Formally, the Tazieff Report contradicted earlier French governmental claims that no immediate threat existed of radiation leaking from underground test shafts. However Tazieff stated that even if leaks occurred, they would contribute negligible radioactivity.

 

The Tazieff mission was the first of three independent investigations of Moruroa that were made in the 1980s. The second was the Atkinson mission, led by Dr Hugh Atkinson of the New Zealand DSIR. In response to the presidential invitation to regional leaders that had been extended by Debray in June 1983, four months later Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea sent a scientific mission to inspect the atoll.[lvi] The findings of the mission were released in July 1984 in a document known as the Atkinson Report.[lvii] As was the case with the Tazieff mission, the Atkinson mission paid only a brief visit to Moruroa, lasting four days from 25 to 29 October 1983. The report concluded that environmental radiation on Moruroa was very low, and posed no danger.[lviii] No evidence was found of abnormal rates of cancer which might have been caused by radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests from 1966 to 1974. Like the Tazieff mission, samples taken by the Atkinson mission were from the surface of the atoll, and from the lagoon.[lix] The Atkinson mission stated that radioactive waste management had been sorted out by the time of its arrival, and that this was no longer a problem.[lx]

 

The limitation of the Atkinson Report was that it arrived at no firm conclusions on the geological soundness of Moruroa. The team did not have the opportunity to conduct a geological survey and had to restrict itself to some general observations and conjecture. The most the Atkinson mission was able to do was to measure the venting of radioactive gas to the surface from an old nuclear test site. Although only one measurement could be made, traces of radioactivity measured were presented as confirmation of the assessment that radioactive gas was able to reach the surface after a test. The report noted that the mission was not given permission to gather data on the geochemistry of the atoll to ascertain to what extent radioactivity might leak from test cavities in general.[lxi]

 

CEP officials were opposed to a geological examination of test sites on the grounds that defence secrets might be breached.[lxii] French unwillingness to allow a geological survey of test shafts raised questions among the sceptical concerning what motive the CEP might have for keeping this area of investigation off limits. Were they afraid someone might find a leak?

 

The report stated that nuclear testing had damaged Moruroa and that radioactivity could leak from the atoll, but was vague on the time span involved, saying that the potential for leakage would probably be fulfilled "in less than 1,000 years".[lxiii] It was pointed out by the Atkinson Report that water which had seeped into the base of the atoll was capable of leaching radioactive materials into the biosphere in the long term. The mission did not have the chance to obtain adequate data to enable a conclusion on the rate of this process.

 

The French response to the Atkinson Report was to hold it up as evidence that Moruroa was safe, despite failing to answer questions concerning the geological soundness of the atoll, and the capacity for leakage into the sea and air. French Nuclear Tests drew on the more positive parts of the report in its case for French testing. Mitterrand likewise presented the conclusions of the document in a positive light:

 

This report confirms preceding conclusions; underground tests do not damage the integrity of the volcanic massif and therefore do not lead to deleterious effects, either on the environment or man. In spite of all this, anti-French campaigning continues.[lxiv]

 

Perhaps it might be more accurately described as anti-nuclear campaigning rather than as anti-French campaigning. Whatever the accompanying adjective, as Mitterrand noted, campaigning against testing continued. The South Pacific Forum was less reassured by the Atkinson Report than Mitterrand was. At its meeting in Tuvalu from 27 to 28 August 1984, the Forum decided that while the report reduced fears over short-term effects of testing, there were still grounds to doubt the long-term safety of testing. Forum rejection of French testing in the South Pacific was therefore retained and reiterated in the meeting's communiqué.[lxv]

 

Forum opposition was prompted by the remaining uncertainties about the safety of the tests. Essentially, the doubts that had not been dispelled concerned the geological effects of testing. Comparatively little was known about what was happening to the base and walls of Moruroa as a result of nuclear detonations. It could be questioned just how much the CEP knew about the atoll base, as it was not equipped with a bathysphere capable of descending to the base of the atoll wall for an underwater geological survey.

 

The third independent mission to Moruroa was to highlight the limitations of what was known about the effects of testing on the geological structure of the atoll. From 20 to 25 June 1987, the Cousteau Foundation examined Moruroa, with the permission of the Defence Minister. The Cousteau mission differed from its predecessors in investigating the atoll wall and the floor of the lagoon with diving equipment. A submarine was used to examine, to a depth of 230m below sea level, the damage resulting from the test on 25 July 1979. Divers estimated that around a million cubic metres of debris had collapsed off the atoll wall as a result of the explosion, and they noted extensive faults visible to a depth of 180m.[lxvi] The mission rejected the official assertion that such faults were natural and unrelated to testing. On 21 June, members were present for a nuclear test made under the lagoon. They were able to confirm that the explosion caused underwater fissures and rock falls on the external slopes of the atoll.[lxvii] They were however unable to confirm speculation about the rate of radioactive seepage, admitting that it was difficult to gauge this effect of explosions due to the fact that the depth and location of faults within the atoll could not be observed.[lxviii] The mission described the volcanic platform of the atoll as being a bad site for testing, because of the capacity of water to seep into test cavities and act as an agent to allow radioactivity to leach into the ocean. However the report also stated that as far as was known, there was no likelihood of radionuclides leaking out immediately, and by the time they did in several hundred years, any material would be very weak in radioactivity.[lxix]

 

The rate and level of possible radioactive seepage, and the precise effects of fracturing within the atoll, are the crux of deciding whether testing represents a danger or not. Manfred Hochstein and Michael O'Sullivan, of the Geothermal Institute at the University of Auckland, have come to conclude with the aid of computer models that the rate of seepage from explosion cavities into the environment could require substantially less time than the several hundred years accepted by the three aforementioned reports. Their computer models demonstrated that convection currents might push radioactive material from a 10kt explosion at a depth of 550m a distance of 200m in around six years. A 100kt explosion at a depth of 1km could result in convection of 500m in 30 years.[lxx] If this rate was sustained the amount of time it could take radioactivity to reach the environment might be measured in decades rather than centuries. The authors could not find any reliable statistical data to support the assertion that radioactive material reaching the atmosphere or marine environment would be hazardous to the health of personnel on Moruroa.[lxxi] Computer models, while enabling projections of what may happen, are not as reliable a source of data as measurements made in situ and over a long period of time, so the work of Hochstein and O'Sullivan was largely conjectural.

 

Conclusive judgement on what the effects of underground testing might have been cannot be passed without a detailed geological survey of Moruroa, including extensive examination of the floor of the atoll's lagoon and its outer walls to a greater degree than performed by the Cousteau mission. To avoid accusations of bias, such a survey would have to be conducted by an independent third party which could not be associated either with the pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear camps. The French campaign of openness has not extended to permitting a prolonged, comprehensive, independent survey.

 

In the National Interest

 

Concurrent with the policy of promoting the activities of the CEP as safe, and of working to convince outsiders of this image through a restricted opening of Moruroa to independent inspections, under Mitterrand great efforts were made to defend the test programme from various perceived threats. The defence by the French State of its prerogative to detonate nuclear devices in French Polynesia was at times asserted to the extent of employing acts of violence against its opponents, of which the most flagrant example was the Rainbow Warrior bombing in July 1985. This section considers the sometimes paranoiac attitudes that state officials demonstrated in their defence of nuclear testing against its critics, and the alienation that French attitudes have prompted in the South Pacific. Although such attitudes could be considered ephemeral in the broader scheme of French South Pacific policy, their bearing on the biggest French diplomatic gaffe in the region during the 1980s, the Rainbow Warrior bombing, is such that they merit examination. The decisions that led to the bombing, and the diplomatic consequences of it, are reviewed below in the context of regional policy.

 

French Governments have guarded the operations of the CEP against outside criticism since the 1960s. In response to calls from French Polynesian autonomist parties to conduct a territorial referendum on whether testing should continue, or in reply to concerns expressed over safety conditions at Moruroa, the French Polynesian Territorial Assembly was informed from 1963 to 1995 that defence matters are beyond the realm of its competence.[lxxii] As far as Paris was concerned, the territory had abdicated its right to comment on Moruroa and Fangataufa when it ceded the atolls to direct state control in 1964.[lxxiii] In any case territorial statutes before and since then reserved defence matters as a state domain.

 

Environmental activists who have criticised the CEP have sometimes been subjected to rough handling by the French authorities. Incidents occurred during the first Greenpeace campaigns against French testing in 1972 and 1973. On 1 July 1972, the vessel Greenpeace III was rammed in international waters by a French warship, La Paimpolaise, and had to be towed to Moruroa for repairs. The same vessel was boarded during another protest on 15 August 1973. Its captain, David McTaggart, and his navigator, were beaten up by a French boarding party. French officials denied the veracity of the assault. Their denials were undermined by photos produced by McTaggart's crewmates. Accusing the French State of piracy on the high seas, in May 1975, McTaggart was awarded damages by a French court in Paris for the ramming.[lxxiv]

 

The state response to foreigners and to certain French citizens who have voiced opposition to testing in French Polynesia has been expulsion from the territory. McTaggart and his crew were deported in August 1973 and were informed that they would not be permitted to return to the territory. In December 1990 French officials refused entry to the Greenpeace crew of the vessel Rainbow Warrior II.[lxxv] In March 1986, Dorothée Piermont, a West German Green member of the European Parliament, was expelled from French Polynesia for calling for a halt to testing.[lxxvi] For several years she fought a court battle against the French State over this expulsion, culminating in a verdict on 27 April 1995 by the European Court  of Human Rights at Strasbourg, that France had violated her right to freedom of expression under European law.[lxxvii] The 80,000 francs she was awarded by the court were a symbolic victory over Paris.

 

 These are just three selected examples of a practice that appears to have become standard procedure in French Polynesia. Anti-nuclear activists have been treated as undesirable aliens who pose a threat to public order. Such expulsions mark the limits of the French willingness to maintain open debate on the CEP. As the individuals in question were foreigners, the French State was able to employ its immigration laws to political ends in order to remove them. Against French citizens protesting tests the State has had less leeway, although in the 1960s it chose to act punitively. In December 1963 for example, the French Governor in Papeete issued a decree forbidding Maurice Lenormand from visiting the Society Islands. This measure was taken at the time when Lenormand, as the Deputy for New Caledonia, was lobbying Paris for administrative reform in close cooperation with his Tahitian counterpart.[lxxviii] This order was politically motivated and infringed the civil rights of opponents to the regional policies of de Gaulle.

 

Before 1985, that the French guardianship of its testing operations could have extended to espionage and sabotage on the sovereign territory of an allied nation would have been considered incredible, except perhaps to members of the environmental movement who had been subjected to the censure of the French State, and to students of the history of French intelligence agencies. The Rainbow Warrior bombing was to lead to various revelations, extensively reported by the media, which displayed that France was prepared to extend its campaign against peace activists well beyond its frontiers.

 

The events surrounding the Rainbow Warrior bombing have already been discussed in exhaustive, repetitive, and partially conflicting detail. A recapitulation of those events is therefore somewhat superfluous. The various accounts concerning the bombing operation are listed in the bibliography. The motives for the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior merit closer attention here, as do its diplomatic consequences. The incident was undoubtedly damaging to the reputation of France in the South Pacific. Conduct by French officials before and after the bombing offers an insight into the depth of their pro-nuclear outlook, and the extent to which that outlook rendered them psychologically out of touch with anti-nuclear sentiment in the region.

 

The major motivation for the bombing appears to have been the impression that the operations of the CEP were being threatened by Greenpeace. Evident in the writings of high officials, from Mitterrand down, was the professed belief that France was being victimised by Greenpeace. This portrayal was taken to extremes in an attempt to portray Greenpeace as anti-French. In 1986 Mitterrand wrote:

 

[...] I have no knowledge of any pacifist actions near English, American or Russian test sites. [...] The sporadic rigour of these intransigent people is only unrelenting with regard to us. It is difficult not to discern a political motive in this behaviour, faced with which it is merely a matter of opposing it with our own.[lxxix]

 

Mitterrand attributed politically antagonistic, Francophobic motives to campaigning by Greenpeace against testing. Faced with such antagonism, France had to stand fast in its nuclear policy conduct. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior bombing did not serve to undermine this conclusion. He concluded:

 

Upon reflection, it appears that their objective was not so much to confirm our statements as to conduct political agitation hostile to the French presence in that part of the world. The bomb blast perpetrated in the port of Auckland against the Rainbow Warrior, and the doubts cast upon our secret service, in no way change the fundamentals of the debate. No one can draw arguments from an act which does not morally oblige our country to reduce its surveillance around its atolls or renounce its testing.[lxxx]

 

Mitterrand's absolution of France from moral responsibility for the Rainbow Warrior bombing hinged on the point that the Fabius Government was not necessarily to blame for the actions of members of its secret service. They had acted under the orders of officials in the Ministry of Defence. The Fabius Government had expressed its disapproval by dismissing the Minister of Defence and the head of the DGSE. France would continue to be vigilant against those opposed to its ongoing tests.

 

Charles Hernu, Minister of Defence at the time of the bombing, attempted to discredit Greenpeace by portraying it as imbalanced in its campaigning. Greenpeace was not acting on moral pacifist principles. Rather the organisation was a bellicose enemy of France:

 

Why does "Greenpeace" only attack France? A pacifist is a man or a woman who demands bilateral disarmament. Unilateral pacifism is just disguised bellicosity.[lxxxi]

 

The argument that Greenpeace targeted only France and advocated unilateral disarmament disregarded the history of activism by the organisation against Soviet and American nuclear defence policy in general, and nuclear testing in particular.

 

Greenpeace was founded in 1971 in Vancouver, British Columbia, to protest US testing in the Aleutian Islands. Since then it has regularly mounted demonstrations against the US test programme. For example, in 1983, four Greenpeace activists penetrated the Nevada test site in an attempt to disrupt testing there. In April 1986, and in February 1987, similar efforts were mounted.[lxxxii] The anti-nuclear campaigning of Greenpeace members in Auckland, and of other peace activists, involved opposition to the US nuclear presence in the South Pacific as well as to that of France. From 1976 to 1984, the arrival of US nuclear powered naval vessels was regularly greeted by privately-owned boats, described as "the Peace Squadron", which attempted to block entry to New Zealand ports.[lxxxiii]

 

Greenpeace protests against the nuclear arms race were not limited to Western nuclear powers. Greenpeace activists had experienced greater difficulties gaining access to the Soviet test sites to stage protests, but they had brought their anti-nuclear views to the attention of the Soviet Government. In 1982, the Greenpeace vessel Sirius sailed into Leningrad, the base for the Soviet Baltic fleet, to stage a demonstration against Soviet escalation of the nuclear arms race. The ship and its crew were expelled by the Soviet Government for distributing anti-nuclear leaflets and balloons. In 1990, a Greenpeace delegation travelled to Kazakhstan to declare opposition to nuclear testing there. That same year, Greenpeace sailed a ship to the island of Novaya Zemlya, in the Arctic Circle, where Soviet tests have also been carried out. A team was landed to measure environmental radioactivity and was caught, which resulted in another expulsion.[lxxxiv] Less spectacularly, Greenpeace members in Wellington staged regular protests against Soviet nuclear tests outside the Soviet Embassy in New Zealand during the 1980s.

 

That Greenpeace had taken great pains to oppose nuclear testing was not in doubt. To read anti-French sentiment into this campaigning was to ignore the multinational record of the body's efforts. There were certainly members of Greenpeace who opposed the French presence in the South Pacific, and who were perhaps motivated by a degree of Francophobia, although this was not surprising given the history of antagonism between Greenpeace activists and the French State. It is difficult however to characterise the organisation as a whole as particularly Francophobic. If its aim was to campaign to force the ejection of the French from the Pacific, its leaders have been curiously reluctant to advocate this line. Elaine Shaw, who led Greenpeace New Zealand's anti-nuclear campaigning from 1974 through till 1986, gradually came to believe that French nuclear testing could only be stopped if France decolonised. She sought to convince Greenpeace International of the need to move beyond environmental issues and adopt policy supporting indigenous nationalist movements, not only in the Pacific TOM, but in the Pacific generally. This attitude was not shared by many of her colleagues within Greenpeace New Zealand, who felt that she was attempting to politicise the movement. Greenpeace International rejected her views in the early 1980s.[lxxxv]

 

Considering the opinion, expressed in the highest quarters, that Greenpeace was hostile to France, there existed ample motivation in the heads of leaders in Paris to assent to espionage against the organisation. In the months before the Rainbow Warrior bombing, at ministerial level there was no public hint from the Fabius Government that New Zealand was the subject of discontent in Paris. Protests by Wellington against French testing were long-standing, but they were less active in the early 1980s than they had been in the 1970s. In 1973 and 1974 New Zealand had conducted a case against French atmospheric testing with Australia at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.[lxxxvi] In 1973 Norman Kirk, the Labour Prime Minister, had ordered the dispatch of RNZN frigates to waters off Moruroa to signal New Zealand opposition to atmospheric testing. Australian naval vessels also participated in this protest.[lxxxvii] Since 1974 New Zealand reaction to French nuclear testing had been limited to paper remonstrations in the form of government statements after French nuclear tests, and speeches at international fora such as the UN. Up to 1985 these activities had not been characterised by French Governments as particularly threatening to French interests. Certain French opposition parliamentarians at the time were less resigned to accepting New Zealand and Australian anti-nuclear policy. These individuals were not in a position to influence the conduct of the Government. Michel Debré, the RPR Deputy for Réunion, in particular portrayed the two countries as having the intention to challenge French sovereignty in the South Pacific through their anti-nuclear declarations. In October 1984 he called on the Fabius Government to take more vigorous diplomatic action in response. This action in the National Assembly did not prompt any governmental measures to this end.[lxxxviii] The position of the Fabius Government in early 1985 was that although France might have its differences with New Zealand over French testing, that was to be expected. During his call at Nouméa in May 1985, Hernu commented:

 

Now I don't consider the New Zealanders to be our enemies. They have their own peculiar brand of messianism, protesting against nuclear tests. They should have done that when the English were conducting theirs...but then that's the way things go, that's life.[lxxxix]

 

At the time Hernu made this comment, a French agent, lieutenant Christine Cabon, was already in New Zealand, infiltrating Greenpeace and gathering advance information for Operation Satanic, the DGSE code-name for the action against the organisation.[xc]

 

Not everyone in the French Ministry of Defence was as dismissive of New Zealand as Hernu appeared to be. The undertaking of a French espionage operation in New Zealand offered reason to believe that the country was considered, if not an enemy, then not exactly the closest of friends either. Henri Fagès, who was director of the test facilities at Moruroa until the end of June 1985, demonstrated publicly in 1988 that he viewed New Zealand as antagonistic, presenting it as a base for Greenpeace in its campaigns against French testing:

 

It [New Zealand] pretends to be the sentinel of our tests. Its government officially announces any seismic readings the origins of which it attributes to one of our tests. It is the only one in the world to do so, and it appears that its laboratories never detect testing in Nevada or Kazakhstan, scarcely further away. Also, the only ecological organisation which opposes our tests is firmly established in Auckland. Its local directors seek, without any great success, support from the pro-independence clans of [French] Polynesia."[xci]

 

New Zealand did, as suggested, announce seismic tremors pinpointed as originating from Moruroa or Fangataufa. Until 1988, France issued few public details on its tests. In May 1988 the Rocard Government decided to release details of the number of French tests conducted each year. These disclosures have constituted the limit of French openness in this regard. The DSIR has filled this statistical gap since the 1960s. With a monitoring station in the Cook Islands it was arguably the best stationed foreign body to monitor French activity.

 

Some of what Fagès wrote was inaccurate. Contrary to what he claimed, measured either from the Cook Islands station, or from DSIR facilities in New Zealand, the US test sight at Nevada and the Soviet test sights were not scarcely more distant than Moruroa, as any casual glance at a globe proves. Fagès singled out, and linked together, New Zealand and Greenpeace in their opposition to French tests, suggesting a uniqueness which did not exist. The New Zealand Government was not the only one in the world to announce French tests. Australia did likewise. In furthering his case for complicity between the New Zealand Government and Greenpeace, Fagès neglected to draw attention to the fact that the organisation was as well implanted in Washington, London and Paris as it was in Auckland.

 

The claim that the Auckland members of Greenpeace had links with Maohi nationalists in French Polynesia was well-founded. Anti-nuclear sentiment in French Polynesia predated the foundation of Greenpeace, and Maohi nationalist formations have welcomed Greenpeace visits to Papeete. However Fagès misrepresented the relationship between Greenpeace and Maohi nationalists. It might be suggested, in contradiction to his claim that the latter had not supported the former, that it was Greenpeace which had not supported the pro-independence claims of Maohi nationalists. As mentioned above, neither Greenpeace International nor Greenpeace New Zealand have adopted anti-colonialist policies.

 

Fagès held that the Australian and New Zealand publics, through their anti-nuclear policies, were attempting to challenge France in the South Pacific. He went on to postulate that Australia had neo-imperialist designs on the Pacific TOM:

 

[...] public opinion in Australia and New Zealand has once again voiced protests after the lull which followed the halt of atmospheric testing. It is also a protest against the sovereignty of France over its South Pacific Territories. Australia, the great unwitting imperialist, is claiming control over this ocean, a control which it does not enjoy the means to implement.[xcii]

 

Australian and New Zealand public opinion against French nuclear tests did represent a challenge to French sovereignty over its Pacific territories, in that members of this public were opposed to nuclear activities which France had the right to conduct under international law. Moreover this challenge was less menacing to life and property either than Operation Satanic proved to be in New Zealand, or than French testing might conceivably be in the event of nuclear leakage from Moruroa or Fangataufa. However considering the portrayal of Australia and New Zealand by Fagès, it might be considered odd that their Labour Governments played no part in the 1985 Greenpeace campaign against Moruroa. In May 1985 David Lange had refused formal calls by Greenpeace New Zealand to follow the precedent set by Prime Minister Norman Kirk in 1973 and to send an RNZN frigate to Moruroa with protest vessels.[xciii] The New Zealand Government was not as vigorous a supporter of Greenpeace as was believed by French conservatives.[xciv] Wellington and Canberra were less vociferous opponents of the French Pacific presence in the 1980s than Fagès would have his readers believe.

 

The views of Fagès, however erroneous in some respects, were in 1985 to find a receptive audience in the upper reaches of the Ministry of Defence. Fagès was not alone in the high command with his concern over the security of the test facilities at Moruroa.[xcv] There, an espionage operation was set in motion which worked on the assumption that, as France was being victimised by Greenpeace and New Zealand, they were both legitimate targets for a French riposte.

 

The comments made by Fagès could be dismissed as marginal if not for the fact that it was on his recommendation that DGSE surveillance was mounted on Greenpeace to protect Moruroa from ecological activists. Vice-Admiral Pierre Lacoste, director of the DGSE, was approached by Fagès in January 1985. Lacoste was the recipient of an alarmist scenario painted by Fagès, who accused the DGSE of neglecting French security interests in the South Pacific at a time when anti-nuclear activism was mounting to the point where it would threaten testing operations on Moruroa. Lacoste responded that he would scale up the activities of the DGSE if he received word from his superiors to do so.[xcvi] As Lacoste's immediate superior was Hernu, Fagès wrote a letter to him, date unknown, which called for surveillance of Greenpeace to be mounted in order to gauge its plans.[xcvii]

 

Hernu took the letter seriously, and met with Fagès on 4 March 1985 in Paris. Fagès presented a written report which reiterated his concerns, stating that he believed Greenpeace intended to sail the Rainbow Warrior and three other ships to Moruroa. On 24 June 1984, the day the Pacific Arts Festival was to be held in Tahiti, the ship would disembark Maohi nationalists in outrigger canoes to land on Moruroa.[xcviii] This was an outlandish scenario, and the intelligence which Fagès drew on was lacking in credibility. The date for this projected Greenpeace action was notable for the non-arrival on Moruroa's beaches of this invasion of Maohi nationalists. On 24 June, the Rainbow Warrior was thousands of kilometres from Moruroa, en route from Kiribati to Vanuatu, and the ship was not scheduled to reach Moruroa until mid to late July.[xcix] Hernu said he would order the DGSE to take action to infiltrate Greenpeace and pre-empt its imagined operation.[c] During the following two weeks, Lacoste consulted General Jean Saulnier, the head of Mitterrand's military staff, who offered 4MFF to fund the operation. Saulnier eventually authorised the release of 4.5MFF for Operation Satanic on 8 July 1985.[ci] On 18 May 1985, the DGSE was able to announce to authorised personnel that Operation Satanic was to be launched.[cii] At this point, Operation Satanic does not appear to have been any more than an intelligence gathering mission with some possible sabotage envisaged. Were it to have been what was picturesquely described as an "opération homo", or a homicide operation, direct presidential assent would have been required.[ciii]

 

Mitterrand later admitted that he was aware of the concerns raised by Fagès about Greenpeace prior to the bombing.[civ] To what extent he knew about the concrete details of Operation Satanic is open to speculation. To what degree Saulnier kept Mitterrand informed of the operation is unconfirmed. Fabius does not appear to have known the operation was under way,[cv] although soon after the bombing both he and Mitterrand became aware of the role of the DGSE. The death of the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira during the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July resulted in Mitterrand separately questioning Hernu about exactly what the DGSE thought it was up to. The arrest in Auckland of two suspected French agents two days later, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, later identified as French officers, added greater urgency to this line of questioning.

 

On 14 July, Hernu confirmed to Mitterrand that the DGSE had agents present in New Zealand, although he claimed he was not certain who had made the decision to use explosives.[cvi] At this point, Fabius was also making inquiries. Even though his signature had been appended to the authorisation of the Operation Satanic budget, financed from a special fund administered by the Hôtel Matignon, this signature had been stamped by a subordinate rather than written by Fabius himself.[cvii] At a meeting with Fabius and Hernu on 15 July at the Elysée, Mitterrand informed Hernu that if the responsibility of the DGSE was publicly established, it would cost the Minister of Defence his post.[cviii] Fabius informed Hernu at a meeting at the Hôtel Matignon the following day that he would not cover the Minister of Defence either.[cix]

 

It was not until 22 September 1985 that Fabius apologised to the New Zealand Government for the bombing on behalf of France.[cx] Comments in July from presidential advisers and the Prime Minister's advisers that French responsibility should be admitted had been rejected in preference to denials and protestations of officialdom's innocence. Initially it had been hoped that some amicable settlement might be made with New Zealand. This expectation misread the sense of outrage expressed by the Lange Government, and was not fulfilled.[cxi] In hoping that the incident would fade away, Mitterrand and Fabius underestimated the investigative abilities both of the New Zealand Police and of the French press. In Auckland, numerous members of the public contributed eyewitness testimony which established that Mafart and Prieur were involved in the bombing operation. The police were able to find out from Swiss authorities that the pair had been travelling on false Swiss passports, and that they and other French agents present in New Zealand had telephoned a DGSE number in Paris. From July to September, Mitterrand and Fabius experienced progressively greater difficulty denying that the order for the bombing had come from Paris and that the DGSE was responsible. Some wild attributions of blame for the bombing were being made by Hernu and his subordinates in the Ministry of Defence that did much to undermine the credibility of official protestations of innocence. In August, in a bizarre attempt to fuel the imaginations of Gallic subscribers to speculation over an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy, Hernu[cxii] and Defence Ministry officials[cxiii] claimed that the British secret service was responsible.

 

The official inquiry into the bombing, ordered by Mitterrand, resulted in the Tricot Report of 25 August 1985. The document exonerated the DGSE, concluding unconvincingly that its agents were merely in New Zealand on an intelligence gathering exercise which did not involve the infiltration of Greenpeace.[cxiv] The leftist Parisian daily Libération sarcastically responded with the page one headline "TRICOT LAVE PLUS BLANC".[cxv] Prime Minister David Lange declared on 27 August that New Zealand was not satisfied with the Tricot Report and required an apology.[cxvi] Nor indeed was Fabius satisfied. On 27 August he ordered Hernu to prepare his own report in an endeavour to find out who was culpable within the Ministry of Defence. Hernu drew the same conclusion as Tricot although there had been French agents in New Zealand at the time of the bombing, they were not linked to the incident.[cxvii]  Like other high officials in the Ministry of Defence, if Hernu knew what had happened, he was not prepared to say so.[cxviii]

 

Eventually, the fact that New Zealand was holding two French agents contributed to forcing the Fabius Government into an admission of the responsibility of the DGSE. So too, from August to September 1985, did the investigations of the Parisian press, which led to various discoveries about the identities and activities of the French agents who participated in Operation Satanic. Denials by Hernu of any link between the bombing and the French Ministry of Defence[cxix] were made to sound increasingly implausible. Hernu accused the press and all his other opponents of mounting a libellous campaign against him and his subordinates in order to attack French deterrence "it's not a matter of happenstance that all the people being attacked are men in the nuclear chain of command".[cxx] This was a case of Hernu trying to evoke sympathy for himself and his subordinates as victims while simultaneously appealing to French concerns for national security.

 

As Fabius did not have any indication from Hernu as to who specifically had made the decision to bomb the Rainbow Warrior, he resolved that Hernu and Lacoste, as the two men at the top of their respective organisations, should assume responsibility. With the approval of Mitterrand, their resignations were called for. On 20 September, Hernu tendered his resignation, claiming that his subordinates had hidden the truth from him.[cxxi] Lacoste did likewise the same day. Hernu was replaced by Paul Quilès, previously Minister of Transport, while Lacoste's successor was General René Imbot, the Chief of Staff of the French Army. The pair were instructed to investigate who was covering whom, but were met with denials among their subordinates. For their part, neither Hernu nor Lacoste were prepared to contribute to these inquiries. Having already lost their posts they were disinclined to be so obliging. Hernu wrote two years later that he felt too much solidarity with his subordinates to assist any such inquiry, which is why he offered his resignation.[cxxii] He continued insisting, as he did until his death in January 1990, that he had not given the order to conduct the bombing, and did not know who did.[cxxiii] Mitterrand's public position was that the affair was ridiculous, had gone on long enough, and that someone had to take the blame. He declared in 1989 that he doubted Hernu's profession of innocence:

 

For me, it was a mad operation, an idiotic secret service affair with a cast of second-raters and brigands. Nowadays my interpretation, my 'impression', is that it was all a stunt pulled by the admirals [Fagès and Lacoste]. The sailors down under concocted their affair and Lacoste, himself an admiral, assigned his service to carry out this 'belle opération'. As for Hernu, you know what he's like, he would have said: "Ah! Good idea!"[cxxiv]

 

This was a plausible explanation which was consistent with available evidence. In the absence of solid evidence to support this assumption though, room is still open for doubt as to whether Hernu knew about plans to bomb the Rainbow Warrior.

 

On 22 September Fabius belatedly admitted what the members of the French press had been asserting for weeks: that the DGSE was responsible for the bombing.[cxxv] Further revelations to the public did not eventuate. Hernu and Lacoste had already shouldered the blame for the operation. It was considered unnecessary to punish the agents who had participated in Operation Satanic, on the grounds that they had been acting under orders. Imbot was not prepared to make inquiries which might demoralise the military or call into question its professional integrity,[cxxvi] an attitude which severely limited the extent of his investigation. By 27 September, Imbot had declared that the investigation was over. Exactly who had ordered what is still the subject of a great degree of uncertainty, although the resignations of Hernu and Lacoste marked the beginning of government efforts in Paris to resolve the implications of the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

 

The affair was not taken up by the Opposition to pillory the Fabius Government to the same degree as the New Caledonian troubles in 1984 and 1985 had been. Although various criticisms were offered around the time of the admission by Fabius of the DGSE's culpability for the bombing, they were not to endure to the extent of derisive comments about New Caledonian policy. The comments offered by the UDF, RPR, PC and the FN concerned rather the institutional implications of the affair for the Fifth Republic. Leaders of these parties were less preoccupied with the violation of New Zealand sovereignty, the death of Pereira, and the destruction of Greenpeace property, than they were with the consequences for the good reputation of France and of Republican institutions.[cxxvii] Charles Pasqua, a senior RPR representative, observed perceptively: "What the Opposition reproaches Mitterrand for is not so much having undertaken the operation but rather having carried it out just like everything else he does; in other words like a nitwit, with grotesque results."[cxxviii] Had Operation Satanic not gone awry and become a public matter, there would have been no grounds for complaint. In the absence of any incriminating evidence enabling New Zealand police to establish the involvement of the DGSE, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior bombing would have remained an unattributed crime. The reputation of the Republic would not have been besmirched.

 

The RPR placed the blame for the Rainbow Warrior affair on the Fabius Government, describing its conduct as amateurish. For the RPR there was no question of blaming military officials. On behalf of the RPR group, Claude Labbé stated to the National Assembly on 24 September 1985"we shall not allow [...] the army to carry responsibility which is incumbent entirely on the political authorities".[cxxix] The military officials were merely subordinates on whom Fabius and Hernu had failed to keep a tight rein. Pierre Messmer, a former Minister of Defence, had stated before Hernu's resignation that the Minister should immediately have accepted his accountability and quit his post.[cxxx] Toubon called for Fabius to take responsibility for the bombing.[cxxxi] The RPR did not seek to attack Mitterrand, perhaps because its leaders were anticipating the need to maintain good relations prior to what would probably be a period of cohabitation from March 1986.[cxxxii]

 

Jean Lecanuet, the President of the UDF, agreed with Labbé that the bombing was a political decision for which the military was not to blame, but looked further up the state hierarchy than Fabius "Not for a second is it imaginable that the decision could have been a military one. The sabotage is the result of a political order which came from the highest level [...]. It is implausible that M. Mitterrand was not up with the play"[cxxxiii] The UDF rhetorically asserted that the affair was worse than the Watergate scandal.[cxxxiv] This, as it turned out, was an overestimation and a misinterpretation. Some UDF representatives called for Mitterrand's resignation, claiming that his image had been irreparably damaged, however their stance was unrealistic.[cxxxv] The President was not directly threatened by the consequences of the Rainbow Warrior affair. Other leaders in the UDF were more reticent to comment and no doubt were also anticipating the prospect of cohabitation with Mitterrand.

 

The PC was more outspoken. Marchais described the affair as a "State  lie based on State terrorism".[cxxxvi] Le Pen pointedly remarked "either M. Mitterrand was not  in the picture, in which case he is a mug, or he was and he's an accomplice".[cxxxvii] Either way he placed the blame squarely on Mitterrand, pointing out that as head of the French armed forces it was he who was ultimately accountable. Both Marchais and Le Pen could afford to be immoderate in their commentaries. For their parties, participation in a possible cohabitation was singularly unlikely, and did not influence party policy on this issue.

 

The RPR and the UDF were justified in pointing to the ineffective handling of the Rainbow Warrior affair by Fabius. Since July both Fabius and Mitterrand had been aware that the DGSE had been involved in operations in New Zealand against Greenpeace. A prompt admission of this in July, some dismissals in the Ministry of Defence, and a rapid offer of reparations to the aggrieved parties would have done much to bring the situation under control at an early stage. In July neither Fabius nor Mitterrand might have had all the facts on the DGSE's operation in New Zealand, but nor did they have them by September. When they finally decided to act, controversy had escalated over the bombing, partly because of previous French denials.

 

The round of recrimination in Paris was not to last very long. Once the investigation at the Ministry of Defence had been declared closed, the French parliamentary parties largely closed ranks on the Rainbow Warrior affair. The fate of Mafart and Prieur became the new topic of the day, which led the Opposition to vent its discontent on the asserted obstinacy of the New Zealand Government rather than on the supposed incompetence of Fabius.[cxxxviii] Here, the major parties were united: whether right or wrong, the Rainbow Warrior bombing was an act of State, for which the French Republic collectively could accept culpability, but for which French officers acting under orders were personally blameless. They should not be punished for a decision which was not their own. The New Zealand stance was that the pair were possibly criminals, and their fate would be determined by New Zealand justice.

 

On 22 November, Prieur and Mafart were sentenced in Auckland by the New Zealand High Court to ten years' imprisonment for manslaughter. The verdict was arrived at on the first morning of the trial, without any presentation of evidence, after the prosecution and the defence had agreed that charges would be reduced from murder to manslaughter in exchange for an admission of guilt. The prosecution was uncertain of its ability to establish that Mafart and Prieur had been directly responsible for the death of Pereira. It was also in the interests of the French Government that the trial be resolved as swiftly as possible, with a minimum of factual revelations about the activities of its agents. There were suggestions in the French media that the Fabius and Lange Governments had come to an arrangement. This assertion was denied in Wellington, although the fact remained that for a criminal trial the hearing had peculiar features.[cxxxix]

 

Lange stated after the verdict that the reduction of their sentences or their early release were not to be bargaining points in reparation negotiations with France.[cxl] Lange held to this position into 1986, but was forced to abandon it in the face of pressure from the Fabius Government and, from March 1986, from the incoming Chirac administration. The arrival of cohabitation did not produce any change in French demands for the release of the agents. From February to April 1986 the Fabius Government and then the Chirac Government oversaw the implementation of restrictions on New Zealand imports to France. Customs regulations and the resort to various bureaucratic subterfuges were used to delay and obstruct numerous New Zealand products. This activity started in late February when the importation of lambs' brains was suspended.[cxli] Although French customs officials claimed the suspension was for sanitary reasons, the timing of this and other hindrances placed on New Zealand wool, meat, fish, potatoes and kiwi fruit rendered suspect their claims to represent a disinterested bureaucracy. After the appointment of the Chirac Government, Michel Noir, the new Minister of External Commerce, announced on 15 May that France would oppose the renewal of the preferential tariff agreement on New Zealand butter exports to the EEC.[cxlii]

 

This announcement, on top of the customs blocks and delays to New Zealand goods exported to France, constituted great concerns for Lange. He had pointed out on 27 August 1985 that New Zealand could not afford to permit its relations with France to deteriorate too far over the Rainbow Warrior affair:

 

There are too many common interests and in particular New Zealand would be at risk if it had within the European market an implacable foe. What we need is an understanding associate. Therefore there is no suggestion that New Zealand diplomacy would set out to escalate this matter to the point where it rebounded on New Zealand.[cxliii]

 

New Zealand trade with the EEC was too important to endanger. In 1984, around 20% of New Zealand exports were purchased in the Community. Annual New Zealand trade with France was worth around $NZ270M.[cxliv] The lack of preparedness shown by Lange to negotiate the release of Mafart and Prieur as part of the arbitration of the bombing damages had resulted in trade considerations rebounding on him.

 

Commercial pressures forced a reconsideration in Wellington. Lange assented to putting the matter to independent arbitration, an option preferable to deteriorating relations with Paris. On 19 June 1986, the French and New Zealand Governments announced that they had agreed to arbitration of their differences, to be overseen by Javier Pérez de Cuellar, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. On 7 July, his ruling was announced.[cxlv] Both countries agreed to its terms, which specified that in exchange for an apology from the French Prime Minister and reparation of $US7M, New Zealand would release Mafart and Prieur for internment on Hao Atoll in French Polynesia for three years. France also agreed not to oppose New Zealand butter import quotas to the EEC for 1987 and 1988.[cxlvi] On 23 July, as agreed to in the arbitration accord, Mafart and Prieur were flown to Wallis, and then to Hao for internment. The commercial interests of New Zealand had ultimately taken precedent over the authority of the New Zealand High Court.

 

The Quai d'Orsay announced French satisfaction with the ruling and its intention to honour it: "it will allow both France and New Zealand to renew their traditional ties of friendship".[cxlvii] This was not to be the case. Differences surfaced over the ruling. Chirac broke the arbitration ruling by allowing the return of both Mafart and Prieur to metropolitan France before their three year sojourn on Hao was up. On 14 December 1987, Mafart arrived back in metropolitan France, reportedly suffering from a complaint that could not be cured by doctors on Hao.[cxlviii] On 7 May 1988, Prieur left Hao for metropolitan France as she was pregnant and her father was dying. Chirac claimed that the repatriations had not violated the arbitration agreement, while admitting to a degree of calculation in gaining the return of Prieur:

 

The agreement with New Zealand specified that, should one or the other fall ill, he or she could return to metropolitan France. It also specified that should Madame Prieur become pregnant, she could return home. The day the "Turenges" arrived on Hao, I had Dominique Prieur's husband, also an officer, informed that he was going to be transferred there and that it would be a good move if he could swiftly make his wife pregnant.[cxlix]

 

The agreement did not in fact state that the pair could be returned to metropolitan France under the conditions Chirac mentioned.[cl] Chirac failed to act entirely in accord with the arbitration agreement, and the two repatriations caused New Zealand to call for further arbitration in September 1988. After protracted consideration over the matter, on 7 May 1990, an arbitration tribunal meeting in New York resolved that France had not broken its obligations in repatriating Mafart, as his condition of ill-health was such that he had to be evacuated. In not returning him to Hao after his recovery however, France had violated the accord.[cli] Prieur's departure had broken the accord as New Zealand had not given its consent to her evacuation, and she had not been returned after the birth of her child. There was no chance of them being returned in May 1990. The tribunal found that the three year period of their detention had expired on 22 July 1989, so there was no need to return them. To compensate, it declared that France should create a Franco-New Zealand friendship fund to make amends for its breach of the arbitration agreement of July 1986.[clii]

 

Before their arrival in government in March 1986, RPR and UDF leaders had attacked the Fabius Government for mishandling the Rainbow Warrior affair, portraying it as having handled the matter ineptly, and damaged the reputation of France. The Chirac Government was far less inept in its handling of the aftermath. The trade pressure it applied on New Zealand from March 1986 obtained the release of Mafart and Prieur to Hao, and the violation of the arbitration agreement obtained their return to metropolitan France. These measures damaged the credibility of two French Governments in the eyes of New Zealand officials. Neither the Socialists, nor the Gaullists, nor the Giscardians remained untouched by the aftermath of the Rainbow Warrior bombing. Under both the Fabius and the Chirac Governments, the French national interest was the primary consideration, whether it was deemed to involve the destruction of private property and the death of a foreign national in a New Zealand port, the coercion of the New Zealand Government into releasing French agents, or the violation of the terms of their release.

 

By May 1990 it appeared that the Rainbow Warrior affair had been resolved once and for all. This impression was confirmed when, on 29 April 1991 in Wellington, Rocard and Bolger signed an agreement creating the Franco-New Zealand Friendship Fund, to which France had contributed 11.7MFF, a not insubstantial token of its good-will.[cliii] The actions of the Fabius and Chirac Governments resulted in a third and final apology on behalf of France during the tour of New Zealand made by Rocard:

 

Errors have been committed in the past. France made a mistake. I have said so publicly before and I am saying so here. Misunderstandings developed, and incomprehension brought us into conflict. Now all that must be left behind us. We have to think about building the future.[cliv]

 

Rocard had the distinct advantage of not having been a member of the Fabius Government at the time of the bombing. He had resigned as Minister of Agriculture in April 1985, and he had later criticised Fabius's handling of the Rainbow Warrior affair.[clv]

 

Although Rocard stated that it was necessary to go beyond past misunderstandings, the Rainbow Warrior affair was not yet in fact over. A strange coda to the affair took place in November and December 1991. On 26 November, Gérald Andriès, one of the French agents suspected to be involved in Operation Satanic, was arrested by Swiss officials. It became apparent that he was still the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by New Zealand in 1985.[clvi] The warrant for his arrest, and those for the other Frenchmen suspected of having played a part in the bombing, had not been withdrawn in spite of the settlement of differences between Wellington and Paris. The Swiss police detained Andriès and informed the New Zealand Government, which as a result found itself in an awkward position. Months after the Rainbow Warrior bombing had supposedly been settled, it had returned unexpectedly. On 17 December 1991 Doug Graham, the Minister of Justice, declared that New Zealand had withdrawn outstanding warrants for the arrest of those suspected of participating in Operation Satanic. There was no longer any intention of seeking to extradite Andriès and prosecute him, or to pursue any other French suspects over the bombing.[clvii] New Zealand Government papers obtained under the Official Information Act proved that the National Government, like the Labour Government in 1986, did not wish to antagonise Paris for fear of the threat of French trade reprisals.[clviii] The issue was finally closed.

 

The Rainbow Warrior affair constituted the negative side of French efforts to defend its nuclear policy. The incident harmed France's reputation in the South Pacific, although not irreparably. In spite of its protracted disputes with France since 10 July 1985, New Zealand at no point contemplated cutting off relations with France. New Zealand economic ties with Europe were considered too important to take this step. The Rainbow Warrior affair demonstrated that, however much a South Pacific nation such as New Zealand might contest aspects of French nuclear policy, it was not in a position of sufficient power to push its opposition. Although New Zealand had the support of Australia and of other South Pacific nations, they also had no intention of endangering their economic situations for the same reason as New Zealand they depended to a greater or lesser extent on trade with the EEC. New Zealand did not receive any substantial support from Britain or the United States in its dispute with France.[clix] As nuclear powers ruled by conservative governments, they had little sympathy for any problems Lange and his anti-nuclear Labour Government were having with the French,[clx] and had still less empathy for Greenpeace, which had campaigned against British and American testing at Nevada as well as against Moruroa. The status of France as a fellow Western nuclear power far overrode any cooperation between what the French indiscriminately portray as three Anglo-Saxon nations.[clxi]

 

The bombing showed the degree to which the French military and French Governments were at odds with anti-nuclear sentiment in the South Pacific. The argument that Mafart and Prieur were patriots doing their duty clashed with the popular New Zealand image of them and their colleagues as state-sponsored terrorists. Coming just one month before the annual meeting of the South Pacific Forum for 1985, the bombing was in addition unfortunately timed. It drew the attention of the international media to regional nuclear issues just as the South Pacific Forum was about to consider the creation of a South Pacific nuclear free zone.

 

A South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone?

 

From the election of Mitterrand in 1981 until April 1992, and during the period July 1995 to January 1996, the South Pacific Forum was as constant in its repeated opposition to French nuclear testing as French Governments were in their pursuit of it. With the exceptions of Tonga and the Cook Islands, which wavered on the issue, both the Forum as a whole and its individual member states reiterated their rejection of French reassurances about the safety of operations at Moruroa and Fangataufa. (Appendix 5)

 

While the PS was discarding its leftist anti-nuclear heritage in the 1970s, the anti-nuclear movement in the South Pacific was gaining a larger following in governmental and non-governmental circles. From its foundation in 1971, the South Pacific Forum offered an avenue for statements of anti-nuclear sentiment by regional governments. In 1973 and 1974 New Zealand and Australia challenged France over its atmospheric nuclear testing at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. In 1975, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, an international body of non-governmental lobby groups from the North and South Pacific, held its first meeting in Suva. Greenpeace, originally a Canadian group, spread to the South Pacific in the 1970s, with branches established by ecologists and peace campaigners in New Zealand and Australia.

 

The first proposal for a South Pacific nuclear free zone was submitted to the South Pacific Forum at its meeting in Tonga in 1975 by the New Zealand Labour Government. This proposal lost momentum after the election victory of the National Party that year.[clxii] Robert Muldoon, the new National Prime Minister, was opposed to anti-nuclear sentiment as a threat to the Western alliance, and demonstrated this opposition by inviting US nuclear-powered warships to visit New Zealand. In Australia too that year, a Labour Government lost power, to be replaced by a new administration unsympathetic to anti-nuclear treaties. In 1983, the newly-installed Hawke Government took up the proposal at the meeting of the Forum in Canberra. Prime Minister Hawke sought a draft proposal which would ban all except the transit of nuclear weapons through international territory in the South Pacific, and which would allow port calls by nuclear powered and armed ships at the discretion of individual governments.[clxiii] It was apparent from the outset that Australia was concerned not to install a treaty which would disrupt its defence cooperation with the United States, although the proposal contained a clause opposing nuclear testing, a feature which would challenge French activities. These choices showed a degree of selectivity which left the proposal vulnerable to the accusation that it was anti-French.

 

It took two years before the South Pacific nuclear free zone proposed by Hawke was embodied in a document ready for acceptance by the Forum. It was tabled at the meeting of the Forum on Rarotonga on 6 August 1985, and covered the salient points outlined by Hawke in 1983. The articles of what became known as the Rarotonga Treaty were prefaced with an expression of regional concern at the advance of the global nuclear arms race that described the document as an attempt to further the cause of global disarmament, and to keep the South Pacific free from involvement in escalation.[clxiv] Under article 1, a nuclear free zone stretching from Australia to South America, and from the Antarctic to Kiribati and Tuvalu was declared. This huge expanse was rendered less impressive by article 2, which stated that the zone would not infringe on rights of passage through international waters. All parties would pledge to refuse to manufacture nuclear explosive devices under article 3. Under article 5 they undertook to renounce the permanent stationing of nuclear explosive devices, although this condition did not exclude the possibility of allowing visits by foreign ships or aircraft carrying such devices. Article 6 rejected the use of the testing of nuclear explosive devices in signatories' territories. The Rarotonga Treaty was open to any member of the Forum, and there was provision for its ratification by nuclear powers.

 

Some Forum members chose not to sign the Rarotonga Treaty. Vanuatu rejected the document. Prime Minister Lini pointed out that it did not really create a nuclear free zone in that the United States and other nuclear powers would be free to transport nuclear arms through the South Pacific.[clxv] The Solomon Islands at first adopted a similar stance, then later signed the document at the meeting of the Forum at Apia in May 1987.[clxvi] Tonga refused to sign for opposite reasons to these Melanesian members its monarchy did not want to subscribe to a document which it felt might hinder US military deployment in the region. The Tongan monarchy was not greatly concerned by French testing, feeling that what France did on its territory was largely its affair. Tongan representatives stated that the tests contributed to world peace by reinforcing Western security.[clxvii] Although the rest of the Forum states signed the Rarotonga Treaty, the omissions undermined the customary stereotype of united regional opposition to things nuclear.

 

The initial official position of the Fabius Government concerning the Rarotonga meeting of August 1985 was that as France was not a Forum member, it would refrain from passing comment on the internal debates of the organisation.[clxviii] When a Forum delegation arrived in Paris to lobby France from 6 to 7 February 1986 for ratification of the Rarotonga Treaty, the Fabius Government could no longer remain so circumspect. The Quai d'Orsay issued a declaration on 7 February which indicated that France was not envisaging early ratification of the document:

 

In particular the French delegation (at the meeting) restated that the ban proposed on nuclear tests could only be envisaged within the framework of a long-term process of the reduction of armaments resulting in a balance in forces at a level considerably lower than the current level. For France, the halt of testing cannot be a condition of, or even a preliminary to, the reduction to the reduction of nuclear arsenals.[clxix]

 

In other words, France would not contemplate stopping its nuclear testing unless first there was a massive reduction in nuclear arms on the part of the nuclear superpowers, a precondition which it was not to act upon for another ten years. A halt to French testing would not fulfil the agenda of the French Government requiring a global balance of nuclear forces at a considerably lower level before France would contemplate nuclear disarmament. Paris had been consistent in advocating this position since 1981.

 

Eight months later, on 3 October 1986, the Quai d'Orsay released another statement of French policy on nuclear testing, quoting Chirac's speech to the UN General Assembly in New York:

 

As long as the security of France relies on nuclear dissuasion, the first requirement my country must fulfil is to maintain the credibility of its strategic forces at the level necessary. [...] France will accept neither a numerical or qualitative freeze of its means [of defence], nor the halt of nuclear testing. The former do not exceed the level necessary to ensure our security and our independence. The latter are maintained under safe conditions and thus have the approval of independent experts [...] The position of France on this matter shall not be influenced by the positions of other States.[clxx]

 

Those South Pacific Forum members with diplomatic representation at the UN were delivered a clear message. Although no reference was made to them here, Chirac signalled that France alone would determine under what conditions its testing would be halted. Chirac's position was in accordance with Mitterrand's and with that of the Socialist Prime Ministers who had preceded him since 1981.

 

On 29 September 1986 Emmanuel de Margerie, the French Ambassador to the United States, had stated at a conference at the Centre for Strategic International Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC, that France did not intend to sign the protocols to the Rarotonga Treaty. He gave two primary reasons for this stance. Firstly, the South Pacific was a strategic zone "We [France] cannot support a plan for regional denuclearisation in any part of the world where security appears to depend on nuclear deterrence". Secondly, France was not convinced the Rarotonga Treaty instituted a nuclear free zone "We believe it would be a flagrant contradiction for States in the southern Pacific area to [...] participate in military alliances in these regions while at the same time claiming to be part of a nuclear free zone".[clxxi]

 

The proposition that the South Pacific was a zone of strategic significance was open to doubt. It was not a zone of superpower confrontation, and the French nuclear defence system did not extend to the region. Moreover the assertion that France could not support regional denuclearisation in any part of the world where security appeared to depend on nuclear deterrence had not been applied by France in the case of Latin America. As a regional response to the confrontation of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, in February 1967 Latin American states established the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which constituted the world's first nuclear weapons free zone. France, as a nuclear power with territory in the region, was directly concerned by this document. France signed protocol II of the document, which committed it to respect the denuclearisation of Latin America countries, although it refused to sign protocol I, which would have obliged it to denuclearise its Latin American domains.[clxxii] The motive for this refusal was that Guyane was used as a transit point for the nuclear materials freighted to French Polynesia for the testing operations of the CEP, although as the Treaty of Tlatelolco did not expressly prohibit the transit of nuclear materials via Latin America, Paris was able to sign protocol II. France had similar leeway with the protocols of the Rarotonga Treaty. Although protocols 1 and 3 forbade testing in the French TOM and were clearly unacceptable to France, protocol 2 consisted of an undertaking not to use or threaten nuclear devices against South Pacific parties to the Rarotonga Treaty, which was less onerous to sign.

 

French opposition to the Rarotonga Treaty was unconditional as the document was asserted to serve Soviet interests and erode regional security. As commander-in-chief of French Pacific forces, Vice-Admiral Thireaut indicated this attitude bluntly in March 1988. He stated to an Australian audience:

 

You know our position about the Rarotonga treaty we are opposed to it, we will not sign any of its protocols and there is no point arguing about it. But I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this treaty served the Soviet's [sic] interests so well, that they signed it immediately. This treaty apparently provided more security for South Pacific countries, but we view it as an ineffective and useless arms control agreement.[clxxiii]

 

In January 1988 the Soviet Union ratified the protocols relevant to it (2 and 3),[clxxiv] largely because in the absence of nuclear forces in the South Pacific it had little to lose strategically by doing so, and because the gesture created goodwill in the South Pacific. The document did not seriously obstruct the movement or possible escalation of the dominant US nuclear forces in the Pacific, and parties to the Rarotonga Treaty could still welcome nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed vessels from the US Navy or from any other. The Treaty did not prevent US nuclear deployment in the region.

 

De Margerie's second point is of greater interest. Although he was vague, he was making reference to the fact that the Rarotonga Treaty in no way disrupted regional, notably Australian, defence cooperation with US nuclear armed forces. In promoting its version of a nuclear free zone, the Hawke Government had been careful to draw up a document that did not challenge the Australian uranium mining and processing industry or disrupt US naval and air force visits. It designed the Rarotonga Treaty partly to pre-empt the drafting of a more extreme document by island states, and partly to appeal to regional anti-nuclear sentiment.[clxxv] Seen from this perspective, the Treaty catered more for Australian national interest than for regional advocacy of nuclear disarmament. The provisions in the Treaty against nuclear testing support this assessment. As the sole nation conducting nuclear tests in the zone defined by the document, France was the specific target of these provisions. Just as the Rarotonga Treaty was selective in protecting Australian nuclear interests, so too it was selective in serving as a vehicle against French nuclear policy. Kim Beazley, the Australian Defence Minister, admitted as much in Washington on 1 September 1985, when he announced that the Rarotonga Treaty was "aimed at France".[clxxvi] Showing a great sense of understatement, he added that Australia was not optimistic that France would approve the Treaty, although that it would serve to indicate the strength of South Pacific opposition to testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa. Any pretence the Hawke Government had to advocate regional nuclear disarmament was rendered highly suspect by the biased terms of the Rarotonga Treaty. Visits to Australian ports by nuclear-powered, and possibly nuclear armed, US Navy warships continued into the 1990s.[clxxvii]

 

Frustratingly for Canberra after all its efforts to formulate conditions acceptable to the United States, Washington reacted defensively against the establishment of a nuclear free zone in the South Pacific. Like France, it refused to sign any of the protocols to the Rarotonga Treaty. On 5 February 1987 the US State Department announced the refusal of Washington to sign the Treaty.[clxxviii] Even though the Treaty did not seriously challenge US nuclear deployment in the Pacific, and no American nuclear testing had taken place there since the 1960s, the United States did not want to back the Rarotonga Treaty and thereby set a precedent for the creation of other nuclear free zones which might hinder its global interests. The suspicion also existed that if the Soviet Union was prepared to sign the Rarotonga Treaty it must be of benefit to Soviet strategic interests, and therefore potentially damaging to Washington.[clxxix]

 

The Chirac Government played a role in the US decision not to ratify the Rarotonga Treaty. A week before the US announcement, Flosse had been despatched to Washington in his capacity as government spokesman on nuclear testing to voice French opposition to the Rarotonga Treaty. He had met with George Shultz, the US Secretary of State on 26 January 1987.[clxxx] The US decision was taken by Flosse to imply an unwillingness in Washington to oppose French testing and hence undermine solidarity between the Western nuclear powers. Flosse wrote in 1988:

 

Happily our American and British allies refused, like us, to ratify the protocols which formed annexes to the Treaty of Rarotonga [...] The risk implied would have been that of allowing the creation of a division between Western nations over such a fundamental subject. When I met with him on 26 January 1987, Mr George Shulz demonstrated a favourable attitude to the continuation of our tests.[clxxxi]

 

Although Paris was not the only factor which motivated the American decision not to sign, the United States preferred not to inconvenience France by adhering to the Rarotonga Treaty. Washington supported the French territorial and military presence in the South Pacific, however small, as a stabilising factor in regional defence,[clxxxii] and was in favour of continued French nuclear testing.

 

In 1987 Admiral Baker, the Defense Department Director for the East Asia and Pacific region, stated in Washington to the US House of Representatives subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs:

 

The Free World and all those nations that wish to deter the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union benefit from the fact that there is a French nuclear test programme. Because French testing contributes an additional level of deterrence against Soviet nuclear capabilities the United States cannot in good conscience sign a protocol [the Rarotonga Treaty protocol] against it.[clxxxiii]

 

Shultz shared this view, and outlined it during a visit to Western Samoa in June 1987. At a press conference in Apia on 23 June, he declared that the United States defended the French right to test nuclear devices in order to maintain a strong deterrent against possible Soviet aggression. He rejected claims that French testing posed an environmental hazard. Shultz mentioned the US refusal to sign the Rarotonga Treaty in the context of the necessity for continued French testing.[clxxxiv] As was the case with the Rainbow Warrior bombing, the United States did not intend to break ranks with a fellow nuclear power.

 

Although for chronological reasons his visit could not have had an influence on the British decision to reject the Rarotonga Treaty, Flosse also discussed the document on 19 November 1987 in London with Lord Glenarthur, Secretary to the Foreign Office.[clxxxv] Part of his visit involved discussions on the British refusal to sign the Rarotonga Treaty, which had been announced in March 1987, in the aftermath of the US decision.[clxxxvi] Flosse wrote of British policy:

 

Support for our [nuclear] positions is more qualified in London, taking into account the privileged relations which exist between Britain, Australia, New Zealand and all the States of the South Pacific Forum [...]. On the part of the British Government a certain degree of exasperation is however perceptible vis-à-vis New Zealand's attitude.[clxxxvii]

 

Conservative Ministers in London, like their Republican counterparts in Washington, were predictably not enamoured with the espousal by the Lange Government of anti-nuclear policy, or with the spread of anti-nuclear sentiment generally in the South Pacific. By the 1980s Britain no longer had any military presence in the South Pacific, and was not directly affected by the installation of a nuclear free zone there. Nevertheless, the Thatcher Government chose to side with the United States and France on the Rarotonga Treaty. The British nuclear programme was heavily dependent on US technology and facilities. A declaration of support for the Treaty by London would have caused ructions in Washington. London shared US concerns about the possibility of the creation of further nuclear free zones, and was not prepared to undermine the nuclear policies of France.[clxxxviii]

 

The Rarotonga Treaty was the strongest regional expression of anti-nuclear policy aimed at France in the 1980s. It failed to halt French nuclear testing as it did not meet French criteria for disarmament at that time. Moreover the ratification of the Treaty by Paris would have prevented further modernisation of its nuclear strike force, which at that point could only be accomplished by detonating nuclear devices. At the time France's signature was never contemplated as a realistic prospect, either in Paris or probably in the capitals of the South Pacific. The non-negotiable French position on nuclear testing was well established, and had been reiterated for years. This consideration, combined with the lack of limitations the Treaty placed on the US nuclear presence in the zone, and the refusal of the United States to sign it, precluded any effectiveness of the document as an arms control measure.

 

After France had formally announced its rejection of the Rarotonga Treaty to the South Pacific Forum in February 1987,[clxxxix] Forum members returned to their more usual expressions of discontent about French testing. Annual Forum communiqués ritually included a section stating disapproval of French testing and calling for its halt. Individual Forum members also addressed their concerns to the UN General Assembly. (Appendix 5) Overall however, the nations of the South Pacific were powerless to halt French nuclear testing as long as Paris desired its continuation.

 

This lack of influence over French nuclear policy was not surprising considering the lack of diplomatic influence of Forum members. Any attempt by Forum members to coerce France in an attempt to sway its stance on testing would have been absurd. Written and verbal declarations of principled opposition have generally been used by South Pacific governments instead of sanctions. The one major exception to this rule only underlined the futility of South Pacific nations attempting to apply sanctions on France in an effort to influence its testing policy. On 10 June 1983, Hawke announced in Paris on behalf of his newly-appointed Government the decision to suspend Australian uranium exports to France in an attempt to force a halt to French testing.[cxc] Some members of the new Labor administration deemed it ethically inconsistent of Australia to protest French nuclear testing while supplying France with uranium, even if that material was contracted for use in non-military power plants. The Government compensated Australian suppliers by buying up the stocks destined for France. The suspension was more symbolic than intimidating, as Australia was not one of the major uranium suppliers to France. The non-delivery of Australian uranium to France disrupted neither its civil nor its military nuclear programmes, as ample supplies were available from African and Canadian companies. As well as being ineffectual, the embargo proved costly to the Hawke Government and had to be abandoned. On 19 August 1986, Paul Keating, then the Australian Treasurer, announced that the Government had decided to lift its uranium embargo on France. It had been decided to sell the stockpiles that the Government had purchased to cover a budget shortfall.[cxci]

 

Australia, like New Zealand, did not have the economic power to mount effective trade sanctions against France, even assuming the political will to do so might have been present. Aware of the importance of European trade for Australia, Canberra, like Wellington, was not prepared to endanger its economic future by pushing opposition to French nuclear policy to this extent. The island micro-states of the South Pacific, with fragile economies dependent among other sources on French and EC aid, were still less prepared than Australia or New Zealand to contemplate this option. The decision to halt French testing was not to be made under the influence of South Pacific protests, because these exerted no great influence. Rather, and ironically, the impetus to suspend and eventually halt testing in French Polynesia came from Paris.

 

 

The Test Suspension: a step forward

 

The announcement by Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy in April 1992 that Mitterrand had instructed him to declare the suspension of French testing for the rest of the year came as a surprise. In an uncharacteristic move, Mitterrand intended the action to serve as an example for the other nuclear powers to follow.[cxcii] Previously, faced with the far greater level of superpower nuclear armament, his attitude had been one of 'you first'. Mitterrand had announced in May 1989 that France would not halt its testing until the other nuclear powers had.[cxciii] Three years later, strategic nuclear tensions in Europe had declined to the extent that he was prepared to act as a pace-setter rather than a follower. The President pointed out in a press conference in Paris on 12 April 1992 that he reserved the right to recommence testing if he deemed it necessary.[cxciv] There was, he suggested, a chance that the example presented by France would not be followed. At the time of the French suspension, only Russia had ceased its testing, and that halt did not appear likely to last long. Although the Soviet Union had declared the suspension of its tests on 5 October 1991, it was the Commonwealth of Independent States that had observed it. In April 1992 the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, had ordered the preparation of test sites on Novaya Zemlya. Four Russian tests had been scheduled for October 1992.[cxcv] That month President George Bush had no immediate intention of stopping US nuclear testing. The United States conducted six nuclear tests in 1992. Bush used his presidential power of veto to override a Senate resolution on 19 September 1992 calling for the suspension of US tests until July 1993 and their total halt from 30 September 1996.[cxcvi]

 

The test suspension ran counter to all previous indications presented by Socialist Government Ministers on the willingness of France to maintain its deterrent. Until the announcement of the suspension, Paris had to all external appearances been prepared to continue conducting its tests. As late as March 1992, preliminary work for the series of tests scheduled at Moruroa that year had been under way, activity which had attracted the traditional Greenpeace protests.[cxcvii] The position of Government of Edith Cresson, like that of its predecessors since 1981, had been that nuclear testing was still necessary for the maintenance and modernisation of French defence systems. Prime Minister Cresson had stated to Jim Bolger, the New Zealand Prime Minister, during his visit to Paris in October 1991, that France had no intention of abandoning this activity.[cxcviii] Pierre Joxe, then Minister of Defence, had affirmed two weeks before the meeting that "France shall conduct tests as long as it has nuclear arms".[cxcix]

 

While prepared to suspend testing, there was no presidential intention of abandoning the French strategic nuclear arsenal. Mitterrand had repeatedly declared in the 1980s that France would not contemplate any reduction of its nuclear arsenal until the two superpowers reduced their level of nuclear armament to a similar level to France's.[cc] He maintained this position after the test suspension, as he pointed out in an interview with three French television reporters on 14 July 1992.[cci] In spite of steps taken by Moscow and Washington since the late 1980s to reduce their respective nuclear arsenals, at the time of the announcement of the French test suspension, the superpower forces were still far larger than France's, and would remain so after envisaged reductions. In January 1992, France had a total of 791 nuclear warheads deployed in its nuclear strike force.[ccii] After the announcement in June 1992 of further US and Russian disarmament measures it was estimated that by 2003, assuming full implementation of treaty measures, each country would be left with between 3,000 and 3,500 nuclear warheads.[cciii] This last projection fell short of a reduction similar to the French level of minimum dissuasive force deemed by Mitterrand in the 1980s to be the necessary precondition for Paris's participation in multilateral nuclear disarmament.

 

While Mitterrand's step was outwardly bold, France did not stand to lose much with regard to national security if it failed. The effectiveness of the nuclear strike force would not be affected by the halt of testing operations for a few months. Should other nuclear powers fail to follow the French example, Mitterrand would at least have the satisfaction that he had taken a positive disarmament initiative, and French testing could resume.

 

In November 1992 Mitterrand and Ministers of the Bérégovoy Government considered extending the suspension until July 1993.[cciv] The United States had prolonged testing until September but had announced a nine-month moratorium on 1 October. The explosion of two Chinese nuclear devices after the French suspension announcement in April was discouraging, although this development was outweighed in importance by the maintenance of the Russian test suspension.[ccv] The announcement in November of any firm policy position on the extension of a French test suspension was precluded as a new period of cohabitation looked imminent from March 1993. Consequently no clear position was taken on what was to become of the French suspension in the first months of 1993. There had been some speculation prior to the installation of the Balladur Government that a return of the RPR and the UDF to power would result in a resumption of testing. This scenario did not eventuate. As head of the French armed forces, Mitterrand enjoyed final say on matters of nuclear defence policy, and in any event he received the backing of the Balladur Government on the suspension.[ccvi]

 

On 4 July 1993, Mitterrand announced that the French test suspension would be extended indefinitely, and he expressed French willingness to sign a total test ban treaty.[ccvii] The declaration came in response to decisions taken by Moscow and Washington. On 23 June, the Russian Foreign Ministry had announced that Moscow had no intention of renouncing its suspension.[ccviii] Hours before the extension of the French test suspension by Mitterrand, President Bill Clinton had prolonged the US moratorium until at least September 1994.[ccix] Mitterrand's announcement went further than that of any other French President on the issue of nuclear disarmament, and he could do so without plausibly being accused of endangering the nation.

 

In 1993 Mitterrand was the first French President since the end of World War II who did not have to consider the threat of possible invasion or attack from Eastern Europe. The changing international situation allowed Mitterrand to contemplate the abandonment of aspects of Gaullist defence doctrine. For example in January 1992, he announced that France was open to the integration of the French nuclear strike force into a joint EC defence arrangement.[ccx] That same month Mitterrand declared that in the 1990s the function of the French nuclear strike force would have to be reconsidered in response to international changes such as the end of the Cold War, European integration, and the withdrawal of Russian forces from Eastern Europe. He mentioned the possibility of French coordination with the British nuclear deterrent.[ccxi]

 

Early commentary on the initial French test suspension of April 1992 asserted that Mitterrand had taken the measure to improve the popularity of the Bérégovoy Government among voters of the French Left. It was argued in particular that the Socialists were in search of votes from PS supporters who had left to follow the electoral coalition of two green parties, Génération Ecologie led by Antoine Waechter, and Les Verts led by Brice Lalonde. If so, it was an appeal exhibiting signs of desperation, and was made to a small segment of the electorate one which failed to minimise the severe Socialist defeat in the legislative elections of March 1993. The argument that the Socialists had been aiming to catch the ecological vote belittled the importance of the suspension and overlooked the fact that the ecological movement in France was not unambiguously anti-nuclear. Despite the fact that Lalonde, for example, had established his reputation as an anti-nuclear campaigner, prominent for his participation in protests off Moruroa from 1973 to 1981,[ccxii] as Rocard's Secretary of State to Environmental Affairs from 1988 to 1991, he had expressed support for French testing and defended its safety.[ccxiii]

 

French peace organisations such as Stop Essais, Le Mouvement de la Paix and Solidarité Europe-Pacifique, as well as Greenpeace International, saw the suspension as a belated positive response to anti-nuclear campaigning since the 1970s. On 1 January 1992 French peace organisations, along with the Catholic and Protestant churches in France and other European countries, had organised a European Campaign for a Moratorium on French Nuclear Tests.[ccxiv] Greenpeace members too preferred to think that the decision was at least in part a response to their anti-nuclear campaigning.[ccxv] During March 1992 the Rainbow Warrior II had visited French Polynesia to signal opposition to the projected series of tests that year. This argument was a case of wishful thinking. If successive French Governments had refused to accede to demands by anti-nuclear movements to halt testing for so many years, there was little reason to think Paris would suddenly change its mind to satisfy them.

 

The second most significant factor  behind the French test suspension after the decline in superpower confrontation since the 1980s was to be found in budgetary considerations. The ambition of French political leaders to maintain the standing of their nation as a nuclear power had always been limited by slender financial resources. The French nuclear deterrent had not been established at a level of minimal necessary dissuasive force solely out of free strategic preference. Paris had not had the means to establish a nuclear force as extensive as those of the Soviet Union or of the United States. The "very moderate"[ccxvi] level of French nuclear testing has been a consequence of the inability of Paris to fund testing on the same scale as the superpowers. The annual number of French tests generally had declined from 11 in 1981 to four in 1991, and were held increasingly close together chronologically to reduce the costs involved in financing the operations of the CEP at peak activity.

 

French defence spending in general in the 1980s was the subject of some difficult decisions. Governments were faced with a shrinking defence budget, which fell from 17% of the state budget in 1981 to 14.9% in 1986,[ccxvii] at a time when the various branches of the nuclear strike force, and substantial segments of conventional forces brought into service in the 1950s and 1960s, were becoming obsolescent. Governments had to balance the distribution of funds necessary for the maintenance and development of conventional and nuclear forces, an act which they had difficulties performing. Important re-equipment programmes were delayed for lack of funds, compounded by technical delays and escalating research and development costs: the Rafale fighter and the Leclerc main battle tank were designs which had originally been intended for service in the 1980s, as was a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to replace the ageing Clemenceau. By the time of the Gulf War, none of these were yet in service, highlighting deficiencies in the re-equipment of French forces. France found itself increasingly restricted in its choice between conventional and nuclear priorities. The end of the Cold War and the advent of the Gulf War revealed the limitations of French defence funding priorities, which in the 1980s had given priority to the ongoing development of nuclear arms.

 

In the early 1990s it was decided that the decline in a military threat from Eastern Europe, and superpower nuclear disarmament, were circumstances which would permit several nuclear projects to be discarded or postponed to the advantage of conventional spending. The 1992 to 1997 military budget programme projected an annual average reduction of 6.6% in nuclear defence spending.[ccxviii] The projects rejected to fulfil these budget cuts implied some major reductions for the French nuclear force. For example, on 1 September 1991 it was declared that the strategic nuclear bombing force would be phased out by 1996, without being replaced or upgraded.[ccxix] This had been accomplished by July 1996, with the French Mirage bombers in question being reassigned as reconnaissance aircraft. On 4 June 1992 the re-equipment of army units with Hadès tactical nuclear missiles was halted even though the programme was near completion. Those units which had been re-equipped were withdrawn from service and mothballed. By 1993, all prestrategic land-based nuclear arms had been withdrawn from service in the French Army. It was intended that the silo-based missiles on the Plateau d'Albion would be retired by 1996,[ccxx] an intention which was acted upon.[ccxxi] Again, no measures have been made to replace them. A project to have the missiles replaced with mobile launchers was cancelled by Mitterrand in July 1991.[ccxxii] These reductions left the FOST as the sole remaining French strategic nuclear force by 1996.

 

In the early 1990s there was reason to believe that the French re-equipment programme for its nuclear force had been cut back so far that there might not be any need to carry out nuclear tests for some years. In 1992, the French military had only one new nuclear weapons design under development the M5 missile, intended to re-equip the FOST, was due in service in 2005. The military were also contemplating a version of the M5 suitable for mobile launch from the Plateau d'Albion.[ccxxiii] The test series in 1991 had already included work on the warhead for this missile before the test suspension. Further tests were not required for the manufacture of the mobile version of the M5 due to the design's abandonment that year. In the 1980s, the French Ministry of Defence had argued that the explosion of nuclear devices was essential to the research and development progress of nuclear weapons,[ccxxiv] and that computer simulations were not a fit substitute for the real thing. Since then, advances in simulation technology had been made, to the extent that a Ministry of Defence working party was set up in July 1993 to examine whether it would be feasible to use simulations rather than actual tests.[ccxxv] François Léotard, the Defence Minister for the Balladur Government, was led to conclude in October 1993 that France could do without nuclear tests for "some years" without adversely affecting national security or the effectiveness of the French nuclear force.[ccxxvi] The working party presented its report to the National Assembly on 17 December 1993. The report concluded that in spite of advances in simulation technology and past tests, a further 20 tests would need to take place before real detonations could be discontinued.[ccxxvii] The possibility of a resumption of testing therefore persisted in spite of the end of the Cold War.

 

The possible resumption of nuclear testing was a prospect not viewed positively by certain functionaries in the Ministry to the DOM-TOM. Jacques Le Blanc, stationed there as the Permanent Secretary to the South Pacific, commented in May 1992 that the suspension of testing removed a major barrier which had hindered the development of French relations in the South Pacific. He said that a resumption of testing would have detrimental implications for these regional relations.[ccxxviii] Although at its meeting in Honiara from 8 to 9 July 1992 the South Pacific Forum praised the suspension,[ccxxix] it indicated on 6 May 1993 that a resumption of testing would harm French relations with the region.[ccxxx]

 

A Short-lived Reprise

 

The election of Jacques Chirac in May 1995 on a platform favouring a return to nuclear testing in French Polynesia was to put Le Blanc's scenario to the test.

 

The public explanation for the resumption of testing advanced by Chirac was very much in line with traditional Gaullist deterrence doctrine and indeed, with the motive outlined by Mitterrand in the 1980s for the necessity of maintaining an up-to-date nuclear force in a time of global political instability. Running at odds with the prevalent assumption in the international community that the mid-1990s were a safer time than the days of the Cold War, and therefore that there was no great need for a continued build-up of nuclear arms, Chirac agreed only to a certain point. He stated somewhat muddledly in an interview on TF1 in September 1995"Today, there is no longer any potential enemy. But in Eastern Europe there still exist thousands and thousands of atomic weapons."[ccxxxi] Faced with the continued existence of a presumed threat from Eastern Europe, and the political instability of Russia and its neighbours, Chirac held it to be "indispensable" for France to resume nuclear testing. When questioned in the interview whether he might be over-reacting, his response was to evoke the history lesson that France that had been invaded in 1870, 1914 and 1940 and could be once again: "Those who contest our defence system remind me of those who did so in 1936. We all know the results."

 

The new President had previously offered detailed exposition of the technical reasons for the new round of tests in a speech to the French Senate on 12 July 1995. In the best Cartesian manner, he outlined that three reasons applied for the resumption of testing. Firstly to confirm the performance of the TN-75 warhead, with which submarine-based M45 missiles were to be equipped. These tests had been commenced under Mitterrand but were unfinished at the time of the test suspension in April 1992. Secondly, there existed a need to further test the capabilities of old weapons, to determine the effects that the passage of time had had on the explosive powers of nuclear warheads, and thirdly there was the goal of carrying out calibration tests under real blast conditions which would provide the new test centre at Bordeaux with accurate data for the calibration of its simulation equipment.[ccxxxii]

 

In setting out such arguments, Chirac found himself at odds with certain members of the RPR, who had acquiesced to the continuation of the test suspension under the Balladur Government. The reaction from the French Socialists was critical well before confirmation that testing would resume. Michel Rocard had expressed views widely held on the French Left when he wrote in a front page Le Monde article published on 26 May 1995 that a new bout of French testing would pose a major set-back for French relations with the South Pacific. The reaction from the former President was likewise predictably one of disappointment. Mitterrand saw the move as a set-back, not only for French regional diplomacy in the South Pacific, but on a broader scale. He stated on 14 June 1995"The resumption risks offending the entire world."[ccxxxiii]

 

The last tests conducted by France in the South Pacific, six in all,[ccxxxiv] did indeed provoke a level of international protest which far outstripped that of the 1980s, although without reaching the point of posing more than a transitory inconvenience to French foreign policy. The stance of the South Pacific Forum was condemnatory. On 14 September 1995 during its annual meeting of heads of government at Madang, PNG, the Forum called unanimously for an immediate halt to testing and suggested it would have long-term harmful consequences for French regional relations.[ccxxxv] There was however, no announcement that the Forum would move to the extent of cutting off French aid funding to the body, or severing diplomatic links. Its protest was firmly rhetorical and restricted to paper. Forum unanimity should also be examined closely. There is a tradition at South Pacific Forum meetings for motions to be adopted unanimously or not at all, with dissenting parties being over-ridden in the presentation of a united front in the "Pacific Way". However, away from the Forum meeting, various island leaders showed a less than tenacious opposition to France over nuclear matters. In June 1995, Prime Minister Maxime Carlot of Vanuatu stated that while in principle his country opposed French nuclear testing, it would not be appropriate to meddle in French internal affairs.[ccxxxvi] As was the case with France and other Forum members, bilateral aid and trade continued between France and Vanuatu during the nuclear tests. In October 1995, a month in which two detonations occurred at Moruroa, Carlot led a government delegation to Paris to spend three days discussing a range of trade and cooperation matters, during which he was awarded the Légion d'honneur by Prime Minister Juppé.[ccxxxvii] Likewise, Tonga steered clear of provoking Paris that year. The Tongan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Crown Prince Tupouto'a, preferred to maintain friendly bilateral relations with France, stressing that it was a Catholic country with the right to make its own decisions in defence matters.[ccxxxviii] Like Vanuatu, Tonga openly reinforced links with France during the period when international protests against French testing were approaching their peak. On 28 July 1995, Radio Tonga announced that the Tongan Development Bank had secured a $US1.5M loan from the French Government.[ccxxxix] In the first week of August, a French Polynesian Government delegation led by Flosse met with Dr Tahiata Howell, the Tongan Environment Minister, to discuss closer cultural, sporting, agricultural and economic relations.[ccxl] In Fiji, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka did his best to smooth over any regional differences with Paris over testing. On 15 September 1995 he declared that France had a positive role to play in the South Pacific.[ccxli] He was concerned about maintaining French aid and trade which had developed since the coups of 1987 (developments considered below in chapter 8) particularly in the face of anti-French statements emanating from members of the Fijian Parliament, evidence that Fijian democracy under the new Constitution may have become somewhat healthier than the Prime Minister would have wished.

 

Certain members of the Forum did however take their level of protests further than they had in the 1980s. When the announcement was made in June 1995 concerning the resumption of the CEP's activities, the Australian and New Zealand Governments were initially reluctant to move beyond official statements condemning French testing. Faced with popular concern however, both came to relent and took steps that they had rejected in the 1980s.

 

On 14 June 1995, Australia announced that it would be suspending defence ties with France. Effectively this step had as its consequence a halt to the Australian servicing of French military aircraft in transit to and from New Caledonia via Darwin, and the exclusion of Mirage from an RAAF tender in August 1995.[ccxlii] While the Bolger Government decided to voice its protest by sending the HMNZS Tui  to stand off Moruroa in international waters at the start of the tests in September 1995, Prime Minister Keating stated that he had no interest in sending an Australian warship to Moruroa.[ccxliii]

 

Of potentially greater significance as regards French underground testing was the New Zealand decision, with the support of Australia, Western Samoa, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, to resume the case against French nuclear testing that Wellington had conducted against France in 1973 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. This resolution had the advantage of being a highly visible form of protest in Europe, as opposed to Moruroa, and attracted considerable media attention. This effort however proved to be fruitless when the Court rejected New Zealand's case on 22 September 1995. Its judges considered that there were insufficient grounds to reopen the case, this time with regard to underground instead of atmospheric testing, as France had already ceased atmospheric testing, and there was a paucity of evidence that French underground tests posed any hazard.[ccxliv] Paris regarded this verdict as a triumph, while Wellington considered the case to have been thrown out on a technicality.

 

Of greater concern to Paris was the spread of anti-nuclear lobbying beyond the South Pacific Forum, although it too was to prove largely ineffectual. By August 1995, Prime Minister Alain Juppé was expressing surprise and perplexity at the spread of hostile reaction to French testing to the European Union.[ccxlv] His Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hervé de Charette, bitterly accused Western European nations protesting tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa of hypocrisy: "they were quite happy living under the American nuclear umbrella".[ccxlvi] Opposition to French testing was being expressed at high levels by France's European neighbours. On 14 July 1995, the Bundestag voted unanimously in opposition to the resumption of French testing.[ccxlvii] Going beyond national level, members of Green parties, European Socialists and Communists took their anti-nuclear stance to the European Parliament and used the opportunities afforded by the EU to pressure France. On 11 July 1995, Chirac was booed in protest over testing by Green, Socialist and Communist representatives when he spoke to the European Parliament at Strasbourg.[ccxlviii] In September, following anti-nuclear lobbying, a European delegation of three scientists was sent to Moruroa to inspect the test facilities there.[ccxlix] As with the Atkinson Mission, their access was restricted and their stay too short to allow thorough, conclusive analysis of any possible environmental risks.

 

The European Commission in Brussels, responding to further anti-nuclear lobbying by European politicians, declared on 24 October 1995 that taking France to the European Court of Justice to demand greater safety measures was not justified given the absence of clear-cut evidence of any harmful environmental effects of underground testing by the CEP.[ccl] This effectively brought to an end campaigning via the European Parliament on the part of Green parliamentarians and their sympathisers on the European Left.

 

However the potential remained for France's European neighbours to cause offence in Paris. The diplomatic efforts of the South Pacific Forum  were bolstered by a previously unwitnessed level of opposition to French underground tests in the international community. On 17 November 1995 the UN General Assembly voted 95 to 12 in favour of a resolution, sponsored by nine South Pacific nations, and aimed at France and China, deploring nuclear testing. Significantly, ten European countries - Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden and Portugal - voted for the motion. Germany, Spain and Greece abstained in order not to offend either side of the debate, leaving Britain as the only West European nation to side with Paris.[ccli] In response Chirac cancelled high-level meetings that had previously been scheduled with the Belgian and Italian Governments, scheduled for 22 November and 24 November respectively.[cclii] These were however comparatively mild reactions, and discord did not develop any further. Both France and its European neighbours placed too high a value on continuing their close relations to let testing turn into a source of greater disagreement.

 

The UN General Assembly vote was the most forceful manifestation of international opposition during the period of Chirac's five-month coda to the record of French nuclear tests in French Polynesia. Yet already there were indications that the ructions created by the presidential decision were not bound to last. It had been clearly stated and reiterated by French representatives from Chirac down to ambassadorial staff in the South Pacific region that these were to be the last "real" French nuclear tests. Once they were over, presuming an absence of any hard evidence coming to light that environmental damage had been caused by them, there could be no plausible grounds for letting them stand in the way of further strengthening French relations with South Pacific nations. To underline this point, on 20 October 1995 France made its most significant concession to regional anti-nuclear policy with the announcement that it would sign the Rarotonga Treaty once it had finished its tests in French Polynesia early in 1996.[ccliii] The decision could only be met with approval from South Pacific Forum members who, a decade before, had lobbied in vain for France's ratification of the document. In Suva on 25 March 1996 Gaston Flosse ratified the Rarotonga Treaty on behalf of the French Government on the same day as British and US representatives also ratified it.[ccliv] Although a decisive step, it should not be overestimated. France had made the decision to sign in its own good time, and only once it had completed its nuclear agenda in the South Pacific, flying in the face of international condemnation. By the time it came to ratify the Rarotonga Treaty, it stood to lose nothing by doing so, considering both the closure of the CEP and the absence of any other elements of the French nuclear force in the region. France took its position to its logical conclusion when, on 24 April 1996, it signed a total nuclear test ban at the UN General Assembly, along with the United States, Russia, Great Britain, and the previously recalcitrant China.[cclv] As Mitterrand had suggested in the 1980s, come the time of significant superpower arms reductions, France would stop testing, albeit keeping its capacity for modifying nuclear arms through test simulations.

 

On 29 January 1996, Chirac had officially announced an end to French nuclear testing in the South Pacific,[cclvi] just a few months short of the thirtieth anniversary of the first test at Moruroa on 2 July 1966. The end of tests effectively removed one of the greatest historical barriers to France's pursuit of its long-term goal of improving its relations with the region. While on 29 January Don McKinnon, the New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs, downplayed the French decision by stating it would take "years" to rebuild good bilateral relations with France due to the resumption of testing,[cclvii] within months there were signs that relations were already becoming much healthier. On 30 August 1996 the New Zealand Government announced it was to purchase $NZ40M worth of French Mistral ground-to-air defence missiles for the New Zealand Army.[cclviii] Opposition to French military technology had given way to its purchase.

 

With the removal of the obstacle French testing had posed to its policy of furthering its role in the regional affairs of the South Pacific, it now has to be seen whether Paris retains the will to capitalise on the opportunity for improvement that this offers. It may well turn out that in years to come, France will demonstrate less interest in what in the 1980s the Institut du Pacifique and other Parisian Pacific boosters had portrayed as "the new centre of the world" than in the enormous potential offered to French national interests by European Union and its extension to Eastern Europe.

 

 

Notes

[i] In order to protect against unscrupulous operators, no notes, bibliography or other references are provided in this Web publication. Readers wanting a specific reference may contact me at wsmccall@maxnet.co.nz.

 

© Wayne Stuart McCallum 1996.

 

 

 

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