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25 years ago: France ends moratorium on nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific
On June 13, 1995, the French government announced that it would resume nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific. French President Jacques Chirac decided to end the three-year moratorium on nuclear testing, citing France’s “higher interests,” just shy of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in World War Two—earning himself the hostile label “Hirochirac.”
Chirac told the press that “all the civilian and military experts … were unanimous in telling me that if we wanted to assure the safety and reliability of our deterrent forces, if we wanted to move to a stage of simulating [nuclear tests] in laboratories, we were obliged to lift the moratorium.” He also stated that the tests would have no “ecological consequences,” in spite of one United Nations report which estimated that 150,000 had already died or would eventually die as a direct result of nuclear testing in the Pacific. The tests were supposedly run to provide enough information to improve nuclear technology without requiring more tests.
In turning the South Pacific atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufaas into testing grounds, Paris followed the precedents established by its American and British rivals. Between 1946 and 1958, the US government detonated 66 nuclear bombs in the south Pacific—six islands were vaporized completely and others remained uninhabitable for decades afterward.
Three months after the announcement, a French atomic bomb was detonated beneath Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific, on September 5. It sparked widespread opposition and protests took place in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Polynesia. The Tahitian capital of Papeete erupted into protests and riots. The same day, French naval commandos seized two ships owned by the environmental group Greenpeace to prevent them from sailing near the test site, about 750 miles southeast of Tahiti. They also arrested two Greenpeace divers who used rubber dinghies to enter the 12-mile exclusion zone around Moruroa.
The day before the blast, the Tahitian capital of Papeete saw its largest demonstration ever against French nuclear testing, and many in the crowd called for French Polynesia’s independence from colonial rule. France has occupied the Society Islands since 1840, and in 1958 annexed them, declaring them an “overseas territory.”
Chirac ended the nuclear testing program in January 1996, after six of the eight planned tests were completed.
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