other side
pp. 17-18 · Read in the full issue
The bomb: from the other side
From James Boyack
FRANCE probably will have conducted its first nuclear test by the time this reaches print. The only obstacle to a late June start of the 1972 series would be persistently unfavourable weather conditions.
Test preparations have been curtained by un precedented secrecy in recent months due to the equally unprecedented barrage of Pacific Basin protests. French authorities, military and civilian, are saying absolutely nothing about what’s happening.
The only reason tests are now certain is because France began to warn air and sea navigators to remain outside the nuclear danger zone. Radio Mahina, Tahiti's radio link with the sea lanes, on June 17 began 11 daily urgent warnings to boatsmen that nuclear experiments could take place as of the following Monday afternoon, Tahiti time. The AVURNAV, broadcast by radio and teletype, defined the danger zone this year to be a circle with a radius of 120 nautical miles. Mururoa, the blast atoll, is at its centre. Additionally, for 200 miles due east of the island, a champagne cork-shaped 55degree angle was also declared off limits.
The 200-mile perimeter was the first official con firmation that explosions this year would be weak in strength. Hydrogen tests in 1968, 1970 and 1971 required a 500-mile taboo to the east.
THe zone is dangerous for a greater distance to the east because the mushroom cloud immediately begins to drift in that direction, away from the inhabited western Pacific. Radioactive particles quickly rise to the uppermost atmosphere and start a slow ride east around the Southern Hemisphere. Most of these die out before they reach the South American coast. Some continue in a belt around the globe, with more particles dying all the time. Those which remain create the relatively mild fallout registered by each country in their path.
Test substances reach the upper atmosphere winds quickly because devices are exploded high in the air.
They are suspended at blast time from a 14,000 cubic metre balloon.
France claims to be the first country to use this “balloon” system and therefore the first nuclear power to have conducted “safe” tests.
The reason they are safe is that when the fire-ball is
created, it does not touch a land or water surface. No foreign substances are swept up into the mushroom stem and therefore no radioactive debris is showered from the atomic cloud in the vicinity of the test.
I saw this system work in July, 1970. A group of journalists had been invited to witness a blast from a French navy vessel cruising 19 miles away. Less than five hours after a one-megaton hydrogen explosion, we were directly under the point of detonation. Many of the journalists (I begged off) swam in the Mururoa lagoon with the French Defence Minister about 45 minutes later. The French tests, whether those protesting them like it or not, are a different animal from the Bikini atoll or any other Pacific island experiments.
Speaking of protests, the massive boycott of French goods and services in the Pacific is taking its toll locally.
Tahiti receives most of its meat from New Zealand by air freight. Shipments ceased on June 1. Sea freight is also not being loaded, and local importers have established emergency trading links with the United States.
Aside from the presently minor repercussions of the various boycotts, one observes relatively little here indicative of French tests 750 miles to the southeast.
There has probably been less public furore over the tests in Tahiti than anywhere else in the Pacific. The autonomist Territorial Assembly majority remains op posed in principle to the nuclear activity, but public manifestations of its stance have been lethargic and infrequent. There are no slogans on the walls, and, since the first blast six years ago, no one has taken to the streets with placards of dipleasure. Frankly, I don’t think the Tahitians give much of a damn about the tests. At most there is a superstitious suspicion of them.
The tests are blamed for diseases like leukaemia, for fish poisoning and even for a scarcity of fish. Only two politicians, John Teariki and Henri Bouvier, have spoken out against the nuclear programme since its introduc tion.
NATIONAL Assembly Deputy Francis Sanford took his first adamant public stand against the blasts a few weeks ago in New Zealand. He shot off a salvo at the French Government in an interview with the New
Zealand Herald. His remarks were widely reproduced by the local press.
Something he did not tell the Herald was that he witnessed a test sometime back, and upon returning from the test site to Tahiti, he told local newspapermen that he was confident that thorough and adequate security measures had been adhered to. His headlined declarations, along with similar eye-witness reports over the past six years from a dozen local politicians and personalities, have neutralised whatever anti-test senti ment might exist in Tahiti.
Another reason for local indifference has been French Government efforts to make sure the French Polynesians felt safe despite the nuclear fireworks in their backyard.
It has been often repeated here that there have been no detailed scientific demonstrations that the tests to date present a significant menace to human, animal, vegetable or sea life. Radiological control stations, financed by France but operated in co-operation with host country scientists, ring the globe and have reported their findings since 1966. A UN radiological surveillance commission, using data thus acquired, has consistently judged the French tests essentially innocuous. A Radiological Control Laboratory here (visited by PlM’s Judy Tudor last year) constantly takes the radiological pulse of everything in French Polynesia susceptible to contamina tion. I agree with Judy that these fellows seem to know what they re doing. jPRENCH public relations men have not done their * j°J? properly in the Pacific outside Tahiti. At the risk of being taken for a pimp or a fool, I must admit that unless the French are complete liars, their view of their own tests is as credible as any other.
Maybe if this view were given a proper hearing in the current debate, people at least would not be so smug as to feel justified in bombing French holdings in New Zealand and Australia, and otherwise harassing people and private companies who couldn’t change matters even if they wanted to.
For the record, it should be known once and for all that France did not provoke a Tahitian boycott of the South Pacific Arts Festival last May in Suva. The anti test, pro-autonomy assembly majority vetoed a French Government proposal to spend about $50,000 to send a Tahitian delegation to the festival. at the ranch, those seven munitions thieves have really outdone themselves this time.
Three of them, in the company of the two most celebrated escape artists of the last penal decade, staged their second gaol break in three months. And this one was a beauty. It is worthy of Papillion and Houdini combined. As I write this, 30 hours after the dramatic event in late June, the escape has cost the prison director his job and has put in gaol the gendarme supposedly guarding Tahiti’s seven most dangerous “criminals”.
But let me pick up this story where I left off in my June letter.
The seven, after all, turned out to be an incipient revolutionary guerilla group nipped in the bud. This was revealed during their trial last month. The judge told a jam-packed courtroom the seven planned to use their stolen munitions to bomb petrol storage tanks in eastern Papeete (which would have probably resulted in the incineration of the whole town) and other key build ings, bridges and installations. The group, which called itself “Teraupoo” (a famous ancient Tahitian warrior), was also charged with plotting to kidnap Governor
Angeli and the admiral responsible for the atomic tests centre (CEP).
The prosecutor’s vision of their conspiracy was very generous. He chose not to oblige a jury trial on charges more incriminating than simple robbery. Lucky for them. They refused to hire or accept counsel, and probably could not have side-stepped a death sentence were such to have been demanded, a fact the prosecutor emphasised.
The state chose to regard the seven as “a puerile band of children, who, if they were 14-year-olds, would be spanked and sent back to their families”. The court pointed them as screwy, excited, impressionable youths.
It suggested motives of individual bitterness and frustration with society rather than political reasons for their activity.
The prosecutor argued, however, that by breaking into a military camp and stealing munitions, and then escaping from gaol and afterwards sparking a destructive prison riot, the group had three times flirted with social catastrophe. They showed determination and the state would be as firm. The accusing attorney asked for a maximum sentence—five years imprisonment, a fine of 400,000 CFP and an additional 10-year exile from Tahiti.
Judgment was rendered in 20 minutes. Five got the maximum penalty. The other two, with lesser roles in the plot, received three-year sentences, 200,000 CFP fines, plus the 10-year banishment.
The courtroom was tense during the two-hour trial, but super-tight gendarme security inside and out proved unnecessary. A single disturbance occurred, and this at the end of proceedings.
CHARLIE Ching. 36, one of the seven, had brought a bag of Tahitian soil to court. Pointing to it, he said. “This is no French soil. We don’t accept French law!”
When sentences were announced, Ching was once again on his feet shouting, “It’s a crying shame. You. you can steal. Get the hell out of here, you dirty bastards. This is our home. You are foreigners. You destroyed our plantations. Pimps! We’re not through yet. We’re going all the way to independence!”
And as he entered the prison bus, with gendarmes on either side of him, Ching screamed, Vive Vindependence.
This was almost a month ago. In the meantime, a special gaol was built just for the five with the heaviest sentences, and two other petty thieves with multiple escapes to their credit. Four cells were constructed inside an abandoned building in the Papeete police station courtyard. Each cell had three thick concrete walls, and extra-thick bars. Bars were also placed above the prisoners, encaging them like animals. A narrow passage way separated the pairs of cells. At one end, 12 feet from this mini-cellblock, sat a prison guard 24 hours a day.
At the other end, about 20 feet away behind an iron gate, sat a gendarme. Between 11 p.m. and 2.25 a.m. on Monday morning, June 19, the seven screamed and yelled and sang. Then there was quiet. The gendarme guard changed at 4 a.m. The retiring guard told his replacement not to make any noise because the prisoners had finally gone to sleep. Breakfast was served at 7.30 a.m. Only two of the seven were in their cells. In each of three cells, one of the bars above the prisoners had been cut with a saw (found) and bent down. A false ceiling had been penetrated easily, and it was a few steps to freedom, where the five remained for the moment.
Whoever said the Tahitians were stupid?