In March this year, a new research coming from declassified military records revealed that France underestimated the impact of nuclear tests in French Polynesia.
The two-year investigation, which came to be known as Moruroa Files, are the first independent scientific attempt to calculate how much damage has been caused by the 193 nuclear tests that the French government conducted between 1966 and 1996 at the Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia.
For the first time, this report revealed that the extent of the radioactive fallout from these tests reached all the way to the island of Tahiti and the 80,000 inhabitants of its main city, Papeete. The same place where I am sitting now as I write this newsletter. It’s hard to imagine that, a few decades ago, some of my neighbours were exposed to radioactive material while the government categorically denied that the nuclear tests were harmful.
I may have avoided radioactive exposure in Papeete but I’m not sure I can say the same for when Pakistan tested its own nuclear bomb in 1998. After all, the testing site in Baluchistan was less than 700 km from my hometown, Karachi — a far shorter distance than the 1,200 km between Papeete and Moruroa.
Join us in this week’s The Global Tiller to mark the International Day against Nuclear Tests because as much as we would like to believe that this extremely harmful practice has come to an end, the last nuclear testing was done as recently as 2017 by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
It is not news that nuclear bombs and tests have caused significant long-term health issues for the affected populations. The French testing led to clusters of cancers in the Gambier Islands, not to mention radiation poisoning, birth defects, leukaemia, thyroid and other cancers that came to afflict the people of the Marshall Islands, Australia and the central Pacific — the sites of nuclear tests conducted by the United States and the United Kingdom. The Soviet Union’s nuclear sins continue to live on in Kazakhstan, as well.
But these harmful effects are mild as compared to the existential threat that the world’s nuclear arsenal poses for us: a decade-long nuclear winter that could kill most people on Earth. And what makes it even more unsettling is the fact that this could happen, not from a political fallout, but simply a mistake:
Fortunately, a lot of advocacy has gone into nuclear disarmament and, as of January 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has entered into force:
It prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.
A nation that possesses nuclear weapons may join the treaty, so long as it agrees to destroy them in accordance with a legally binding, time-bound plan. Similarly, a nation that hosts another nation’s nuclear weapons on its territory may join, so long as it agrees to remove them by a specified deadline.
While a large number of countries have signed on to this treaty, all major nuclear powers are missing in action. I’m not sure if nuclear powers need to be educated on how bad the consequences of their decisions could be but, as long as their populations remain complacent, these countries will continue to risk the future of humanity while flexing their nuclear muscles at each other.
As institutions fail yet again to address existential threats, what role can we play in making sure a nuclear winter does not become our future? Can divesting from companies that create nuclear weapons help? How can we make sure that we take the right action because, as this haunting ordeal of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings shows, we don’t have the luxury of hindsight when it comes to nuclear weapons.
Until next week, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
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…and now what?
I arrived in Tahiti in 1994 due to my father’s posting as a Navy officer. This was a few months before France resumed its nuclear testing. The following year, we saw the city burn from anti-nuclear protests.
Back then as a middle-schooler, I was convinced there were good reasons for nuclear testing: the nation, the flag…all the elements of the official narrative that I was hearing and accepting without any questions. After living in Tahiti for more than 20 years, I am fortunate that my views have evolved: I am anti-nuclear and I acknowledge how badly France has treated this region
In retrospect, I cannot help but wonder how we managed to even reach this point where a country could willingly put the lives of individuals at risk for the simple sake of power, geopolitics, and this giant chessboard that some nations are playing at the expense of all of us.
I was even younger in 1986 when I remember the French government (clearly not the best at dealing with this topic) convincing its population that the Chernobyl toxic cloud stopped at the French border. All this to protect a national strategy that allowed France to sit with the big guys at the big table.
And what did we get as a result? An industry was born, one that doesn’t shine through its habits of transparency.
No wonder Albert Einstein tried to stop the US government when they started to use his work to build the first nuclear bomb. Einstein was a pacifist and was in no way willing to be associated with this craziness. Too late for you, Albert. From the Manhattan Project to Moruroa and through the Cuban Crisis, humanity has been living in fear of a nuclear war.
As a result, when you talk to anyone in Tahiti but also lots of places in the Pacific and the rest of the world, they’d tell you they don’t want anything related to nuclear. Decades of militarisation, secrets and conspiracies have traumatised generations about this technology.
But there was a time when nuclear wasn’t so nuclear. The time of Marie Curie, a researcher who helped medicine create amazing machines to cure and not to kill. A time when Fermi was able to envision nuclear energy as a source for good and not destruction.
Curie warned us that, “The road to progress is neither fast nor easy,” warning us on the need to be careful and cautious when implementing the wonders of science. But we didn’t listen to her.
It makes you wonder: had governments not seized the crazy opportunity to play “destroyer of worlds”, we could have had a completely different approach to this unique scientific discovery. In times when energy becomes a problem, when fossil fuels are invading our lungs to the point of no return and we’re struggling to find a way to get out of it, nuclear could have been a solution.
But it cannot and will never be. Because the powers of their time decided to put at stake promises of the future. Because the rationale of war justified this experiment even if, up until the first test, we weren’t sure if it would put the entire atmosphere on fire.
There was a time when leaders had a choice. But when they did, they were unable to envision the unintended consequences of their actions. They favoured short-term thinking and immediate power games at the expense of a more positive future.
How often has humanity been deprived from good progress because of the inability of leaders to be bolder, wiser, to stand above conflicts? How often will that happen again?
The story of the nuclear weapon is a cautionary tale for the future. Whether it be for AI or genetic engineering, we have in our hands powerful tools that could be forces of good if and only if we decide according to the better angels of our nature, and not the worst evil of power plays and patriotism.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury