In an unprecedented move, French Polynesia, an overseas territory governed by France, is to ask Paris for nearly $1 billion in compensation for damage caused by nuclear weapons tests carried out by France in the South Pacific between 1966 and 1996.
The Assembly of French Polynesia has prepared a demand for $930
million (754,2 million euros) over "major pollution"
caused by the 193 tests carried out by France for 30 years, La
Dépêche de Tahiti reported. On top of this, the proposed
resolution seeks an additional $132 million for the continued
occupation of the Fangataufa and Mururoa atolls, used for nuclear
testing.
The conservative Tahoera’a Huiraatira party committee has been
acting independently of Polynesian President Edouard Fritch, who
said he was "sorry" for the motion "written without consulting
him," local press reported.
Meanwhile, the text of the resolution, set for approval by the
Assembly, highlights a "very poor situation of the
atolls," and a clean-up "impossible in the current state
of scientific knowledge," Tahiti Infos reported. They write
that French Polynesia has been "too long sidelined" from
decisions on "waste conservation and monitoring modes
whatever their nature as well as the rehabilitation options of
the atolls."
On 24 August 1968, France conducted its first multi-stage
thermonuclear test at Fangataufa atoll in the South Pacific
Ocean, the so-called 'Canopus' test. With a 2.6 megaton yield,
its explosive power was 200 times that of the Hiroshima bomb,
according to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
Organization (CTBTO).
France began its last series of nuclear tests in the South
Pacific in 1995, breaking a three-year moratorium, provoking
international protests and the boycott of French goods. It
conducted its final nuclear test in January 1996 and then
permanently dismantled its nuclear test sites. Later in that
year, France signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
(CTBT).
In 1996, in the wake of the nuclear testing, a $150 million
annual payment was granted to French Polynesia, a territory of
over 100 islands and atolls with its own government.
France, together with China, is not party to the 1963 Partial
Test Ban Treaty, which bans nuclear explosions in the atmosphere,
under water and outer space but not underground.
Last year it came to light that French nuclear tests carried out
in the South Pacific had proved to be far more toxic than
previously thought. According to declassified documents, seen by
Le Parisien, plutonium fallout covered a much broader area than
Paris had initially admitted, with Tahiti allegedly exposed to
500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation.
According to the CTBTO, a study conducted between 2002 and 2005
of thyroid cancer sufferers in Tahiti, who had been diagnosed
between 1984 and 2002, established a "significant statistical
relationship" between cancer rates and exposure to radioactive
fallout from French nuclear tests. Another survey carried out by
an official French medical research body, Inserm, in 2006, also
detected an increase in thyroid cancer among people who had been
living within some 1,300 km of the nuclear tests conducted on the
Polynesian atolls between 1969 and 1996.
In 2010, France pledged that veterans and survivors would be
elegible for compensation, noting that this process would take
time.