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3 Nuclear colonialism: anti-nuclear activism and national independence
While anti-nuclear protests surged across much of Western Europe in the early 1980s, one country in the region was apparently immune from large-scale protests: France. One explanation for this lack of a large anti-nuclear movement in France is that the country was not being asked to deploy new nuclear weapons on its territory – unlike the UK or West Germany, for example. Equally importantly, France had (and has) its own nuclear weapons, which were championed by politicians across the political spectrum as a guarantor of France’s national sovereignty. In other words, while the arrival of American nuclear weapons on British or German soil was seen by many to be a challenge to national sovereignty, the fact that the French state had its own nuclear deterrent was by contrast presented as a way of defending national sovereignty. While anti-nuclear activism certainly existed in France in the early 1980s, it never approached the scale of what was seen elsewhere in NATO at the time.
While metropolitan France saw relatively little anti-nuclear protest, another part of France saw an important rise in anti-nuclear activism in the early 1980s: French Polynesia, an overseas French territory.
When it first developed its own nuclear weapons, France had conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Sahara Desert in Algeria. Following Algeria’s independence in 1962, however, France sought a new testing site for its nuclear weapons and chose French Polynesia, specifically the Mururoa Atoll. France refused to join the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty and between 1966 and 1974 France conducted a series of atmospheric nuclear tests. From 1974 until 1996, it continued with underground nuclear tests, with at least 175 tests taking place in French Polynesia by 1996.
The impact of these tests is now well documented, and the nuclear fallout and increased radiation levels contaminated Polynesian populations of different atolls, as well as French soldiers stationed in French Polynesia. This is an example of nuclear colonialism, whereby a country with nuclear weapons tests these weapons in what is to them a peripheral territory, affecting marginalised and indigenous communities disproportionately. So committed was the French Government to the tests that they authorised the sinking of an NGO ship, the Rainbow Warrior, which was protesting against the tests, killing one Greenpeace crew member.
These nuclear tests overseen by the French state mobilised anti-nuclear activism among Polynesians. In 1973, an estimated 5000 people marched against the nuclear tests. Given that the entire population of French Polynesia at the time was about 130,000, the number of activists corresponds to nearly 4 per cent of the total population. Importantly, anti-nuclear activists’ demands to stop the nuclear testing was increasingly tied to growing calls for self-determination. By the early 1980s, the anti-nuclear cause was increasingly related to the anti-colonial one, with a peaceful and anti-nuclear dimension becoming a crucial part of Polynesian identity. However, while the question of Polynesian independence remained a divisive one, opposition to the nuclear tests became more widely shared among Polynesians.
While anti-nuclear activism in French Polynesia became linked to calls for greater national self-determination, the French nuclear tests also mobilised activists around the world, and indeed in metropolitan France. Campaigners across the South Pacific worked together to achieve the 1985 Treaty of Rarotonga, establishing the South Pacific as a nuclear weapons free zone. In Session 3, you’ll learn more about this kind of cross-border or transnational cooperation in opposing nuclear weapons.