Moments In Time - June 1972: French Nuclear Tests At Mururoa

The Age

Thursday May 25, 2006

Alan Attwood

France's atom-bomb tests brought a mixed reaction in Australia. By Alan Attwood

Three decades ahead of the Rolling Stones, the French were working on their own bigger bang. President Georges Pompidou announced that France would conduct a new series of nuclear-weapons tests above Mururoa Atoll, in the South Pacific, nowhere near the Elysee Palace. Those living in the general vicinity were decidedly unimpressed.

New Zealand urged the United Nations to stop the atmospheric tests. The Australian Council of Churches called for an immediate international conference. Returning from a trip to Asia, Prime Minister William McMahon was met by demonstrators chanting anti-nuclear slogans. He went home to Bellevue Hill, only to find a delegation of women concerned about the welfare of their children. The PM invited two of the mums in for coffee and conceded that he, too, wished the tests weren't going to happen.

This may have surprised one of his own senior colleagues, Vic Garland, the minister

in charge of Australia's program to monitor nuclear fallout, who had suggested that Australian scientists were using "scare tactics" in their campaign to halt the nuclear tests and that there was "no cause for alarm". The response from the scientific community? No, minister. One researcher suggested that previous French tests in the South Pacific (in 1966, '68 and '70) had caused the greatest radioactive fallout over Australia since the British tests at Maralinga, South Australia, in 1957.

The pending tests hung like a nuclear cloud over the news of June 1972. Other things were going on: Pastor Doug Nicholls became Australia's first Aboriginal knight; Britain floated the pound; the Victorian Football League moved to ban streamers, flags and other "unnecessary litter".

Federal Labor MP Jim Cairns, hero of the anti-war marches, declared: "The French nuclear testing is the workings of a vainglorious people who think possessing a device which can kill millions of people is a mark of military strength." Athlete Herb Elliott made a personal protest, visiting the French consulate in Melbourne to return a trophy presented to him four years earlier by the Academy of Sport in Paris.

Weapons testing began over Mururoa late in the month. Details were sketchy: the French didn't exactly issue news releases. Australia's most vigorous response occurred only after a change of government in December '72. Early the next year, the Whitlam Government initiated legal action against France in the International Court of Justice. The French response? More tests. Then a declaration that it no longer recognised the court. It wasn't until September of '74 that France announced it had achieved its objectives, and that further testing would be carried out underground.

The futility of trying to change French policy was summed up by the fate of a telegram of protest, signed by 400 West Australian academics and fired off to President Pompidou in June '72. It never got there.

Why? A union ban on all mail to France.