Countdown at Mururoa Atoll

Somewhere in the South Pacific last week, united in a quixotic cause, were a former French army general, a New Zealand service station owner, a former Australian paper bag manufacturer, a young American couple and a New Zealand woman six months pregnant. They and a dozen or so companions were heading for the lonely atoll of Mururoa, about 750 miles southeast of Tahiti and 530 miles northwest of rocky Pitcairn Island. Their mission: to force the French government to abandon plans to explode a series of nuclear devices in the area.

Their prospects: slim. An admiral in Paris let it slip that the first nuclear test would probably take place "a few days before the end of June." Chances are that the French navy will track down and remove the pickets and their four boats before the blasts are triggered. (Another protest boat was intercepted on the eve of similar tests last year.)

The Pacific protesters are not alone, however. Indeed, although France has conducted nuclear tests in the region of Mururoa yearly since 1966, it has never encountered the current level of outrage. The New Zealand government ordered a frigate, with a cabinet minister aboard, to steam into the test area. The World Health Organization called for an immediate halt to the French plans. Australian trade unions refused to handle French imports, from Camembert cheese to cosmetics; they also let 1,000 bags of mail from France pile up in the post offices. Somewhat ghoulishly, the girls at a Melbourne high school sent an invitation in French to President Pompidou to attend their funerals "a une date uncertaine--cela depend en vous." Yet another protest to Pompidou came from some 100,000 Peruvian women denouncing the eastward drift of radioactive fallout. The mayor of Hiroshima charged France with "blatant disregard for human dignity." Even Prince Philip of Britain joined in the din, saying that he would gladly carry a banner down the Champs-Elysees if he thought it would help stop the tests.

Many have already carried banners of protest in Paris, as well as in London, Tokyo, The Hague, Sydney, Wellington, Lima and Istanbul. Last week Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the influential French politician and publisher, flew off to organize a demonstration in Tahiti. On his arrival, he lauded those willing to risk their lives in the explosion zone--particularly Jacques de Bollardiere, 65, a wartime military hero who had resigned as a general in 1961 over the mistreatment of Algerian captives. The former general, said Servan-Schreiber, "is saving the honor of the French army." The American couple in the zone were David and Emma Moodie, who had recently been running a ferry service in New Zealand. Before sailing toward Mururoa, David Moodie, 27, said: "The danger to ourselves is of little importance. Man's tenancy of this world is severely threatened due to a philosophy of violence."

The French government insists that the South Pacific blasts are necessary to test a triggering device for its first operational thermonuclear weapons, but it insists that they pose virtually no danger to human life. (If that is so, replied Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, why not hold the tests in Corsica?) In fact, the danger from fallout is debatable. A more compelling argument against the tests may be that they serve no worthwhile purpose. In the view of many armaments experts, France is simply wasting money by trying to develop its own nuclear capability. Having already spent an estimated $15 billion on the project, France remains ten to 20 years behind the superpowers.

"We resemble an automobile racer who sets off from Le Mans and gets farther and farther behind the other cars in every lap of the race," says retired Air Force General Paul Stehlin, now an anti-Gaullist Deputy in the National Assembly. "Under the most favorable hypothesis, by 1975 we will dispose of a nuclear capacity of around 30 megatons. The U.S. already boasts 30,000 and the U.S.S.R. perhaps 25,000."

The French believers in a nuclear force claim that parity is not the objective of the Mururoa tests, that the aim is simply to develop sufficient weapons to provide a taux d'ennui (nuisance tax). If France could knock out just a couple of major cities in any attacking nation, this reasoning goes, that would be enough to deter a bigger power from trying to knock out all of France.

At week's end, the International Court of Justice at The Hague moved in with its own official verdict. It handed down a temporary injunction against the tests--pending final decision on suits brought by Australia and New Zealand charging that the French program violated their rights. But the French government appeared unmoved by the court's action. It had previously ignored the suits, claiming that the court had no jurisdiction over "matters of internal security." The countdown on the tests continued.

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