France Seeks to Make Case for Nuclear Tests in Pacific : Atomic weapons: Last planned explosions draw global ire. But Paris says they are safe and necessary.

MURUROA ATOLL, French Polynesia —  On Sunday, Aug. 6, the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a couple of dozen young men, most in T-shirts and shorts, were lying in front of the peeling-stucco Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in the center of Papeete on the island of Tahiti. They were on a hunger strike to protest France’s resumption of nuclear testing here in the South Pacific.

They put up little flags of blue-and-white stripes and gold stars, the flags of the small independence movement in this French colonial territory, but the flags did not flap in the languid heat. A large, hand-made banner, the words etched by black marker on a white sheet, proclaimed, in French, “No to the bomb.”

About the same time, at the tourist-crammed Hotel Sofitel on Maeva Beach barely five miles away, French military officers in their tropical whites and khakis briefed a couple of dozen reporters, photographers and TV crew members about their impending trip to the French nuclear testing site at the Mururoa Atoll 600 miles to the east. If the officers knew that day was the 50th anniversary of the world’s first atomic strike, they did not mention it.

There has been general agreement in France for more than three decades that Charles de Gaulle was right in decreeing that their country must have a nuclear force. This faith did not prepare France for the worldwide wave of condemnation that met President Jacques Chirac’s announcement this summer that France would resume underground nuclear testing with seven to eight tests in French Polynesia between September and next May. France would then sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Chirac said, and never test again.

Shrill Condemnations

The condemnations have been shrill and widespread. Australia and France are locked in a trade war over the issue. Greenpeace and other environmentalists are planning to sail a flotilla of protest ships into French waters around the testing atolls. The French navy turned away one Greenpeace ship a few weeks ago with a barrage of tear-gas canisters.

French nuclear specialists were angered to find President Clinton joining the chorus of condemnation. In 1992, when French President Francois Mitterrand ignored the advice of his specialists and ordered a moratorium on nuclear testing, then-President George Bush brushed aside any suggestion that he too join the moratorium. The Americans moved ahead with their scheduled series of underground tests.

In view of that recent history, the French appeared to expect at least silence from Washington.

To make matters worse, the French public, for the first time, has joined the protesters. Recent polls show that 60% of the French want Chirac to call off the tests.

“There is still a majority in France who want to keep nuclear deterrence,” says Jacques Bouchard, director of military applications for the French Atomic Energy Agency, a civilian organization of scientists and engineers under the Ministry of Defense. “But most people don’t like the idea of tests if you can avoid it.”

The French government, in an unusual attempt at openness, invited journalists to see the testing site and barrage the engineers, scientists and military officers with questions last week.

Rarely have French officials seemed so troubled that the rest of the world does not understand them. Accusations that they are willfully damaging the environment annoy them most of all.

“I can understand when it is a question of politics, when one government sets a policy on deterrence and another government adopts a different policy,” Alain Barthoux, a nuclear engineer in charge of operations at Mururoa Atoll, said at dinner one evening. “But the environment is an issue that men of science must discuss by marshaling evidence. You must not discuss it with only emotion.”

In their Cartesian way, the French are trying to make a logical case for their resumption of nuclear testing. Their argument follows two lines. First, they say, without testing they cannot maintain the nuclear deterrence needed to protect their country. They say their current weapons have become obsolete and need to be strengthened; tests will help them achieve this.

Although the test ban treaty will allow nuclear powers to keep weapons up to date through computer simulation in the future, the French insist that they cannot create the sophisticated computer system needed to do this without testing.

They deny other motives--such as an attempt to create a new miniature bomb. “We are not trying to make new atoms,” Bouchard insists.

Their second argument is environmental. The French produce an enormous array of statistics to show that they have not damaged the Mururoa Atoll or contaminated the Pacific.

Not even the people working on the atoll have ever shown signs of radiation or nuclear-related illness, according to French medical records. Barthoux, a rumpled, balding man, fielded hostile questions about the environment for two days, continually backing up his claims with statistics and comparisons.

Asked if he has ever worried about the risk to the health of people like him who work at Mururoa, the 60-year-old, Algerian-born Barthoux replies: “No, not at any moment. Here, like in any nuclear center, we have requirements, laws and inspection by safety commissions. And we have always had to live by this. It is clear that the exposure around the site is lower than at any nuclear station in France. . . . Does that surprise you?”

1st Atoll Tests in 1966

The French first began testing at Mururoa and the neighboring atoll of Fangataufa in 1966, after they were forced to give up a site in the Sahara Desert to an independent Algeria. At first, they detonated bombs in the atmosphere over the atolls, but they switched to underground testing in 1975.

In all, there have been 41 atmospheric tests and 134 underground tests at the atolls.

In 1985, the French Intelligence Service, on orders hatched in the office of President Mitterrand, sent agents to Auckland, New Zealand, to blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior before it could set sail to Mururoa. One Greenpeace member died in the explosion, and two French agents were captured and jailed by the New Zealand police.

The scandal humiliated France and increased French officials’ frustration over the actions of Greenpeace. They believe that outsiders might reduce their clamor if they understood more about the geology of the Mururoa Atoll and the type of tests conducted there.

An atoll is one of nature’s strange phenomena--a strip of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that almost completely encircles a huge lagoon so aquamarine-blue that it looks like a picture-postcard cliche. But the island is mostly lagoon. No one lived here until the French selected the island as a test site in 1962.

Almost 2,000 live on Mururoa now, mostly French soldiers and sailors, some French scientists and technicians, and some Polynesian workers. It looks like a bustling town, but everything must be imported from France or Tahiti except coconuts and fish.

The atoll is used in nuclear testing because of the way it was created. Atolls form because they lie atop great volcanic mountains on the floor of the ocean. Coral--the skeletal remains of sea life--adheres to the mountain, thickening and growing upward over millions of years.

The strip of land that surrounds the atoll is really the rim of coral cropping up out of the sea. The nuclear tests are thus carried out deep within the dead volcanic mountains beneath Mururoa and Fangataufa 25 miles away. The French scientists put long cylinders into the ground that contain measuring equipment and the nuclear device.

During the latest press tour, Barthoux showed one of the cylinders to the reporters. It was 60 to 80 feet long, with perhaps five feet of empty space at the bottom for the nuclear-device measuring equipment. Workers fit the cylinders with measuring devices and cables.

A barge resembling an oil rig was digging a well in the Fangataufa lagoon, and a second barge was preparing to do the same in Mururoa. The French say that the depth of the well depends on the force of the explosion; wells reach down 2,000 to 3,000 feet.

After the cylinder, weighing 50 to 70 tons, is placed in the well, the top of the well is plugged with rock drilled out of the mountain, and with concrete. According to Barthoux, the cylinder, once exploded, is destroyed in milliseconds; the sensors have only one-millionth of a second to record and analyze the blast data before they are destroyed. In this flash of time, the cables carry the information to recording barges in the lagoon.

According to movies of past tests, the lagoon experiences a seismic shock that lifts the water up for a few seconds, producing a white foam that subsides as the water returns to its original green-blue.

French scientists say that beneath the surface of the lagoon, the blast has created a molten lava inside the well that within minutes turns into a glass-like substance that traps the radioactivity within the mountain. They say Mururoa is far less contaminated with radioactivity than Tahiti or Paris or any other populated area exposed to radiation in everyday life.

Contamination Debate

Foreign scientists who were allowed to test the site during the 1980s agreed that contamination on the atoll is very low. But they fear that the tests may do long-term structural damage to the coral above the mountain--something the French dispute--that could lead to leakage.

French officials acknowledge that the coral layer slips down a few inches during a blast, but they deny that this hurts the atoll.

“When I first heard about the testing, before I even came here, I was against it,” said a young French soldier in Mururoa, fulfilling his year of national service. “It’s a generational thing, I think. All the people are more mature--they have experienced war and understand these things better. But it is like a family when the father tells the children what to do. The children don’t want to listen.”

A member of the older generation, Gen. Paul Vericel, a dapper man in white who commands the Mururoa test site, tries to deal with the problem of those who will not listen to his arguments. “It is very difficult to explain complex problems to the general public,” he tells the reporters.

Asked if he felt that Chirac had made an error in announcing nuclear tests during the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, Vericel replies: “For many people, the fact of nuclear testing is irrational, and the image of Hiroshima is upon them. It’s true that the coincidence strikes people.

“But 49 or 50 years [later], Hiroshima is still Hiroshima, and the president of the republic had no choice.”