Tests May Begin In First Days Of July

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31097, 28 June 1966, Page 17

Tests May Begin In First Days Of July

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter —Copt/rtght) PAPEETE (Tahiti), June 27. A final warning to shipping and aircraft to keep clear of France’s forthcoming nuclear test series in the Pacific is expected within 48 hours, authorised sources said in Papeete.

They indicated that the warning would ?ome about four davs before the first explosion, which accords with newspaper reports in Tahiti that testing in the Tuahotu archipelago will begin on July 1 or 2. Anxiety over the possible consequences of the tests continued in Tahiti and in other countries bordering the Pacific.

A Japanese peace committee, including the Nobel prize winner, Dr. Hideki Yukawa, appealed to President de Gaulle today for an immediate suspension of the tests. The President of the Polynesian General Assembly, Mr Jacquer Tauraa, told A.A.P.Reuter earlier he also had lodged a protest. “Very Worried” “Like all Tahitians, I am very worried,” he said. The test site on Moruruoa, 776 miles from this island, is expected to be ready by July i. According to press reports the first nuclear test is likely to follow almost immediately, weather permitting. The weapon to be tested is an “improved” atom bomb,

a nuclear fission device and not a fission-fusion hydrogen bomb, according to French military authorities. It is thought that France has not yet produced enough enriched uranium to make an H-bomb.

One of the major aims of the series is believed to be the testing of a system for dropping A-bombs from aircraft and of a warhead for a medium range ground-to-ground missile. An official party, including the French Minister for Overseas Territories, Mr Pierre Billotte, and five elected members of the Polynesian Assembly, will leave Tahiti on June 30 for the French Atomic Energy Commission’s main supply base on Hao island—497 miles east of Tahiti in the Tuamoto archipeligo. From Cruiser Officials will watch the explosion from observation points on the specially-sealed cruiser de Grasse, which will give the signal to detonate the nuclear device, the aircraft carrier Foch, and from Gambier Island, 280 miles east of the test island.

A report from Paris said President de' Gaulle would be coming out to Tahiti in the first half of September for the concluding phase of the series. The United States, Australia and New Zealand have refused landing rights for French ships carrying equipment for the tests.

Official protests have come from Japan and a number of countries along the Pacific seaboard of South America. But France has argued that many of these countries are further away from her test site than they are from

United States testing grounds in Nevada, that the archipeligo is thinly populated and that fall-out 'Mil drop on empty ocean.