Mururoa testing ‘to end soon’

Press, 24 October 1989, Page 30

Mururoa testing ‘to end soon’

By

NIGEL MALTHUS

French nuclear testing at Mururoa will end “very soon, but not tomorrow” according to a French Peace Movement delegation visiting New Zealand.

The four-man team visited Tahiti before coming to New Zealand on a mission aimed at making contact with peace groups in the Pacific. It met the Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control, Ms Wilde, and the National Consultative Committee on Disarmament, in Wellington, before meeting trade unionists in Christchurch. The team’s main message was that many French people did not support the nuclear policies of the French Government, said their spokesman, Mr Claude Lignieres. “French public opinion is much more ready to follow us than is generally thought,” he said, through an interpreter. A recent poll showed that 73 per cent of the French were > opposed to their Government’s level of defence spending. France’s nuclear strike force, including missiles, nuclear-armed tanks, and six nuclear submarines with 20 warheads each, was already “out of all proportion,” said Mr Lignieres.

Proposed military budgets for the next three years included a 4y 2 per cent increase, with nuclear arms the main item. But even the military was now admitting having to question it he said.

Testing at Mururoa had reduced from 10 blasts a year to eight and was due to reduce to six — not for economic reasons, since each shot cost only a trifling portion of the Defence budget, but because of French public opinion. Mr Lignieres, a pastor in the Reformed Church, said stopping testing at Mururoa was the French Peace Movement’s first demand.

The delegation drew a parallel between the opposition by New Zealanders to the Anzac frigate project, on the grounds that the money would be better spent on social aims, and the present situation in France. There were several strikes over budget constraints in the public sector. People were making the link with high defence spending. “The work for peace is linked with the struggle for social justice,” Mr Lignieres said.