Govt regrets French nuclear test

Press, 1 July 1983, Page 1

Govt regrets French nuclear test

PA Wellington The Government regrets the nuclear-bomb test at Mururoa on Wednesday but expects more “from time to time,” says the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon. “We know they are continuing with their tests,” Mr Muldoon told journalists yesterday. The delegation of South Pacific scientists going to Mururoa to inspect the test site would probably be there in September, he said. Mr Muldoon also answered comments from the French Ambassador in Australia, Mr Jean Bernard Merimec, who said Mr Muldoon’s understanding of the test timetable was “bizarre.” Mr Muldoon said the Ambassador was “second guessing his own President,” who.

Mr Muldoon says, has given him a date for the ending of testing. “If he is saying the French President, Francois Mitterrand, wasn’t telling the truth when he spoke to me that is between him and his President.” The French nuclear-test programme has in the past brought strong protest from Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific countries. Mr Muldoon raised the issue in talks this month with Mr Mitterrand and later told journalists he had been given an assurance the tests would end in a certain number of years. He also later said he had privately been given the actual date by the French President but has refused to reveal it.

The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Lange, yesterday called on Mr Muldoon to divulge the date. Speaking after a Labour Party caucus meeting in Auckland, he likened Mr Muldoon’s attitude to the nuclear-test termination date to people who had been given horse-racing tips. “They have always met the trainer,” said Mr Lange. “They always know who is going to win, but they never tell you which horse it is going to be. “And when the other horse wins, they say: ‘Ah, that is the one I had my money on.’ “It is all very infantile

this business of saying: ‘I have got the breeze because the French President whispered to me’.” (Mr Muldoon had said it would be wrong of him to reveal the timing “when no-one from the French side has said it and in some reports they were saying this could not be right.”) Asked if he would reveal the date if he had the same information under the same circumstances, Mr Lange said, “If I had them on terms whereby they were confidential to me, then of course, I would net reveal them.

“But I would not prance about playing the big guy that has had the whisper in the ear.”

Mr Lange said the fourth Labour government would take steps to end the nuclear tests altogether. “We will host, under United Nations auspices, a regional conference of Pacific nations to bring about a nuclear-free Pacific.” A French scientific report on how nuclear testing has affected the stability of Mururoa Atoll will be made public next week, it was announced in Paris.

The study was conducted by a group headed by a volcanologist, Mr Haroun Tazieff, who is the French Government’s commissioner for the study and prevention of major natural risks. The group visited the island last year and has just given its

report to the Defence Minister, Mr Charles Hernu. Mururoa has been used both for atmospheric tests and in recent years for underground tests. Antinuclear groups have claimed that the underground explosions have dangerously affected the struture of the atoll.

A nuclear explosion on Mururoa was recorded on Wednesday by the New Zealand Seismological Observatory at both its Rarotonga and Wellington stations, Dr Warwick Smith, the observatory superintendent, said yesterday.

Dr Smith said the “moderately large” blast at the French test site was of 50 kilotons, and was recorded at 5.46 p.m. New Zealand time.

A kiloton is the equivalent of about 1000 tonnes of TNT.

It was the fifty-fifth underground test by the French at their Pacific base, and the third this year. Bomb shocks were picked up on recording equipment on April 19 and May 25 — both bigger than the detonation on Wednesday, according to Dr Smith. “Rarotonga is our most sensitive station because it is the closest, but this time we picked it up in Wellington, but only just.” The strongest explosion recorded during the underground testing programme was of 140 kilotons in July, 1975, he said.