France's nuclear tests in Pacific 'gave islanders cancer'

[struggle4progress]

By John Lichfield in Paris
Published: 04 August 2006

For the first time, the French government has been confronted with scientific evidence that its nuclear tests in the Pacific caused an increase in cancer on the nearest inhabited islands ...

They will also reopen the controversy in the Pacific - and in Australia and New Zealand - surrounding President Jacques Chirac's decision to resume the tests soon after he became president in 1995.

France has since abandoned all experimental nuclear explosions. Florent de Vathaire, an expert on cancer epidemics at the French medical research body Inserm, said: "We have established a link between the fall-out from French nuclear tests and an increased risk of cancer of the thyroid" ...

Officially, France has never recognised that its Pacific nuclear tests could endanger the health of its own Polynesian citizens, and that of other populations. The brief resumption of nuclear tests at Mururoa atoll in 1996 was justified on the ground that there was no possible threat to human health ...

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1212778.ece

[ReadTomPaine]

1. Of course it did.

Why on earth wouldn't it? Who would be fool enough to believe otherwise after a half century of nuclear tests that have indicated otherwise?

[w4rma]

2. Chirac is a right-winger. Figures. (nt)

[tocqueville]

3. Chirac wasn't around at that time, it was De gaulle

As all other nations testing nuclear weapons, France underestimated the risks of exposure and fallout.

[eridani]

4. Mon cher Jack

http://lalaland.msu.edu/~vanhoose/humor/0355.html

Here's the open letter published in an Australian newspaper:

An open letter to M. Jacques Chirac:

Mon cher Jack

Je suis a bit fromaged off avec votre decision to blow up La Pacifique
avec le Frog bombes nuclears. Je reckon vous must have un spot in La
Belle France itself pour les explosions. Le Massive Central? Le Quay
d'Orsay? Le Champs Elysees? Votre own back yard, peut etre?

Frappez le crows avec stones, Sport! La guerre cold est fini! Votres
forces militaire need la bombe atomique about as beacoup as poisson
need les bicyclettes.

Un autre point, cobber. Votre histoire militaire isn't tres flash,
consisting, n'est-ce pas, of battailles the likes of Crecy, Agincourt,
Poitiers, Trafalgar, Borodino, Waterloo, Sedan, et Dien Bien Phu. Un
bombe won't change le tradition. Je/mon pere/ mon grand pere/le
cousing third avec ma grandmere/la plume de ma tante fought avec votre
soldats against Le Boche in WWI (le Big One). Have vous forgotten?

Reconsider, mon ami, otherwise in le hotels et estaminets de
l'Australie le curse anciens d'Angleterre - "Damnation to the French"
- will be heard un autre temps.

Votre chums don't want that.

[struggle4progress]

5. I must say ...

:spray: