France’s President Emmanuel Macron listens to a victim of a nuclear test. Photo: Le Monde
French lawmakers are expected to launch a probe into the impact of the country's nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia over three decades.
France detonated almost 200 bombs from the 1960s to the 1990s in French Polynesia – a scattered Pacific island territory thousands of kilometers east of Australia – including 41 atmospheric tests between 1966 and 1974. "We need to ask ourselves what the French government knew about the impact of the tests before they were carried out, as they occurred and up to today," the largely communist GDR group in the Assemblée Nationale said in a written request for an investigation. The GDR used its right to request one parliamentary investigation per session to demand the probe, which must be formally approved by the defense committee.
The blasts "had numerous consequences: They relate to health, the economy, society and the environment," GDR said in the text written by Mereana Reid Arbelot, a French Polynesian member of parliament. She called for a "full accounting" of the consequences and added that the group wanted to "shed light" on how testing sites were first chosen during the 1950s. Reid Arbelot said those decisions inflicted "trauma on the civilian and military populations".
Paris first opened a path to compensation in 2010 when it acknowledged health and environmental impacts. A study published by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in 2023 found that nuclear tests slightly increased the risk of thyroid cancer for local people. But campaigners at the time said that it should have looked at a larger segment of the population and called for more reparations.
On a 2021 visit, President Emmanuel Macron said the nation owed French Polynesia "a debt" for the nuclear tests, the last as recently as 1996. He called for archives on the testing to be opened, save only the most sensitive military information.
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