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“FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTINGS” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H7252-H7254 on July 19, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTINGS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kingston). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from American Samoa [Mr. Faleomavaega] is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the President of France for having recently acknowledged a very serious matter that for some 50 years every French head of state has denied any involvement of the French Government.
Last Sunday, Mr. Speaker, President Jacques Chirac of France publicly stated that the Government of France was an accomplice and was involved in the deportation of some 75,000 Jews, whom a majority were French citizens and many refugees also--their deportation to Nazi Germany during World War II. These Jews were sent to Nazi death camps, and according to reports only about 2,500 survived. In his remarks, President Chirac said, ``France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum, on that day committed the irreparable. Betraying its word, it delivered its dependents to their executioners.''
Mr. Speaker, I admire President Chirac for saying these noble words, but I would admire him even more if he would be consistent with his statements and policy towards resumption
of nuclear bomb explosions in the South Pacific.
Quoting from President Chirac's own words, Mr. Speaker, if France is truly the homeland where the rights of men are respected and honored, then why is President Chirac giving a deaf ear--an unwilling spirit--to listen and to examine carefully the plans and requests from leaders of countries from around the world, especially the leaders of countries and territories representing some 28 million men, women, and children of the Pacific region, to stop this insane practice of exploding nuclear bombs in these Pacific atolls.
Mr. Speaker, if France is truly the homeland of the enlightenment, then why is the President of France not giving serious consideration to reason and commonsense thinking by the majority of humanity throughout the world--do not explode nuclear bombs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean--given the fact that the Pacific Ocean covers almost one-third of our planet's surface. Mr. Speaker, may I also remind the President of France that two-thirds of the world's population reside in the Pacific region.
Mr. Speaker, the president of France makes the point that exploding eight more nuclear bombs in the South Pacific is a necessary step to improve France's nuclear deterrent system. The fact of the matter is, Mr. Speaker, the technology to improve the trigger mechanism to explode nuclear bombs is already available. It has been done, and guess which country has this technology. We do. The United States of America.
Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding our country was willing--and is still willing--to share the technology with France, so France does not need to spin its wheels again to continue a testing program when the answers are already known to questions concerning nuclear explosions.
So, Mr. Speaker, I raise another point concerning President Chirac's decision to rescind France's 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing. President Chirac said the decision by his government to resume its nuclear testing program in the
South Pacific is in the highest interest of the Government of France. Mr. Speaker, I submit I have a problem with President Chirac's claim that exploding eight nuclear bombs--each bomb ten times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and killing over 100,000 men, women and children at the height of the conflict with Japan during World War II--the problem, Mr. Speaker, is that these eight nuclear bombs President Chirac's government intends to explode during an 8-month period starting in September of this year, these nuclear bombs are going to be detonated on two South Pacific atolls in French Polynesia.
The President of France claims that exploding these eight nuclear bombs on these Pacific atolls is ecologically safe and that the marine environment will not in any way be affected by it.
Mr. Speaker, the President of France is not an expert on nuclear bomb explosions, and certainly I'm not an expert on this matter, but doesn't it make sense, Mr. Speaker--common sense, that is--I strongly suggest to President Chirac that a panel of nuclear scientists from around the world be invited to these Pacific atolls and allow them the opportunity to fully examine what the French Government has done after already conducting 139 underwater nuclear bomb explosions and 41 atmospheric nuclear bombs under the Moruroa Atoll.
Mr. Speaker, the French Government claims these nuclear bomb explosions are being conducted underground and not underwater. Mr. Speaker, I submit this claim is yes and no. The reason for my saying this is that the Morurao Atoll is made up entirely of coral reefs and marine life, but in the middle of the atoll is a volcanic formation shaped like a cone, but is below sea level. So what the French officials have done is drill some 139 of these holes into this volcanic formation, and accordingly in the middle of this volcanic mountain the nuclear bombs are detonated.
Mr. Speaker, what concerns me and nuclear scientists throughout the world is that after exploding nuclear
bombs 139 times inside this volcanic formation--something has to give after doing this for the past 20 years.
Nuclear scientists have expressed serious concerns about leakages of nuclear contamination directly into the ocean, and the consequences of marine environmental contamination to all forms of marine life can never be restored to life again. That's the danger, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, why is the French Government so afraid to allow a panel of knowledgeable and expert scientists to examine the Moruroa Atoll, if all that the French Government alleges on safety and health to humans are true?
So, Mr. Speaker, while these nuclear bomb explosions will explode inside a volcanic formation--this volcanic mountain-like formation is surrounded entirely by the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Speaker, while it is quite convenient for the French Government to claim a 12-mile territorial jurisdiction around the Moruroa Atoll, the fact is, the ocean surrounding the atoll does not discriminate on whereby nuclear contamination is carried freely and dispersed by the ocean currents--and these ocean currents affect the entire Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Speaker, if the President of France continues to refuse to listen and to stop his government's nuclear testings in the Pacific, I am left one other possible option--declare and ask the goodness of the American people to boycott all French products being sold in the United States and throughout the world.
I also make an appeal, Mr. Speaker, for our musicians and leaders noted in the media and entertainment business to set September 1 of this year to conduct concerts, musical arrangements and gatherings to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the following information.
Government Watch--National Confession
Credit President Jacques Chirac with the moral and political courage at last to say unequivocally what other French heads of state have refused to say for 50 years. Credit him with publicly recognizing France's direct responsibility in the deportation of some of the 75,000 Jews--many of them refugees but the majority French citizens--who were seized and shipped to Nazi death camps during World War II.
Official French complicity in this crime against humanity has long been known and documented. Yet for decades successive governments sought to place responsibility solely on the country's German occupiers, later adding the collaborationist Vichy regime to the roll of those guilty. Chirac, in remarks at a memorial service for 13,000 Jews who were seized in Paris in 1942 and transported to the death camps, was explicit about the actual French role. ``France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum, on that day committed the irreparable.'' His nation owes those victims, he said, ``an everlasting debt.''
It's seldom easy for proud nations to admit crimes or follies. Only in 1976, for example did President Gerald R. Ford apologize on behalf of the government for the hysteria-prompted wartime internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry 34 years earlier. That great wrong had long been widely recognized.
In France for more than five decades it was official denial that prevailed. President Chirac, to his great credit, has made any further denial untenable.
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Future Shock--
(By John Barry)
The terrorists went undetected. In the noon-hour crush of a spring day in midtown Manhattan, the two men with suitcases looked like hotel-bound businessmen. Nobody gave them a second glance as they bought sandwiches from a street vendor and sat on one of the benches by Rockefeller Center. After a moment, they seemed to rummage in the contents of the bags. Only the blinding fireball that vaporized the attackers and instantly killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers announced that nuclear warfare had finally come home to the nation that first split the atom. And by then, of course, it was too late to avert catastrophe.
For years, versions of that nightmare scenario have been grist for doomsday prophets. It was pure hype. A terrorist group with the funds and know-how to develop a knapsack nuke would have had to be so big, rich and sophisticated as to rival a good-sized nation--hardly a recipe for keeping a secret. The routes to the prize--breeding plutonium in a reactor or refining uranium in a giant enrichment plant--are strewn with technical obstacles. Theft of the primary materials was the only way to short-circuit that laborious process, and the nuclear fraternity's huge stores of A-bomb ingredients were tightly protected. So what really mattered was keeping sensitive technology out of the hands of would-be nuclear powers, convincing nervous nations that the U.S. nuclear umbrella would protect them, monitoring peaceful uses of atomic energy--and heading off a showdown with the U.S.S.R.
Those goals were achievable--but history has turned the nuclear threat on its head, and the terrorist scenario has become frighteningly real. For veterans of the nonproliferation struggle, these are in one sense the best of times, because the terrifying contest between Washington and Moscow is largely over. The United States and Russia are dismantling their ICBMs and their multiple warheads as fast as they can. Their remaining missiles are no longer targeted at each other. And this spring, U.S. negotiators persuaded more than 170 signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to extend it indefinitely--in return only for vaguely worded security guarantees from the nuclear powers. But these are the worst of times, too, because in the debris of the cold war remain tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and thousands of tons of bomb-grade plutonium and uranium. A terrorist bomb made with as little as 13 pounds of pure plutonium would pack the punch of 1,000 tons of TNT even if it fizzled. The main problem, still, is Russia. But today the problem is Russian weakness, not strength. ``The situation in the former Soviet Union today is the single most important event in the history of nuclear proliferation.'' says a senior Pentagon official.
That history so far is one of restraint. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy said he was haunted by fears that by 1975 there could be as many as 20 nations with nuclear weapons. Back then, there were four declared nuclear powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain; China exploded a bomb the next year. That's still the official roster (three other nations have gone nuclear without admitting it: Israel, India and Pakistan). Meanwhile, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Romania all have elected over the last decade to give up nuclear programs. Taiwan and South Korea began preliminary efforts to build a bomb in the 1970s, but gave up under heavy U.S. pressure. Most recently, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstain disavowed the nuclear legacy that fell to them when the U.S.S.R. split up. ``The NPT has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its authors,'' says John Holum, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. ``Non-nuclear has become a global norm.''
Those still knocking at the clubhouse door remain a long way from getting the keys. Consider Iraq, which has drawn most of the attention since the end of the gulf war, when U.N. inspectors began carting away boxes of plans outlining Saddam Hussein's $10 billion nuclear program. Iraqi scientists may not have been as far along as the documents indicated. It seems the scientists lied to please the boss.
``[The program] was a disaster,'' says Bob Kelley of Los Alamos, who has made 27 trips to Iraq as part of the monitoring effort. ``The leadership got taken for a ride. They didn't know what they were doing.''
Other pretenders are scarcely in better shape. Libya's Muammar Kaddafi still wants a bomb, but a Russian intelligence study concluded in 1993 that his poor engineering and technology base put that out of his reach for
``the foreseeable future.'' North Korea has taken a buyout--
$4.5 billion worth of nuclear reactors from South Korea. And although the North Koreans may already have produced as much as 26 pounds of plutonium, Russian experts say scientists there don't have the computers or design know-how to make a bomb. Iran's nuclear ambitions go back to the shah, but poor infrastructure, demoralized personnel and political factionalism under the ayatollahs create huge barriers to building an ``Islamic bomb,'' experts agree. In all, the nuclear wanna-bes are a sorry lot.
But what happens with a nuclear power heads in the same direction as such Third World basket cases? The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened the door to proliferation--by states or terrorists--on a scale that previously was unimaginable. In the START treaties of 1991 and 1993, the United States and the former Soviet Union agreed to drastically reduce their strategic warheads. The problem is that in Russia that has meant moving some 3,000 warheads a year from under control of the military, where safeguards have been stringent, to the civilian Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom), where U.S. experts charge the protection against theft has become so slipshod that some think the best answer may be to slow down or even stop the whole disarmament process.
Just about every U.S. specialist on the issue has had an epiphany about how vast the problem is. For Charles Curtis of the U.S. Energy Department, it was when he was taken into Building 116 of the Kurchatov Institute in the Moscow suburbs. About 160 pounds of weapons-grade uranium cast into shiny spheres was stored in high-school-style lockers and secured by a single chain looped through the handles. There was no other security. William Potter, who tracks nuclear thefts for the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, was transfixed by a Russian Navy investigator's report on the theft of almost 10 pounds of enriched uranium from one of the Russian Navy's main storage facilities for nuclear fuel, the Sevmorput shipyard outside Murmansk. The thief had climbed through one of many holes in the wooden fence surrounding the fuel-storage area, sawed through a padlock on the warehouse door, lifted the lid on a container and broken off three pieces of a submarine reactor core.
``Potatoes were guarded better,'' the investigator said.
Flimsy locks aren't the most frightening weakness. While security for the U.S. nuclear program depends on high-tech gadgetry backed by armed guards, Russia has depended on control of people. ``They had watchers watching watchers, backed by very strict control on movement,'' said one Energy Department official. Will hard times fray the watchers' loyalty? Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist, noticed big new dachas going up inside the barbed-wire perimeter of Chelyabinsk-70, a closed city for Russian nuclear scientists. When he asked who owned the houses, his Russian companion cut him a glance and replied, ``The night people''--black marketers. Former Los Alamos weapons designer Stephen Younger recalls how the director of the weapons lab at another closed city, Arzamas-16, called him aside to beg for emergency financial aid, adding that his scientists were going hungry.
``You are driving us into the hands of the Chinese,'' the man said.
How much may already have leaked? The CIA lists 31 cases of thefts or seizures, most allegedly involving low-grade Russian materials found by German police, in the first six months of this year alone. But many of the cases resulted from ``sting'' operations, part of a pre-emptive strategy initiated by Western intelligence agencies since 1992. Some Russians charge that the operation has actually created a market. Still, some cases are chilling. In Prague last December, police found almost six pounds of highly enriched uranium in the back seat of a Saab; also in the care were a Czech nuclear scientist and two colleagues from Belarus and Ukraine. ``We're starting to see significant quantities of significant material,'' says a White House source. Adds a Pentagon official, ``If just one bomb's worth gets out, people are going to wake up real fast.''
Some members of Russian President Boris Yeltsin's staff are already sounding the alarm. After a presidential inquiry last fall, staffers identified nine facilities they said urgently require modern security systems. But everyone agrees that the list barely begins to address the problem: U.S. experts say not one of the nearly 90 facilities where a total of 700 tons of weapons-grade materials are stored has adequate security. The outcry seems to have had an impact on Minatom, a huge bureaucracy whose director, Victor Mikhailov, is legendary in Washington for resisting foreign interference. In June, Mikhailov agreed to let teams of U.S. experts go to five of his facilities ``to facilitate development of joint improvement plans.'' U.S. experts also will install and demonstrate new security systems at the Arzamas and Chelyabinsk complexes. Moscow's Kurchotov Institute already has the new system.
Paying for all that will require major outlays. U.S. officials estimate that the new equipment will cost $5 million per site: a total of $450 million if Russia agrees to harden security at all its storage facilities. The Clinton administration has begun discussions in NATO, in the International Atomic Energy Agency and among members of the Group of Seven about how the costs might be spread around. The Russian presidential commission studying the problem paints an even grimmer picture. It says upgrading security will cost $17 billion. Nobody knows where that kind of money might come from. But in the meantime, the Russians have begun to adopt a drastic but simple strategy--closing the doors to nuclear plants, even to their own inspectors. Asked if it would be possible to visit one nuclear site, Mikhailov's spokesman said that ``because of Chechnya, no one can go anywhere.'' Evidently security has already been tightened against possible attacks by Chechen separatists.
In place of the arms race, a new race is on--to see how quickly Russian can be cajoled and helped into throwing up enough safeguards to prevent some of the world's most lethal materials' leaking into the wrong hands. In the meantime, the Pentagon is spending $100 million this year in an effort to identify high-tech ``counterproliferation'' tools to track and, if necessary, take out rogue nuclear powers. And policy specialists already are wrestling with the dilemma of how the United States can both cut military spending and continue to convince Japan and other friends around the world that they don't need their own nuclear weapons. It's still a battle to make sure ``The Day After'' isn't just a day away.
[From the Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1995]
Chirac Admits France's Complicity With Nazis
(From Times Wire Service)
Paris.--President Jacques Chirac acknowledged Sunday what a generation of political leaders did not--that the French state was an accomplice to the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
At a ceremony to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the roundup of at least 13,000 Jews at a Paris stadium--the biggest during the war years--Chirac said that French complicity with the Nazis was a stain on the nation.
``These dark hours soil forever our history and are an injury to our past and our traditions,'' Chirac told the gathering at the former site of the Velodrome d'Hiver stadium in western Paris.
``The criminal folly of the [German] occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state,'' he said.
Chirac, a conservative who took office in May, is the first French president to publicly recognize France's role in the deportations of Jews under the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, which collaborated with the Nazis.
In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.
Chirac's predecessor, Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, maintained that the Vichy regime did not represent the French republic and its actions were not those of the state.
That attitude pained France's large Jewish community, which has long pressed authorities to come to grips with the nation's collaborationist past.
At dawn on July 16, 1942, French police banged on doors throughout Paris, pulling men, women and children from their homes and rounding them up at the cycling stadium. The families were imprisoned for three days without food or water, then deported to Auschwitz. Only a handful returned.
``France, the nation of light and human rights, land of welcome and asylum, accomplished the irreparable,'' said Chirac. ``Betraying its word, it delivered its dependents to their executioners.''
In a clear warning against today's extreme-right National Front, Chirac also urged vigilance against attempts by some political parties to promote a racist, anti-Semitic ideology.
Noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld hailed Chirac for his
``courage'' and said that the president's words were ``what we had hoped to hear one day.''
Chirac's statements culminated a process that gained pace in 1994 when a court for the first time convicted a French citizen, Paul Touvier, of crimes against humanity. The former pro-Nazi militia chief is serving a life term for ordering the executions of six Jews in June 1944.
Several deportation survivors attended Sunday's ceremony, along with representatives of the Jewish community and the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew who converted to the Roman Catholic faith.
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