[Pages H7252-H7254]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

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

[[Page H 7253]]
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.

[From the Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1995]

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.
____

[From Newsweek, July 24, 1995]

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.

[[Page H 7254]]

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.

____________________