[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 117 (Wednesday, July 19, 1995)]
[House]
[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.
     

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