France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has spent tens of thousands of euros in an effort to counter research revealing that Paris has consistently underestimated the devastating impact of its nuclear tests in French Polynesia in the 1960s and 1970s.
Days before a parliamentary inquiry presents its report on the tests, documents obtained by the investigative outlet Disclose, and seen by Le Monde and the Guardian, suggest the CEA ran a concerted campaign to discredit the revelations.
A 2021 book, Toxique, which focused on just six of the 193 nuclear tests that France carried out from 1966 to 1996 at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, drawing on 2,000 pages of declassified material and dozens of interviews, concluded that they contaminated many more people than France has ever acknowledged.
The latest documents show that a year after the book’s publication, the CEA published 5,000 copies of its own booklet – titled “Nuclear tests in French Polynesia: why, how and with what consequences?” – and distributed them across the islands.
As part of an operation costing more than €90,000, the commission also flew a four-man team by business class to French Polynesia, where they stayed at the Hilton hotel, to meet local dignitaries and give interviews to the media.
The CEA’s booklet, printed on glossy paper, claimed to provide “scientific responses” to the “allegations” contained in Toxique, whose authors it said did not have “the same level of expertise”. It claimed contamination had been limited and that France always behaved transparently and with respect for local inhabitants’ health.
The publication of Toxique – based on the investigation by Disclose, Princeton University’s science and global security programme and Interprt, an environmental justice research collective – caused a furore in France, prompting visits to French Polynesia by a minister and the president, Emmanuel Macron, who acknowledged France’s “debt” to the region.
In one 1974 test alone, the scientific research found, 110,000 people – the population of Tahiti and its nearby islands – could have received a radiation dose high enough to qualify them for compensation if they later developed one of 23 different cancers.
Toxique alleged the CEA has long underestimated the radiation levels involved, significantly limiting the numbers eligible for compensation: by 2023, fewer than half the 2,846 compensation claims submitted had even been judged admissible.
The parliamentary inquiry, which has so far called more than 40 politicians, military personnel, scientists and victims, is due to report before the end of May on the social, economic and environmental impact of the tests – and whether France knowingly concealed the extent of contamination.
The CEA’s military division, CEA/DAM, the inventor of France’s atomic bomb, has repeatedly called this a “false assertion”. But France’s nuclear safety body, the ASNR, has since acknowledged “uncertainties associated with [the CEA’s] calculations” and confirmed to the parliamentary inquiry that it was impossible to prove people received radiation doses lower than the compensation threshold.
The CEA said in a statement that the aim of its booklet “was to provide Polynesians in particular with the elements to understand” the tests and their impact. It said the booklet applied “the necessary scientific rigour” to explain “the health and environmental consequences of the tests” in a “factual and transparent manner”.
Vincenzo Salvetti, a former head of the CEA/DAM and a member of the 2022 mission to French Polynesia, denied the booklet was intended as the CEA’s official version of events or a response to Toxique.
He said previous CEA publications – particularly a 2006 report that the Toxique researchers calculate underestimated the actual radioactive contamination levels of one nuclear test by a factor of three – had been “much too technical”.
Salvetti confirmed, however, that the booklet stated that the health of Polynesia’s inhabitants had been a “constant concern” of the French state and that France had behaved throughout “with a transparency without precedent or international equivalent”.
Nonetheless, the inquiry has heard that the CEA/DAM has so far declassified only 380 documents in the four years since Macron demanded “greater transparency” around the tests and their consequences – compared with 173,000 declassified by the army.
Jérôme Demoment, the director of CEA/DAM, told the parliamentary inquiry earlier this year that it was “highly likely, if we were to have to manage [nuclear tests] today, that the system put in place would respond to a different logic”.
Forty-six of France’s nuclear tests were atmospheric, exposing the local population, site workers and French soldiers who were stationed in Polynesia at the time to high levels of radiation before the testing programme was moved underground in 1974.
Radiation-related thyroid, breast and lung cancers, as well as leukaemia and lymphoma, are prevalent across the islands. For its part, the French army has said up to 2,000 military personnel could have been exposed to enough radiation to cause cancer.
“The notion of a ‘clean bomb’ has generated controversy, which I fully understand,” Demoment told the parliamentary inquiry. “No nuclear test generating radioactive fallout can be considered clean.”
