A Fancy Price for France’s Pride : Despite protests at home and abroad, Paris plans to carry out nuclear test series

It may have more to do with France’s pride in its self-image as a world power than real security needs, but Paris appears determined to proceed with underground nuclear testing in the South Pacific. It has arrogantly dismissed worldwide protests and--just weeks after the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--plans to conduct up to eight tests under Mururoa Atoll during the next nine months. The tests could start at any time.

The decision has done incalculable damage to French interests, particularly in the South Pacific and Japan. Sales of French wines and other products have plunged in Australia and New Zealand, where widespread protests have condemned the test series. In Australia, French restaurants were vandalized, Air France jets were refused fuel and mail deliveries to the French Embassy in Canberra were disrupted.

In Papeete on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, protesters stormed the airport Friday. The same day, French commandos had the embarrassing duty of boarding a Greenpeace protest ship near Mururoa, 10 years after French secret agents blew up a Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbor, killing a man aboard. Protests have spread to France’s neighbors in Europe, and polls show that even a majority of French citizens disapprove of the tests. More than 2,000 French scientists have urged President Jacques Chirac to reconsider.

Chirac maintains that the tests are needed to let France perfect computer-simulation techniques of weapons testing, which will permit it to renounce further testing and embrace the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty next year. Critics charge--and France stoutly denies--that the blasts could cause radiation leakage by damaging the fragile coral atoll above the underwater mountain in which tests are conducted. Previous tests under the atoll did not result in unusual levels of radioactivity at the surface.

France recently announced that when the tests are concluded it will support a ban on all nuclear tests, no matter how tiny, as part of the test ban treaty. That is good news, and should help break the log jam at the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which has been considering a loophole for testing of low-yield weapons of less than one kiloton.

Some American scientists have argued for certain tests of the early fission stage of nuclear explosions. But a panel convened by the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that such tests are not needed to assure he reliability and safety of existing American nuclear stockpiles. And President Clinton has endorsed the French proposal.

Nothing, therefore, would be more helpful to final acceptance of the nuclear test ban treaty than for the French government to cancel the Mururoa tests.