In 1974, a radioactive cloud from a French nuclear test drifted over Teahupo’o, Tahiti, now the surfing venue for the Paris Games. Villagers still feel the effects.
Fifty years ago this July, as the waters of the South Pacific rushed toward the shores of Teahupo’o in a perfect, powerful curl, as they have always done, another wave visited the tiny hamlet. This time it was an invisible and airborne one: a surge of radiation escaping from a nuclear weapon test conducted by France in this far-flung reach of their republic.
Roniu Tupana Poareu was born in Teahupo’o, her family home fringed by palm trees and hibiscus bushes. She now serves as its mayor and speaks proudly of how its azure wave – a platonic ideal of coiled, frothy propulsion – was selected as the site of the surfing competition in these Summer Olympics, being hosted half a world away in Paris.
But Teahupo’o concealed a secret behind its sunny tourist brochure seascape. Unbeknown to its residents, Teahupo’o recorded, according to declassified French military documents, some of the highest radiation readings on Tahiti, French Polynesia’s most populated island, after a radioactive cloud unexpectedly drifted overhead in July 1974.
Poareu’s siblings, who, like other children then, were particularly vulnerable to the malignant effects of a nuclear fallout, developed the kinds of cancers associated with exposure to radiation. Other relatives were diagnosed, too, and other villagers died. A few years ago, Poareu went house to house in Teahupo’o, a village of 1500, and discovered 60 residents living with the disease. Even as mayor, she had not realised the full toll on her community.
In 2010, after years of refusing to recognise the health consequences of three decades of nuclear testing in French Polynesia, the French Government began a process – bureaucratic and buried in paperwork – of recognising and compensating victims of radiation-linked diseases. One of Poareu’s sisters, who had been diagnosed with several cancers, was among the successful applicants. But no amount of official recognition, Poareu said, could cure her.
“I am happy that we have the Olympic surfing, and I am proud that everyone in the world will know Teahupo’o,” Poareu said. “But sometimes, when I see the suffering of my family, I hate France.”
Development and danger
The twin realities of Teahupo’o, both surfing paradise and cancer hot spot, reveal the complicated legacy of colonialism in French Polynesia, a collection of islands and atolls covering an area roughly the size of Western Europe. As the site of nearly 200 French nuclear tests from 1966 to 1996, French Polynesia developed fast. Before it started detonating nuclear weapons, Paris gifted Tahiti its first airport and modern port.
Polynesians employed by the nuclear industry left their palm-frond homes to live in newly built housing blocks on Tahiti, the largest of the territory’s 120 or so islands. Tourists arrived, too, lured by the coral-edged beaches and tales of a mighty wave at Teahupo’o.
Some families decorated their new apartments with a glowing symbol of Polynesian progress: a framed photograph of a mushroom cloud rising high over a South Pacific atoll.
But with development came danger. This year, French lawmakers opened an inquiry into the harmful effects of the tests conducted on Mururoa and Fangataufa, two atolls on the eastern fringes of French Polynesia. When President Emmanuel Macron of France visited the territory in 2021, he acknowledged that the state owed a “debt” to French Polynesia for the 193 nuclear tests.
“We did it here because we said to ourselves: ‘It’s lost in the middle of the Pacific, it won’t have the same consequences,’” Macron said.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, American nuclear testing devastated atolls in what is now the independent country of the Marshall Islands. The United Kingdom did the same in places under its sway.
“It’s not just us,” said Heinui Le Caill, a representative at the Polynesian assembly. “Justice is needed across the Pacific.”
While government medical researchers have found elevated rates of thyroid cancer in French Polynesia, the local cancer institute, established in 2021, said that overall cancer rates are, in fact, lower than those in metropolitan France, as the mainland is known. Still, many Polynesians contend that the true toll of the weapons testing is undercounted. Because of local taboos, some people die at home without ever going to state health facilities. Until recently, many cancer patients were sent overseas for care, meaning that some of their cases were not added to the disease tally, Polynesian legislators said.
President Moetai Brotherson of French Polynesia said that four of his family members had died of diseases that can be induced by radiation. His grandfather was buried in a coffin lined with lead because of fears that the radioactivity in his body would leach into the soil.
Last fall, Brotherson gave a speech at the United Nations pushing for a formal investigation into the damage caused by the nuclear testing and for a peaceful decolonisation of the territory. The ruling Tavini party, which has called for independence from France, was founded in the late 1970s with a singular mission: to urge a halt to nuclear detonations in French Polynesia, known locally as Mā'ohi Nui.
“From a political standpoint, the issue of the nuclear tests has long been superimposed on the quest for independence,” Brotherson said. “While the tests may have now stopped, people are still dying as a consequence. The French state needs to take responsibility.”
Oscar Temaru, who is the founder of the Tavini party and a former President of French Polynesia, led an effort to file at the International Criminal Court a complaint against France for crimes against humanity.
“We are victims of nuclear colonialism,” Temaru said. “That is why it is urgent for us to get our freedom.”
The champignon cloud
When the uniformed men from metropolitan France first appeared in the 1960s, residents of Mangareva, one of the inhabited islands closest to the nuclear test site at Mururoa, also spelled Moruroa, were thrilled at the prospect of new construction jobs. They were proud that Charles de Gaulle, the war general turned French president, had chosen their part of French Polynesia as the laboratory for one of the 20th century’s most consequential inventions.
Jeanne Puputauki, now 80 and white-haired, remembers the detonation in July 1966 of the very first “champignon,” or “mushroom,” as she put it. Excitement thrummed on the volcanic island, with its coral limestone cathedral. French soldiers and officials descended.
The local population was not given access to a structure adequate enough to protect them from radiation. The winds shifted suddenly, and danger – odourless, soundless and unseen – advanced toward Mangareva. Some of the first to die were the island’s horses, including three belonging to Puputauki’s family, she said.
As the nuclear detonations continued, Mangareva residents said that they were only occasionally directed into bunkers. They drank rainwater and ate vegetables grown in island soil. When the local food seemed to make them sick and lagoon fish went belly up, they resorted to canned alternatives, Puputauki said. The French military personnel stationed nearby enjoyed shipments of fresh food procured from outside Mangareva. They also could shelter in buildings with thick walls.
Throughout, the French Government, which first tested its nuclear devices in colonial Algeria, maintained that the detonations were safe, even as evidence from US testing began to indicate otherwise. Military documents that were declassified in 2013 showed alarming radiation levels on Polynesian islands. In Mangareva, the rainwater radiation more than two months after the July 1966 detonation was 11 million times higher than normal, one secret report showed. French soldiers who had been stationed at a military base on Hao atoll grew sick.
Thyroid disease, which Mangareva residents said had never afflicted the island before the tests, became common. Tears trickling down her cheeks, Puputauki listed family members who had died of the types of cancers that have been linked to radiation: her mother, her father, two sisters, her brother-in-law. Her grandson died of a brain tumour at age 6.
“Now it’s my turn,” Puputauki said. She clutched a string of shells and a crucifix in her hand. A wreath of flowers and ferns sat on her head.
She has been diagnosed with two separate cancers.
“I love my island and it’s my home, so I will stay,” Puputauki said. “But it’s destroyed.”
The healing process was supposed to begin in 2010, when the French Parliament passed a law allowing affected military personnel and civilians to apply for compensation from diseases precipitated by the nuclear fallout. But the specifics, including an initial requirement that applicants prove that their sicknesses had been caused by exposure to radiation, heightened frustrations.
In the first seven years, only 11 victims had their applications approved. After various tweaks to the process, 108 people were given official status in 2023, but that is still just a fraction of those thought to have been affected. Polynesian officials have suggested that about 10,000 people were exposed to high blasts of radiation, but outside researchers say that roughly 110,000 were directly affected, nearly 90% of the population in the 1970s.
Perhaps to signal that the military has nothing to hide, in March, a group of Polynesian politicians was escorted to Mururoa, which is normally off-limits. A military doctor showed radiation readings from the atoll, which were normal. Other officers explained how the nuclear waste – estimated at hundreds of kilograms of plutonium – was safely disposed of in deep wells.
The legislators, however, had many questions. They asked why certain marine life wasn’t tested for radiation. They wondered whether switching from atmospheric tests to underground explosions, which while safer in many ways, had put the nuclear site at threat of partial collapse.
“The French government told us for many years that everything was safe, but it wasn’t,” said Mereana Reid Arbelot, who is the French Polynesian representative at the French National Assembly and a member of the delegation that toured Mururoa. “It’s hard to have trust.”
Memories linger of how France hid its dirty nuclear past. And they reach far beyond French Polynesia. In 1985, the Rainbow Warrior, a boat owned by the environmental group Greenpeace, was in the Pacific to protest nuclear testing when it exploded in a harbor of Auckland, New Zealand, killing one person aboard. It had been headed next for Mururoa, and the French government eventually admitted that its intelligence service had bombed the boat.
Colonial legacy
Last century, a groundswell of independence freed scores of nations from colonialism. Today, fewer than 20 places, almost all small islands controlled by the United States, United Kingdom and France, remain tethered to a larger power.
When the United Nations drew up a list of non-self-governing territories in 1946 – in an attempt to highlight the dangers of the imperialism that had fuelled World War II – French Polynesia was part of the tally. But France soon requested its removal, and the territory did not return to the list until 2013, after lobbying by the pro-independence Tavini party. As recently as last year, a French official said at the UN that French Polynesia had no place on the decolonisation list.
The debate over independence continues. Brotherson, the President of French Polynesia, refers to his land as a “country”, and it has been referred to in French officialdom by the unwieldy designation of “overseas country inside the Republic”. Yet Brotherson also acknowledges the convenience of having a French passport. Unless the indépendantistes, as they are known, can offer judicial, health and education services that approach those of France, he knows that any independence referendum will fail.
Perhaps, Brotherson said, a sovereign French Polynesia could one day negotiate a deal in which Paris would be responsible for the islands’ defence and security but not for other aspects of nationhood. Or perhaps the United States, which maintains such pacts with several Pacific countries, could be a possible partner, he said. If colonialism is an anachronism, Brotherson continued in fluent English, use of the French language might be even more so. Yet because of its territorial holdings in the world’s oceans, France can project its power across the globe.
French Polynesia was once self-sufficient, populated by masterful sailors who navigated their canoes between distant islands. Today, the territory imports 70% of its food. About 70% of the population lives on a single island, Tahiti, as a consequence of rapid urbanisation after the nuclear construction boom.
Many Polynesians, even labourers at the testing sites who have suffered a particularly high incidence of disease, prefer not to talk about the nuclear legacy, said Tamatoa Tepuhiarii, who works for a local group that has helped Polynesian nuclear workers and their families. The workers exulted in how their salaries allowed them to buy exotic imports.
“They used to say that with all the money they earned, they could eat so much butter,” Tepuhiarii said. “But, you know, how much butter can you really eat?”
Many French Polynesians, particularly on the outer islands, know little about the dangers of the tests. The territory is, per capita, one of the largest suppliers of young people to the French military, the same force that built and ran the nuclear test sites at Mururoa and Fangataufa.
“We need to talk about getting compensation for the victims of the nuclear tests,” Tepuhiarii said. “But the most important thing is to decolonize the minds of Indigenous peoples.”
Trouble in paradise
The French researchers had calculated carefully, predicting the interplay of wind, weather and radiation. But on July 17, 1974, the mushroom cloud from France’s final atmospheric nuclear test – before the switch to underground detonations – did not rise as high as scientists had anticipated. Without the winds of a higher altitude, the cloud of radiation barreled directly toward Tahiti, some 1190km away from Mururoa.
What happened next was laid bare in the declassified French military documents. Scientists soon realised where the prevailing winds were forcing the radioactive cloud. It would take nearly two days for the fallout to reach Tahiti, yet residents were not made fully aware of the risks.
When a French commission decided who in Tahiti could apply for compensation over fallout, eligibility was mostly limited to residents who lived on one part of the island, based in part on radiation readings taken across Tahiti that were published in 2006 in a French atomic energy commission report. But an analysis of the declassified paperwork and other radiological data by an investigative consortium including Sébastien Philippe, a research scholar at Princeton University’s Programme on Science and Global Security, showed that the report had significantly minimised the radiation exposure across the island.
Defenders of the 2006 report initially said that the International Atomic Energy Agency had validated its findings. But Polynesian legislators and activists discovered that the international body had validated only the report’s methodology, not the data.
“I’m not a political person, and for a long time I didn’t want to speak out because people assumed that if you talk about the nuclear issue then you must be pro-independence,” said Léna Normand, vice president of Association 193, which helps Polynesians navigate the compensation bureaucracy. “But people need to know what happened and how things are still being covered up.”
Melody Lihault was raised in Tahiti. Her father often flew to the archipelago that includes Mururoa and Fangataufa for his pearl-farming business. In 2002, when she was 14, she was diagnosed with lymphoma and sent to suburban Paris for treatment because there were no adequate facilities back home. Lihault’s parents had the money to come with her, but the other Polynesian children in the pediatric cancer ward – and there were quite a few, particularly from the islands closer to the testing sites, she said – were hospitalised alone. Lihault’s parents tried to comfort them, bringing in tropical flowers and organising a ukulele party in the dark, cold Parisian winter.
In 2016, she was diagnosed again with lymphoma, a separate cancer from her first one, her doctors told her. She has been officially recognised as a victim of the nuclear fallout and is now in remission.
The declassified documents hold further surprises. One map shows that the highest radiation reading recorded on the entire island of Tahiti was in Teahupo’o, the village that is hosting the Olympic surfing event. Yet when a version of that map was published in the 2006 report, the reading from Teahupo’o was omitted.
One day in March, a group of young surfers sat under a shade tree on the beach at Teahupo’o. Powerful waves rolled in. The villagers had heard complaints about how construction for the Olympics had damaged the coral reef and destroyed wetlands needed to absorb the rains that regularly lash the area. But Teahupo’o’s nuclear legacy was something they had never really considered. Still, each young villager started cataloguing family members who had endured cancers. The list grew long.
Several days later, Poareu, the mayor of Teahupo’o, visited her sister at a clinic in Papeete, the French Polynesian capital. The doctor had seen this pattern before many times, he said.
Afterward, Poareu went to a city stadium where local schools were competing in a heiva, a traditional music and dance competition. The children drummed and danced, their costumes festooned with grasses, shells and other tropical bounty. Leis brightened the night. Each troupe told a story, and two acted out the terror, no longer the beauty displayed on living room walls, of mushroom clouds rising above Polynesian atolls. Nuclear weapons are part of local storytelling lore now.
Poareu’s sister died of radiation-induced cancer a couple weeks later.
“All the gold in the world is not enough to compensate us,” Poareu said. “This is paradise, but our paradise is poisoned.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Hannah Beech
Photographs by: Adam Ferguson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES