Lamb, butter and atom. When France invites European affairs into the Pacific nuclear debate

Opposition to nuclear tests developed in Australia and New Zealand even before the establishment of the French Experimental Centre in Polynesia. At first, France paid little attention to the protests emanating from the Pacific States and Territories, but the protests gained in strength and were not very sensitive to the very defensive argument by which Paris asserted the harmlessness of its atomic tests. At the turn of the 1970s, France tried to use the United Kingdom’s entry into the European Economic Community as an economic lever to force New Zealand to moderate its opposition. This episode illustrates the importance of nuclear power in political debates in France and in New Zealand and raises the question of how to overcome it, whether through diplomacy or economics.