http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/current/international/stories/nuclear.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
PAPEETE, Tahiti (Reuter) - Greenpeace breached tight security at a French nuclear test site in the South Pacific on Friday and said two of its divers evaded helicopters and commandos to reach the test platform before being arrested.
The environmental group said its divers slipped underneath the platform at the Mururoa atoll test site after a dramatic chase involving Greenpeace activists and the French military in inflatable dinghies.
French commandos had before dawn stormed the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, which had sailed inside the 12-mile exclusion zone around the atoll to protest against France's decision to carry out up to eight nuclear tests from September to May.
Commandos later slipped down ropes from helicopters to board the Rainbow Warrior's sister ship, MV Greenpeace, a Reuters reporter aboard said. French Defense Minister Charles Millon said on television in Paris that the two Greenpeace vessels were being towed away from the area.
An official of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) said France was unlikely to start its controversial nuclear testing program before next week.
A French officer in Tahiti told Reuters the two Greenpeace divers had been arrested and nine inflatable dinghies belonging to Greenpeace had been detained.
Xavier Pastor, a Greenpeace campaigner aboard the MV Greenpeace, said: ``This is only the beginning of the protest... We have said we will do all we can to stop the entire series of tests and this is just the first attempt.''
The drama came on the first day of the September to May French program of seven or eight underground blasts at Mururoa or the neighboring atoll of Fangataufa.