Hi Everyone,
With the time now so close, and with the crew dealing with the fine details of last minute preparations, I'll just take a moment to pass on some of our reflections on the coming event.
This campaign is about so much more than the iummeadiate issue of the French government wanting to test eight nuclear bombs. This issue ranges right from the local to the global, and on to the entire question of the direction of human development: our relationships to one another, and our relationship to other forms of life and the world in which we all live. It is also of course an historic campaign for us, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior notwithstanding, and pivotal in helping us express our vision of the future.
On the local issue, we have the immeadiate effects of letting off nuclear explosions on a small island, and on the people - and other life - who live on the surrounding islands. Going to a wider frame, we see that the people of French Polynesia are very much in a majority in their opposition to these tests in there country. This is an issue of Democracy, and the power of a few to dictate their will over the many - particularly galling in the case of a country such as France that projects itsewlf to the world as democratic. Closely associated to this aspect is the pain of all the people in the Pacific - in Australia, Kiribati, and particularly the Marshall Islands - as well as French Polynesia who have suffered from nuclear weapons tests. Many of these people, and there descendants, are today still suffering terribly from tests that took place thirty and forty years ago - usually in obscure places that, even if the western world does look, it does not want to look too closely for fear of the extreme moral contradictions that will be exposed. Nuclear war and international power politics were not a part of these victims lives ( at least not untill the military arrived).
Then globally: if the French resume nuclear testing it seems certain that the USA, UK and Russia will be at it again before the year is out, their protestations of good faith regarding the NPT and a CTBT as meaningless as the French pronouncements. If the genie climbs back out of the bottle that it has been so nearly squeezed back into - inspite of the arrogance of the Chinese - there wont be just the big five nuclear powers by the year 2000. The writing is clearly on the wall in that regard.
So, we find ourselves at an historic opportunity in the course of human development. On the one side, a mass of millions upon millions of people around the world who utterly reject large scale war as a means for socities to resolve their differences; on the other, a tchnologically advanced, yet developmentally paralysed clique of powerful, meglomanic elites for whom he (and I see few shes involved) who weilds the biggest stick gets the biggest slice of cake - even if the cake is destroyed in the fight! At this moment in time humanity has a chance to make serious advances on the questions of the way we relate to one anothere as human beings, and also to other forms of life. A step that I believe the future will show to be as significant as the invention of the wheel.
The focus of all this is a tiny island in the South Pacific, and an old ship with a crew of many nations, swept along by the power of millions. For us on the ship the support we have recieved from around the world is truely extrodinary, yet significant as to the collosal strength of our mission. We all understand the power of what is happening here. The crew is very, very positive about this action, and we hope it will greatly help the huge campaign all the offices have mounted. The crew has worked hard to prepare the ship, and we feel our work will be well rewarded. I am sure it will. All of us, together, are asserting the right to peacefully protest injustice, to fight for a better future, and use the power of that future to change the present.
So, here we go - hang on to your seats folks.....
Alice on board the Rainbow Warrior