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1950-2000
This badge was worn in support of the Nuclear Free Pacific campaign of the early 1970s which protested against French nuclear testing in French Polynesia. A total of 200 nuclear tests were conducted by the French military in the Pacific region between 1966 and 1996.

For a nuclear-free Pacific

c. 1975

Donated by Diana Pittock

Museum of Australian Democracy collection

The donor of this badge, Diana Pittock, writes:

The Nuclear Free Pacific campaign grew from the French nuclear tests [on] Mururoa Atoll. In 1975 the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Group was active throughout the Pacific. The New Zealand Prime Minister sent two frigates in 1973 as one of the ship protests to the islands. Then on 10 July 1985 the French sabotaged the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior which killed … Fernando Pereira.

The badges worn for this campaign in Australia through this period were: the Greenpeace badge ‘You Can’t Sink a Rainbow’; ‘Stop French Testing’; ‘For a Nuclear Free Pacific’; and the picture badge of an island with a palm tree and a nuclear warhead.

There were anti-nuclear rallies in Australia through the 1970s and 1980s, often within the Palm Sunday Rallies.

My concern about nuclear radiation, as from nuclear testing, arose from information such as that from Dr Helen Caldicott in 1983, a paediatrician, and Dr Rosalie Bertell, a scientist, in 1980. [They] maintained there is no safe level of radiation. Should the testing continue, people, the land and ocean would be harmed.