MEDIA RELEASE
20 September 2017
Today, 20 September 2017, in New York, the UN is inviting all member states to sign the new Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons, adopted by 122 nations on 7 July. The French government is refusing to sign.
Today also, at daybreak in the Bure region of eastern Champagne, where France plans to bury most French radioactive waste, that same government has sent cohorts of gendarmes to search the “House of Resistance” and other places where people are opposing this CIGEO project. Ordinary homes are being searched, possessions seized, people held for questioning. This vast police operation comes in the wake of the demonstration of August 15, which was repressed with injuries to several people, one of them serious.
On the international level, France is stubbornly refusing, like the USA, to abolish nuclear weapons. One might think, hearing President Macron and President Trump speaking at the General assembly, that the elimination of these accursed arms was a matter concerning North Korea alone. Yet really they are outlawed for all states, especially those that possess them and which (like the US, the UK, Russia, China and France) undertook decades ago to eliminate them – that is required by Article VI of the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty), in force since 1970, which they treat as mere tissue paper.
The criminality of the nuclear-armed states is today flagrant. So is their hypocrisy. Especially France, the “Homeland of Human Rights”, which relies for her so-called security on her ability to cause a billion deaths and her threat to annihilate whole populations – exactly the fate that Trump is promising the North Koreans if their leader persists in retaining his weapons, just as France and the other nuclear-armed states are doing.
In this world of crazies, devoted to violence, destined to state terror and private terrorism, and heading for self-destruction, France shows additional obstinacy by keeping her nuclear power-plants and producing vast amounts of radioactive waste which she seeks to bury very deep in the dump at Bure and then forget about.
The nuclear industry, in its two faces, military and civilian, is proving once again that its conception of history and society is repressive, heavily-policed, tyrannical and death-bearing at all levels. The nuclear state threatens our lives and our freedoms.
Let life and fraternity, let reason and democracy prevail. Let’s put an end to nuclear weapons and nuclear power-plants.
ACDN
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More information (in French):
Communiqué Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire"
Reportage sur FR3 Lorraine (1’ 11’’)