“On the Mururoa atoll, there is a bald cow, spiteful and radioactive,” said Russian poet Sergey Satin in one of his poems. And that is all true: Mururoa, an uninhabited atoll in the southern part of the Pacific Ocean, was the place of nuclear tests by the French, which caused protests all over the world. In 1985, Greenpeace planned an expedition to the Mururoa Atoll aboard Rainbow Warrior. On the 10th of July of 1985, the agents of French intelligence service drowned the ship in a New Zealand port. The protest campaign was fated to fail, but instead, there was a tremendous political scandal. Everything ender with the resignation of French minister of defense Charles Hernu. The resonance was so tremendous that no protest campaign could have achieved that.
