SUNDAY STAR-TIMES, JULY 19, 1998

On July 22, 1973, the Royal New Zealand Navy frigate Otago told the world of France's latest nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll.
At dawn, 25 years ago, a mushroom cloud rose over Mururoa Atoll as France set off a nuclear explosion at her South Pacific testing site. In Paris, a Defence Ministry spokesman, maintaining the French government's customary silence on nuclear testing, said: "I know nothing about this subject. I have no comment to make."
But the Royal New Zealand Navy frigate Otago, idling 35km offshore, watched the test and reported it to the world, launching a barrage of international condemnation on France, with China, the only powers still carrying out nuclear tests in the atmosphere.
That was exactly what Prime Minister Norman Kirk intended when he ordered the Otago to cruise on the Mururoa horizon, a "silent accusing witness" of France's action continuating atmospheric tests in the Pacific.
To heighten world attention, Mr Kirk put a cabinet minister on board, Fraser Colman, father of three young daughters and holder of the immigration portfolio.
Jack Marshall, leader of the opposition National Party rejected an invitation to make the protest bipartisan, dubbing it "gunboat diplomacy and a futile and empty gesture."
The Australian government was no more enthusiastic, agreeing "only as a last resort in trying to stop the tests" to commit its support vessel HMAS Supply to the operation. Its participation was critcal, for the Otago could not carry enough fuel to get the 4280km to Mururoa, let along home again.
To ensure maximum publicity, the Navy was directed to accommodate a newspaper journalist (this correspondent), a radio reporter and a televison cameraman. It did this as reluctantly as it adopted the label of "protest vessel", though the crew of 245 volunteers came to revel in their international celebrity status.

Mr Kirk acted after France had rejected an eight-to-six majority vote by the Internation Court of Justice to grant New Zealand and Australia an interim injunction restraining the French from starting a new series of atmospheric test at Mururoa.
Mr Kirk had sent his deputy, Hugh Watt, to Paris on an abortive mission to persuade the French to stop the Pacific tests they started in 1966. Foreign Minister Michel Jobert told Mr Watt that New Zealand would "just have to put up with the tests for a while longer and then everything will be all right between New Zealand and France".
In fact, it was to be 23 years before France's Pacific testing programme finally ended. In the meantime, the Rainbow Warrior had, tragically, gained even more international notoriety that the Otago.
It was never intended that the frigate would try to stop the tests. Unlike private protest sailings, it would not enter French territorial waters, nor position itself downwind of fallout to frustrate explosions.
"What we aim to do," said Mr Kirk, "is to publicise what is happening in this remote part of the world so as to stimulate world opinion and attract wider support for the rights of small nations."
The Otago conducted anti-fallout exercises soon after leaving Devonport on June 28 but seasickness pills were a greater priority as the Pacific defied its name and boredom set in as day followed uneventful day.
The voyage came to life on July 7 when a French miliary aircraft made four low-level swoops over the ship. A French minesweeper then began to tail it and it was repeatedly buzzed by planes.
Paris decleared a no-go zone of 60 nautical miles around Mururoa and news of Mr Kirk's response that the Otago would "not be intimidated" and would exercise its right to sail in international waters raised a tremenous cheer from the crew.
On July 10, the Otago made its first radio contact with the private protest vessel Fri, a US-registered ketch with a crew of 13.

Mr Kirk, concern to maintain the official nature of his protest and worried about the unpredictability of the private protesters who had pledged to try to stop the tests, ordered no contact unless life was at risk.
I was talking to Fri skipper David Moodie on the Otago's radio when a 15-man boarding party took it over.
"This will probably be our last communication," said Mr Moodie. "They are about to take the radio . . ." It then went dead. The story led front pages throughout the world. Seizure of the Fri showed the tests were about to start, whetting the international appetite for future developments.
The Otago radio room was inundated with media calls from around the world which Fraser Colman fielded for hours at a time.
The first test - at about five kilotonnes, one-quarter the strength of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima - finally came at 6am New Zealand time on July 22. I watched from the ship's bridge and reported: "Within a few minutes of the blast the cloud began to form and could be seen clearly on the horizon above Mururoa, rising through a layer of cumulus cloud and billowing out into a perfect mushroom."
My story led the front page of the New York Times and newspapers around the world, prompting widespread protests against France.
Defiantly, the French set off three more atmospheric explosions that year and seven more in 1974, before moving the programme underground.
They conducted 124 underground tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa between 1975 and 1991 when they anounced a moratorium. France resumed testing in 1995, detonating six more before the last and biggest at 120 kilotonnes on January 7 1996.
France recently announced it world formally close its test centres at Mururoa and Fangataufa at the end of the month.
HMNZS Otago, which spent an unprecented 35 days at sea on its protest voyage, went to the scrapyard in 1987.

- DAVID BARBER