On the night of July 10, 1985, the Rainbow Warrior, flagship of the environmental organization Greenpeace, lay moored in Auckland Harbor. Suddenly, at midnight, two explosions tore through the ship, sending it to the bottom of the harbor and killing a journalist onboard. Days later, New Zealand police arrested two French intelligence officers, charging them with bombing the vessel. Keep reading to learn more about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the international crisis it sparked.

“Let’s make it a Green Peace.”

Greenpeace is an international network of environmental activists, supported by a nonprofit organization, whose members engage in nonviolent direct action in support of environmental campaigns against activities that they argue cause irreparable environmental harm, including—but not limited to—petrochemical resource extraction, commercial whaling, and nuclear testing. The group originated in 1970, as the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, where they gained fame for shipborne protests against American nuclear weapons tests in Alaska. At their outset, they were a loose and somewhat chaotic coalition of journalists, scientists, hippies, and Quaker activists for peace. This is, in fact, the story of the name “Greenpeace.” One activist is said to have departed a meeting, flashing a peace sign as he went. Another activist responded: “Let’s make it a Green Peace.” The name stuck.

Although a pacifist organization, Greenpeace is hardly a passive organization. It gained a reputation for aggressive direct action in its anti-whaling campaigns in the 1970s. Using small rented boats, they followed suspected whaling vessels, attempting to interfere with whale hunts, and often coming into direct confrontation with commercial whalers.

From the start, Greenpeace’s highly symbolic protests attracted the animus of Cold War era governments, particularly when the organization directed its focus toward nuclear weapons testing. The group’s first attempted action, in 1970, was to sail to the site of an impending American nuclear weapons test, with the goal of causing costly delays to the test, and drawing negative attention from the public. Although the ship was intercepted by the U.S. Navy well before it could reach the test site, the action did succeed in bringing the Cannikin nuclear weapons program into public awareness, arguably contributing to the cessation of tests in Alaska shortly thereafter.

The Rainbow Warrior

The Rainbow Warrior was the pride of the ragtag Greenpeace fleet. Originally commissioned as a fishing trawler, the ship was built in Scotland in 1955. Greenpeace purchased the vessel in 1977 and refurbished it, launching it again in 1978 as the Rainbow Warrior. The ship and its crew established a swashbuckling reputation, and became notorious for disrupting whale hunts and commercial fishing operations on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to the chagrin of the Soviet Union and Western allies alike.

Between 1978 and 1985, the Rainbow Warrior intercepted and disrupted whaling fleets in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, coming into conflict with the Icelandic Coast Guard and Spanish Navy. The latter encounter, in which the Rainbow Warrior twice evaded capture by Spanish gunboats, ultimately led to the resignation of the head admiral of the Spanish Navy. Following the North Atlantic campaign, the Rainbow Warrior was refitted in the United States before sailing to the Pacific, where it campaigned against Japanese-Peruvian whaling fleets, with the ship and its crew being briefly detained by the Peruvian military.

In 1985, the Rainbow Warrior turned its attention to the issue that first brought Greenpeace into being: nuclear weapons testing. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the United States and France conducted numerous nuclear weapons tests in their overseas territories in the Pacific Ocean, as well as in international waters. The environmental impact on island communities in proximity to the test zones was severe. The soil on Rongelap, an atoll in the Marshall Islands downwind from American nuclear tests, was found to contain 430 times the average quantity of plutonium for the Northern Hemisphere. In 1985, the people of Rongelap requested assistance from Greenpeace in evacuating the island. In May 1985, the Rainbow Warrior evacuated the entire 350-person population of Rongelap in what became known as Operation Exodus.

A Bombing in Auckland Harbor

Following Operation Exodus, theRainbow Warrior travelled to New Zealand, to prepare to lead a fleet of protest vessels to protest French nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia. The late 1970s and early 1980s had seen numerous clashes between the French military and protestors, with French naval commandos boarding protest vessels; on one occasion, a French naval vessel deliberately rammed a Greenpeace ship Unbeknownst to the crew of the Rainbow Warrior, agents from the French intelligence service, the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), had infiltrated the Auckland office of Greenpeace and were surveilling the ship as it docked in Auckland Harbor.

At midnight on July 10, 1985, an explosion tore into the Rainbow Warrior, damaging the ship and prompting the crew to evacuate. After a few minutes, Fernando Pereira, a Dutch photojournalist who had been travelling with the crew, returned to the ship to retrieve his equipment. A second, more powerful blast followed, ripping a hole in the hull and sending the Rainbow Warrior to the bottom of Auckland Harbor. Pereira drowned belowdecks.

The New Zealand Police launched an investigation, and immediately suspected the involvement of French intelligence. Two days after the explosions, detectives interviewed two men, posing as Swiss tourists, who turned out to be Captain Dominique Preieur and Commander Alain Mafart of the DGSE. France initially denied involvement. But as evidence mounted, and the international outcry grew, France was forced to admit culpability. In September, the French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted that France had bombed the Rainbow Warrior: “It was agents of the D.G.S.E. that bombed the boat. They acted under orders…The truth is cruel.“

In the meantime, the trial of the two agents continued in New Zealand. In November 1985, the pair pleaded guilty to manslaughter and began serving ten-year prison sentences. This was far from the end of the scandal, however, which by this point had grown into a full-on crisis in international relations between two ostensible allies.

Arbitration in the United Nations

Nuclear testing in the Pacific had fueled tensions between France and New Zealand for decades prior to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, with New Zealand strongly opposed to all military applications of nuclear power. Previous tensions between France and New Zealand over atmospheric nuclear testing in 1975. New Zealand and Greenpeace demanded reparations from France, to be paid to the organization and to the family of Fernando Pereira, as well as a public apology from the French government.

France argued that the two agents were acting under military orders, making their detention in New Zealand unjustified under international law. The French government threated to retaliate against New Zealand by blocking imports of butter from the nation into the European market—at the time, New Zealand’s most profitable trading partner. Diplomacy prevailed over escalation in July 1986, when France and New Zealand agreed to submit to the United Nations for arbitration.

The UN Secretary-General ruled largely in favor of New Zealand and Greenpeace, ordering France to pay reparations and issuing an apology. In return, the two imprisoned French officers were remanded to French military custody, on condition that they remained confined to a remote base in French Polynesia for three years. France violated the agreement two years later, returning both agents to France, and was found liable for an additional $2 million in reparations, bringing the total paid out to New Zealand and Greenpeace to roughly $9 million. Greenpeace used its share of the funds to retrofit and launch a replacement vessel, the Rainbow Warrior II, in 1987.

France continued to conduct nuclear tests in the Pacific up until it signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996. Although nuclear testing has slowed significantly in the 21st century, three nations—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—have conducted tests since the signing of the test ban. All three countries are non-signatories to the treaty. The United States conducted it most recent nuclear test in 1992 at the Nuclear Test site in Nevada. However, the United States (along with Russia and China) signed but never ratified the test ban treaty, meaning there is no legal prohibition on the United States resuming nuclear weapons tests. President Donald Trump has expressed interest in resuming nuclear weapons tests on a number of occasions, although no new policies have been introduced to date.

Environmental Law and Policy in HeinOnline

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