|
G
D
C
G
Once, in seas of silver, fishermen would cast their
nets
D
C
D
To take the bounty of the sea: those men are fishing
yet,
G
D
C
G
But now their boats are laden down with goods of
lethal store,
D
C
D
G
And in these peace-times we should fear those
sea-bound men-of-war.
Chorus:
Send the
boats away, my friends, oh send the boats away.
We care not
how we run them out, but send the boats away,
For if we
choose to live in peace then who are they to say?
Let's take a
stand, protect this land, and send the boats away.
Who will want those nuclear hauls when those nets
are raised?
and death comes to our oceans when those seas are
full of waste,
And fishing-boats of fisher-folk lie useless on the
shore,
For bearing down upon them now are those sea-bound
men-of-war.
Chorus
Once I slept easy in my bed, mind free from
Holocaust,
But now it seems our nuclear-free Pacific zones
we've lost,
For now the boats are laden down with goods of
lethal store,
And in these peace-times we should fear those
sea-bound men-of-war.
French Nuclear Testing
In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded an atom bomb
and in 1953 a hydrogen bomb. France felt threatened
with invasion by the Soviet Union, and although all
NATO countries ere protected by American nuclear
bombers, submarines and missiles, French leaders
felt their country should have its own independent
"Force de Frappe."
In 1960 the French exploded an atom bomb in its
colony of Algeria, but since 1945, hundreds of
thousands of Algerians had died fighting for
independence, which they got in 1962, so the 1968
hydrogen bomb tests began on Mururoa Atoll in the
South Pacific, near the French colony of Tahiti.
Starting in the 1960s, huge anti-nuclear protest
marches took place all over New Zealand.
In 1973, using the RNZN Otago and Canterbury, with a
cabinet minister on board, and secretly supported by
the naval intelligence ship Lachlan, New Zealand
officially protested the tests only 35 km from the
exploding bombs.
In 1974 a radioactive cloud from the 41st test took
a different trajectory than planned, and the
inhabitants of Tahiti and the surrounding islands,
home to 110,000 Polynesian people, were subjected to
significant amounts of radioactive fallout.
Consequently, in 1975, the French began underground
tests on an island near Mururoa.
Rainbow Warrior sinking
In 1985, while the Greenpeace protest trawler
Rainbow Warrior was tied up at an Auckland wharf,
three French government frogmen attached magnetic
mines to its hull, and the explosions killed a
Greenpeace crew member. Two other terrorists who had
been directing the frogmen onshore were quickly
arrested, causing a huge international incident and
a public relations disaster for France.
In 1995, after exploding 210 nuclear bombs in the
South Pacific Ocean, irradiating 110,000 Islanders
and causing many to die of cancer, the French
finally stopped their tests.
|
