Wednesday, October 11, 1995


   RENNES, France (Reuter) -- The French daily Ouest-France carried a
photograph Wednesday of a huge crack in coral at France's Mururoa atoll
nuclear weapons testing site that it said had been taken by a diver.
   The picture of a fissure, 10 feet wide, which the paper said snaked
for several miles, seemed certain to fuel a debate over the safety of
the underground blasts at Mururoa in the South Pacific and the nearby
atoll of Fangataufa.
   Ouest-France quoted experts as saying the cracks were due to blasts
carried out under the coral rim of the atolls that were discontinued in
1986.  All tests since then have been carried out in rock deep beneath
the lagoons.
   The regional daily stressed that the cracks, photographed by a diver,
were located in the coral and not in the volcanic basalt where the
nuclear devices are exploded deep below sea level and their radioactive
debris trapped.
   It said parts of the fissures could be seen at low tide.
   The government last week accused the country's leading newspaper, Le
Monde, of lying and threatened court action after it published a map of
alleged cracks in the rock under Mururoa.
   Foreign Minister Herve de Charette told parliament:  "Never have any
cracks of any kind been spotted."
   Le Monde stood by its story, carried amid global outrage over
President Jacques Chirac's decision to resume tests, that the cracks
could be torn open by future explosions.
   France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has admitted that there are
cracks in the coral, but insists that they pose no threat and that there
are none in the basalt below.
   Ouest-France agreed that there was no risk of radioactivity leaking
out through the cracks in the coral.
   "The real, if not the only threat these fissures present is that of a
landslide which could be triggered by a tidal wave," it said.