Cancer strikes three generations of family after French nuclear tests – Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History

Anti-nuclear activist Hinamoeura Morgant Cross as a baby with her mother in 1988.

The six-part podcast series Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History tells how and why French spies bombed a Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland’s harbour 40 years ago. In episode five, hosts John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy travel to Tahiti to meet the people whose horrific ordeal started the whole story.

Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross was 24 years old when she found out she had chronic myeloid leukaemia. Her diagnosis means cancer is in her family across three generations.

“It started with my grandma, who got thyroid cancer in the 90s. And then it was my auntie, her first daughter, who was born in 1965. She was born before the first nuclear tests here. She got thyroid cancer and also a breast cancer. And then my mum and my sister got thyroid disease.”

Cross – who goes by Hina – was born in 1989, more than a decade after French nuclear tests in Polynesia went underground.

She is one of a growing number of French Polynesians suffering from cancer and other illnesses linked to radiation poisoning that they believe has been passed down from generation to generation.

As the podcast describes, it’s Hina’s story – literally the fallout of France’s nuclear ambitions in the Pacific – that led Greenpeace to step up its protest campaign and then France’s fateful decision to blow up the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland on July 10, 1985.

“I really felt that I had poison in my blood, in my genes,” Hina told Noelle McCarthy.

“I was a young mum when I first got diagnosed, and the first diagnosis was very bad – they thought that I had the worst leukaemia.”

Hina’s son was a toddler when she was diagnosed. Initially she thought she had only six months to live.

“The most painful feeling was to think that I didn’t have the time to teach all I wanted to teach to my son. I really thought – how will he do things without his mum? It was the worst, thinking I will not be able to raise my child.”

Hina has since gone on to have another child, but she says she knows many people in French Polynesia who choose not to have children.

“[My husband and I] had a big discussion: are we allowed to have another kid? Is it responsible, now that I know I was poisoned? He also has a lot of radiation-induced cancer in his family: his uncles, his dad. We feel guilty. I think of many other people I know who’ve decided not to have kids and it’s terrible."

Noelle McCarthy (left) with anti-nuclear activist Hinemoeura Morgant-Cross in Tahiti.

Growing up in Tahiti in the 1990s, Hina says she knew nothing about the French nuclear programme, except for the economic benefits.

“I remember my teacher telling us that, thanks to the French nuclear tests, we are a developed country. We have school, we have roads, the airport, access to TV, internet, all the goods in shops and at home. There was one small photo in our schoolbook and that was it.”

But when Hina was diagnosed with cancer, it was her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who made the painful connection between her granddaughter’s life-threatening illness and the legacy of nuclear testing.

“She felt very guilty about my leukaemia – she thought she should have fought more against the nuclear testing in the 1960s, she should have protested more. I had to stop going to see my grandma because every time I visited her, she was crying.”

A legacy of unspoken shame around the testing makes the connection between nuclear fallout and cancer hard to talk about, Hina says. At the beginning, she found it difficult to speak about her own diagnosis openly.

“I was ashamed to say I had leukaemia. It was a hard thing.”

The "Licorne' French nuclear test explosion at Fangataufa Atoll in Mururoa French Polynesia, July 3, 1970. Photo / Alain Nogues/Sygma via Getty Images

Hina’s cancer turned out to be treatable. She takes medicine every day to manage it: on the day we speak, she is marking 12 years of living with leukaemia. Her illness is partly what started her on the path to becoming a politician – today she is a member of Tahiti’s National Assembly, elected on a platform of anti-nuclear activism in 2023. She’s spoken all over the world, including at the United Nations in 2019.

“General de Gaulle came to Tahiti in 1966 and talked to my people about a big development. What development? Miscarriage, handicaps, cancer, leukaemia? I finished my speech by saying that for 30 years, we have been the lab rat, the guinea pig of the French state.”

French nuclear bombs were tested in French Polynesia up until 1996. In June the French parliament recommended the Government apologise and make changes to a much-criticised compensation law. The recommendations have not yet been passed into law.

Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History is a six-episode true crime series. Follow the series on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released on Thursdays.

The series is hosted and produced by John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy of Bird of Paradise Productions in co-production with the New Zealand Herald.

Rainbow Warrior: A Forgotten History is supported by New Zealand on Air.