They want to attract the attention of the media and provoke a strong enough shift in public opinion to make the French government suspend its decision to build a new nuclear reactor, the EPR. To build it would drag France even deeper in the crazy nuclear adventure. In the field of energy, the hunger-strikers are asking that the research moneys, of which 90% are now consumed by the nuclear industry, be reoriented into the development of renewable energy, energy savings, and ways to end nuclear dangers and nuclear pollution. More than forty support committees have been formed already in France.

Action of Citizens for Nuclear Disarmament (ACDN) held a General Meeting on 12 June in Saintes and decided to support this collective action.

André Larivière was in Saintes a month earlier, during the anti-nuclear "Tour de France" which he organised on the national level.

André Larivière

André Larivière in Saintes (May 12, 2004)

Back in the 1980s he did two long fasts to protest against the arms race. ACDN shares his nonviolent struggle in these two matters. In fact, military and civil nuclearism are linked "like hand and glove", with the civilian glove concealing the military fist. The CEA (the Atomic Energy Commissariat) which has governed both sectors since the start, knows that better than anyone. And France is not content with disseminating nuclear materials and technologies,; she also continues to modernise her arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, those that she undertook to eliminate in May 2000 (article VI of the Non-Prolifération Treaty). France must now dismantle them, and renounce both military and civil nuclear technologies, before these lead to catastrophe.

The French people have never been consulted on these two vital subjects. It is a democratic scandal. We call on our fellow-citizens to lobby their elected representatives and otherwise give active support to the action "To live nuclear-free".