The Rainbow Warrior Affair

Raymond A. Jones is a history professor at Carleton University in
Ottawa.

This small volume of just over 200 pages is an unashamedly partisan journalistic account of the Rainbow Warrior affair and will appeal to the committed anti-nuclear activist. The authors have a strong South Pacific background and the best part of their book is the account they give of the impact of both American and French atomic testing on the native peoples of the South Pacific.

The limitations of this sort of enterprise are well known. There are no footnotes and no bibliography and attributions are left unacknowledged so that the committed reader is left to take the authors’ information on trust. What should be a straightforward narrative is unnecessarily complicated by the cheap stylistic trick of interspacing supposed background information in between highlight action passages without regard to continuity. Fortunately the anti-nuclear case is already so strong that it will not suffer unduly from the efforts of these particular investigative journalists.