Nuclear deterrence drills deepen Franco-British military entanglement amid global arms race and climate crisis risks

The headline ignores the Indigenous resistance to nuclear testing in French Polynesia, where Kanak and Māori communities have long protested the environmental and cultural desecration tied to such exercises. The 1995 Runit Island nuclear waste dump in the Marshall Islands—a legacy of U.S. testing—serves as a precedent for the ongoing colonial violence embedded in nuclear militarism. Indigenous knowledge systems, such as the Māori *whakapapa* (genealogy) tied to land, frame nuclear weapons as a disruption of cosmic balance, a perspective entirely absent from Western strategic narratives.