France to pay nuclear testing victims

France has established a $13.5 million fund to compensate people who claimed illness as a result of four decades of nuclear testing in Algeria and French Polynesia. The U.S., Russia and Britain government set up similar programs decades ago, says Robert Alvarez of the Ploughshares-funded Institute for Policy Studies, and France’s delay in doing the same "shows how rigid and paranoid the thinking was." Frank von Hippel of the Princeton University commented, "It takes a long time for these things to percolate” before “the government finally deigns a response."