Three months before Bob Hawke joined with Pacific leaders in the Cook Islands to sign a landmark new anti-nuclear treaty, the local newspaper carried an arresting headline. “PACIFIC – A REGION OF ‘PEACE’ – AND BOMBS FOR FRANCE,” thundered the Cook Islands News on Saturday 11 May 1985. The French defence minister had turned up in Noumea to declare the country had no enemies in the Pacific – but the platitudes were greeted with scepticism because just hours earlier France had carried out its 69th nuclear test in French Polynesia. These heightened concerns permeated the region in the months leading...