How France Secretly Poisoned the Algerian Sahara

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime secretly detonated four atmospheric and 13 underground nuclear bombs and conducted tests of nuclear technologies in the Algerian Sahara. This secret atomic programme spread radioactive fallout and caused irreversible contamination across Algeria, the Sahara, Africa and elsewhere.

On 13 February 1960, the French colonial and military authorities detonated the first of 17 atomic bombs in the Algerian Sahara. The site of the inaugural nuclear bomb was Reggane—a district with a town, villages and an oasis—located in the Tanezrouft Plain of the colonized desert, approximately 1,000 kilometres south of Algiers. France had thus entered an exclusive nuclear weapons club, becoming the fourth country in the world to possess arms of mass destruction, after the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom. This exclusivity was seemingly unaffected by the destruction of human, animal and vegetal lives, nor by the toxification of the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of natural, living and built environments that these bombs caused over the following decades in Algeria and elsewhere.

Between February 1960 (about five years after the outbreak of the Algerian Revolution and four years after the first exploitation of Algerian oil) and February 1966 (around four years after Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule), the colonial and military authorities exploded four atmospheric and 13 underground nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara. They also conducted tests of other nuclear technologies and weapons there, spreading radioactive fallout and causing irreversible contamination across Algeria, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including southern Europe).

This year marks 65 years since the detonation of France’s first bomb in the Sahara and 80 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs in Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively, within which Congolese-sourced uranium was critical. But up until this day, the significance of North, West and Central Africa in global nuclear politics is often overlooked—and the facts and deeds of France’s nuclear weapons programme in the Algerian Sahara remain a military secret. Most French institutional archives that document the production, detonation and consequences of these weapons of mass destruction are classified and inaccessible to the public. This imposed amnesia not only encumbers the writing of France’s atomic histories in the Algerian Sahara, but also prevents victims, veterans and civil groups from claiming the socio-economic, psychological, spatial and health compensations and recognitions that should be accorded to them according to protocols of international law...