How France Secretly Poisoned the Algerian Sahara

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).