Sandstorm – The Sahara of Nuclear Tests

Overview

In the late 1950s, the war in northern Algeria was at its peak. Yet, more than a thousand kilometers from the battlefield, a massive project was emerging from the Saharan sands: the atomic bomb. Officers and scientists from the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) were establishing France’s first atomic testing center. On February 13, 1960, at 7:04 a.m., France’s first atomic bomb—codenamed "Gerboise Bleue" (Blue Jerboa) and with a yield of sixty kilotons—was detonated. The town of Reggane lay just forty kilometers from ground zero. Between 1960 and 1966, the French military conducted seventeen tests: four atmospheric explosions near the town of Reggane and thirteen underground tests in the Hoggar region. Half a century later, no epidemiological study has ever been carried out to determine the health and environmental impacts of these tests.