France's First Atomic Bomb Lit Up the Sahara
On February 13, 1960, France detonated its first atomic bomb over the Algerian Sahara, becoming the world's fourth nuclear power and leaving a radioactive legacy still being reckoned with.
Seven minutes past seven on the morning of February 13, 1960, the desert of the Algerian Sahara flashed brighter than the sun.
France had chosen one of the most remote places on earth for its first atomic test: a windswept plain near Reggane, in the Tanezrouft region, some 600 kilometers south of Bechar. A plutonium bomb sat atop a steel tower 100 meters tall. Sixteen kilometers away, in a command post, French engineers and officers waited. Military equipment had been placed at measured distances from the blast to study the effects, and jets circled overhead, ready to sample the radioactive cloud. No journalists were allowed anywhere near the site.
When the device fired, the flash lit the desert for miles. An eyewitness account relayed to the French press described the desert lit up by a vast flash, the shock wave arriving some 45 seconds later, and an enormous ball of bluish fire with an orange-red center that gave way to the familiar mushroom cloud.
The test, codenamed Gerboise Bleue -- French for "blue jerboa," the desert rodent -- was a complete success from the engineers' point of view. The bomb yielded 70 kilotons, the full power the French Army had designed for. That made it by far the largest first atomic test in history: bigger than America's Trinity (20 kilotons), the Soviet RDS-1 (22 kilotons), and Britain's Hurricane (25 kilotons) -- bigger, in fact, than all three of those first bombs combined.
With a single flash, France became the world's fourth nuclear power, after the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom. President Charles de Gaulle exulted: "Hurray for France! Since this morning, she is stronger and prouder."
The timing was no accident. France was fighting a brutal war in Algeria, and de Gaulle believed an independent nuclear deterrent would restore France's standing as a great power after the humiliation of 1940. General Pierre Marie Gallois, the strategist who championed the program, earned the nickname "father of the A-bomb." The codename itself nodded to the French tricolor: blue for the first test, white and red for the two that followed later that year -- Gerboise Blanche in April and Gerboise Rouge in December.
But the Sahara was not empty. The tests took place on land France ruled as a colony, during a war for Algerian independence. Radioactive fallout from Gerboise Bleue drifted across West Africa, reaching Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Sudan. Ghana froze French assets in protest; Morocco withdrew its ambassador. France's own 1960 atomic energy report recorded a contaminated zone some 150 kilometers long. Decades later, Algerians and French veterans exposed to the tests sought recognition and compensation, and in 2009 France passed a law offering compensation to victims of its nuclear tests.
France went on to conduct three more atmospheric tests in the Sahara before moving its program underground. The last of them, Gerboise Verte, was detonated hastily in April 1961, just after a revolt by generals in Algiers -- rushed, in part, to keep the device out of the putschists' hands.
Today the Reggane tests sit at a complicated crossroads of history: a scientific and strategic triumph for France, achieved on colonized land in the middle of a war of independence, with consequences that outlived the mushroom cloud by generations. The blue jerboa's shadow still falls across the Sahara.
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