France struggled to relinquish Algeria as a nuclear test site, archives reveal

Top French officials, including French President Charles de Gaulle, sought to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara following the former French colony’s independence in 1962. These plans, described in recently declassified French documents, never came to fruition.

Yet some of these documents create an opportunity to revisit Algeria’s nuclear history in the wake of the sixtieth anniversary of the country’s independence. [Nearly 70 000 readers look to The Conversation France’s newsletter for expert insights into the world’s most pressing issues. Sign up now.] The Ghanaian and Nigerian governments - as the historians Abena Dove Osseo-Asare and Christopher Hill have respectively documented - developed systems to measure French radioactivity in their countries. Other neighbouring states, like Tunisia, turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and eventually to the United States, for similar assistance with fallout monitoring.

In May 1963, the Algerian President Ben Bella grew impatient with the French refusal to cease nuclear activities in Algeria. French unwillingness to relinquish the test sites at that time threatened his domestic authority and his foreign policy, which both hinged on independence from Paris. He asked Jean de Broglie, France’s State Secretary for Algerian Affairs, if French forces could hasten their departure from Reggane since the site remained unused.

Thiry and other top French brass worried about French capabilities to conduct underground tests following the infamous Béryl accident in 1962. Radioactive fallout from the poorly contained shot had contaminated the French state ministers Pierre Messmer and Gaston Palewski, French soldiers, and nearby Algerian communities.

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