France’s Colonial Legacy: Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Algerian Sahara
Can the Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) region be considered safe from nuclear weapons, twenty-five years after the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT)?
My name is Dhikra Aouatef Benmansour (she/her). I live in Algeria and I’m Amazigh Chaouie, which means I live in the Aurès where there are montagnes and Roman ruins full of history, where Tacfarinas the Numidian soldier was born and where the rebellion queen Dihya fought. Our people wear traditional outfits and speak unique languages. I spent my childhood in Tamanrasset, in the south of the country, where a large population of Tuareg people, the Indigenous people of the land, live. This exposed me to their culture and how they live, and has inspired me to talk and write about them. They are attached to their land and traditions and witnessing them being the targets of France’s colonial legacy is the source of my rage.
The statement from the Algerian Archive Foundation condemned the harmful effects of the tests that were conducted in Algeria from 1960 to 1966.
Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule in 1962. Despite this, the French colonial empire conducted 17 nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara and due to the Evian Accords, they continued their activities until 1966. A clause in the Evian Accords, signed on March 18th, 1962, granted France the right to maintain its nuclear testing facilities until 1967. Still, the program moved to the Pacific atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa in 1966 (Jarvis, 2022). Though France claimed that these tests were conducted in isolated and distant places, they were carried out in two regions near the towns of Ekker and Reggane. These sites were populated by thousands of local Tuareg people and nomads who had received no information about the nuclear tests, not to mention the animal and plant species that inhabited the area.
The French nuclear tests were anything but safe, clean, or contained; archival documents revealed that insufficient precautions were taken (Hennaoui & Nurzhan, 2023) to protect the local people, French personnel and Algerian manual laborers (Hassan et al., 2022). Gerboise Bleue was the name of the first French nuclear bomb test, which was four times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and three times stronger than the first tests conducted by the U.S. or the U.K. (Panchasi, 2022).
These tests led to the death of the Tuareg people. They continue to suffer today from congenital anomalies and cancer following exposure to indelible radiation (Centre de documentation et de recherche sur la paix et les conflits, 2002). This radiation also polluted the environment and facilitated the collapse of animal and vegetal species (Mollard, 2022).
Even five years after independence, tests were conducted underground, in the atmosphere, and even underwater, resulting in fallout that spread across Africa. Radioactive dust from these tests still emanates from the Sahara today. As Yale Professor Jill Javris (2022) notes, the impact of radiation from nuclear testing on communities in North Africa continues today.
“Radioactive dust still emanates from the Sahara, from those nuclear bombs, whose effects are absolutely indelible. In this sense, even the sand itself has been occupied by colonial occupation.”
The story doesn’t end here. After finishing the tests in 1966 in the Algerian Sahara, the French colonial empire discarded the testing materials and polluted equipment by burying them in the sand (Collin & Bouveret 2020). The exact sites of those waste burial materials are currently unknown which means the local Tuareg people and the environment are in danger. The French government is aware of the human and environmental consequences of these tests but has refused to provide information regarding topographic maps of the sites (Collin & Bouveret, 2020). Algeria is still waiting for these maps, without which decontamination is impossible (Moreno, 2022).
After all these years, France continues to evade responsibility. It refuses to provide the location of polluted sites, which could be used to identify testing sites so measures could be taken to protect the environment and local people from illnesses.
References
Hassun, J. M., Zanatta-Kline, M. J., Kawaguchi, M., Hendricks, M. B. D., Zahner, O., Bustos-Ortiz, R., Rasaretnam, R., Park, S., Saleh, T. A., & Ahmed, Z. H. (2022). Loom of the Future: Nuclear Decolonization and UW. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/51509
Collin, J.-M., & Bouveret, P. (2020). The Waste From French Nuclear Tests in Algeria—Radioactivity Under the Sand Analysis with regard to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (p. 168).
Mollard, M. (2022, June 23). Nuclear powers: France’s atomic bomb tests in the Algerian Sahara. The Architectural Review. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/nuclear-powers-frances-atomic-bomb-tests-in-the-algerian-sahara
Jarvis, J. (2022). Radiant Matter: Technologies of Light and the Long Shadow of French Nuclear Imperialism in the Algerian Sahara. Representations, 160(1), 54–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2022.160.3.54
Hennaoui, L., & Nurzhan, M. (2023). Dealing with a Nuclear Past: Revisiting the Cases of Algeria and Kazakhstan through a Decolonial Lens. The International Spectator, 58, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2023.2234817
Moreno, A. (2022, September 2). France’s Nuclear Test From Half A Century Ago Had Some Devastating Lasting Effects. Grunge. https://www.grunge.com/992157/frances-nuclear-test-from-half-a-century-ago-had-some-devastating-lasting-effects/
Panchasi, R. (2022). An Atomic “Adventure” in Empire: Algeria, April 1961. Retrieved from https://www.jadaliyya.com/
