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. If they had, they would have violated a request made several times by the first Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella and his cabinet not to conduct atmospheric nuclear testing in their country – a call he notably extended to the rest of the world.
The publication in 2021 of Toxique, the French-language study of French nuclear testing in Polynesia by the physicist Sébastien Philippe and the investigative journalist Tomas Statius, recently highlighted the health and environmental risks taken for the sake of the French nuclear arsenal. Their analysis revealed much greater radioactive contamination in French Polynesia than Paris had admitted, with French forces conducting nearly two hundred nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and underground between 1966 and 1996.
