Sixty-six years ago, France conducted the “Gerboise Blue” test and entered the exclusive club of countries to develop and test nuclear weapons independently.
Gerboise Bleue was the codename for France’s first nuclear test, marking the country’s entry as the fourth nuclear power in the world, after the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom.
The test was conducted on February 13, 1960, at the Hammoudia site near Reggane, in the Tanezrouft region of the Sahara Desert, which was part of French Algeria at the time.
In fact, the test was conducted while the Algerian War of Independence was still underway.
With about 60-70 kiloton explosion capacity, Gerboise Bleue was more than four times as powerful as Little Boy, the US nuclear bomb unleashed on Hiroshima at the close of World War II.
Following the first test, France tested four bombs above ground in Tanezrouft between 1960 and 1962, and about 13 underground nuclear tests between 1960 and 1967.
Why Did France Develop Nuclear Weapons?
France developed nuclear weapons primarily to achieve strategic independence, restore national prestige, and ensure its security in a world where it believed that it could no longer fully rely on allies, especially the United States.
The program began in the early 1950s under the Fourth Republic but accelerated dramatically under Charles de Gaulle after he returned to power in 1958, leading to France’s Gerboise Bleue in 1960.
A host of factors influenced the French decision to build nuclear weapons in the 1950s, such as World War II and the Fall of France at the time. The rapid defeat in 1940, occupation by Germany, and reliance on the Allies left a deep scar on the psyche of the people and the leadership.
The French leaders believed France must never again depend on foreign powers for its survival, and surmised that nuclear weapons would provide an ultimate guarantee of sovereignty in a deeply divided world.
However, this was not the immediate trigger for the development of nuclear weapons, whose impact had been seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
France, a colonial power, went through a period that is often referred to as the Loss of National Grandeur (prestige). In the mid-1950s, it suffered a humiliating defeat in Indochina in Vietnam, which essentially ended its colonial presence in Southeast Asia.
At the time, some voices within the French establishment suggested that becoming a nuclear-armed state would compensate for imperial decline and reaffirm French stature as a great power.
The French cabinet authorised the development of an atomic bomb in December 1954, following which Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France launched a secret program to develop an atomic bomb.
However, it wasn’t until France suffered further humiliation that the program got its much-needed acceleration.
The most pivotal trigger for France to go nuclear was the Suez Crisis. In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, a joint Anglo-French enterprise that had historically owned and operated the Suez Canal.
Outraged by the move, which was interpreted as an end of British and French influence over the Middle East, France and Britain invaded Egypt to regain control of the Canal after its nationalisation in July 1956.
“In keeping with these plans, Israeli forces attacked across Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956, advancing to within 10 miles of the Suez Canal. Under the pretext of protecting the Canal from the two belligerents, Britain and France landed troops of their own a few days later,” as per the US Office of the Historian.
At the time, the United States, under President Dwight Eisenhower, strongly opposed the action for two reasons: to disassociate the United States from European colonialism and to avoid the possibility that the Soviet Union could intervene in the war, triggering escalation.
The US coerced France and Britain into accepting a ceasefire in November 1956—a move that was seen as abject humiliation.
For France, this demonstrated that it could not act independently in its own interests without US approval and created the impression that the US might not back French priorities. This convinced many French leaders, including de Gaulle, that reliance on American nuclear protection was unreliable.
The Fifth Republic’s formation and Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s election in 1958 gave the movement further impetus to develop an atomic bomb. He said, ”A great state that does not have nuclear weapons, while others do, does not control its own destiny.”
De Gaulle saw nuclear weapons as essential for political influence, respect among nations, and maintaining France’s rank in the international system.
A protocol outlining the responsibilities of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the Defense Ministry in developing and detonating an atomic bomb was signed on November 30, 1956.
These included setting up a test location, building a device, and supplying the plutonium. Yves Rocard, Gen. Charles Ailleret, and Pierre Guillaumat were instrumental in developing the atomic bomb.
All these efforts culminated in the first-ever atomic test, the Gerboise Bleue.
The test’s levitated plutonium core produced a pounding 60-70 kilotons on February 13, 1960, setting a record that remains the largest ever first test. Later, additional testing was conducted, earning France a seat at the nuclear table.
By this time, De Gaulle was criticising NATO as being too US-dominated. He withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966.
The French nuclear doctrine emphasised “strict sufficiency,” meaning having sufficient capability to inflict unacceptable damage on any aggressor, making any attack too costly. It also served as an “existential” deterrent tied to national survival.
The Mirage IV bombers, armed with nuclear gravity bombs, entered service in 1964, and by the late 1960s, the Strategic Air Forces were fully capable, with dozens of aircraft on alert.
Later, in August 1971, the S-2 silo-based missile entered service, followed by the commissioning of the first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine in December 1971.
By the early 1970s, France had all three components operational and capable of strategic deterrence—a nuclear triad had even been achieved. In fact, France became only the third country, after the US and the USSR, to field a complete triad.
It now fields about 290 nuclear warheads, and is still championing the cause of “strategic autonomy” amid a fractured Transatlantic relationship between the European Union and the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron has also proposed providing a nuclear umbrella for Europe.
French Nuclear Testing Had a Devastating Effect
For France, February 13 signifies its entry into a very exclusive club that would change its destiny and its standing within NATO forever. However, for Algerian people, the test represents one of the worst tragedies to have affected them during French colonialism.
The French authorities initially stated that the tests were being conducted in abandoned and desolate locations. However, it was later revealed that thousands of people were living at the locations where France was conducting nuclear tests.
Reports suggest that the local populace was not adequately notified of the tests and their potential impacts, which left a legacy of uncontained radiation that vitrified large swaths of desert with heat and plutonium, and continues to cripple residents.
The French Ministry of Defence claimed that the testing affected 27,000 Algerians, but Algerians like Abdul Kadhim al Aboudi, a professor of nuclear physics, say up to 60,000 people lived near the testing sites.
When the French finally left Algeria, they buried a variety of contaminated items across the two regions: military-grade trucks positioned in the blast radius to serve as barometers of its power, engine parts from aircraft that flew into Gerboise Bleue’s mushroom cloud to collect radiation data, and metal from remote-controlled towers that set off the bombs.
The area’s Saharan winds washed away the sand covering these nuclear waste graves. Southern Algerians started exploiting contaminated objects as resources after France failed to warn them about the dangers of lingering radiation.
It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the devastation in Algeria became known when a citizens’ organisation discovered that both nomads traveling across the Sahara and those living close to the test site frequently suffer from body damage. In addition, several reports indicated that the radioactive plutonium used in the test caused several ailments among people living in South Algeria, including high rates of skin cancer.
France continued to deny responsibility for any harm from their nuclear testing program until 2010, when the French legislature finally passed a law acknowledging harm done by its nuclear testing program and created a compensation program for the affected people.
Later, the National Assembly of France unanimously approved a reform that simplifies the compensation process for individuals exposed to French nuclear tests in Algeria and Polynesia.
The reform replaces the burdensome case-by-case causality test with a presumption of exposure for those who were present in designated test zones and subsequently developed recognised illnesses linked to radiation exposure.
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