Nuclear France’s Empire of the Bomb

In February 1960, France became the fourth nation after the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom to become a nuclear power. They did this by detonating a 70- kiloton atomic bomb at Reggane in the Sahara Desert. Code-named Gerboise Bleue, this was the first of four atmospheric tests done in the midst of the Algerian War—in territory that became part of an independent Algeria in 1962.

French history has typically segregated the war in Algeria from the simultaneous nuclear tests in Algeria.