<
https://theconversation.com/france-struggled-to-relinquish-algeria-as-a-nuclear-test-site-archives-reveal-187712>
"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.
Together with a round-table event including Polynesian civil society and French
officials, the publication prompted French president Emmanuel Macron to order
an unprecedented declassification of French nuclear archives. The importance of
these documents for victims’ rights to compensation, which have been guaranteed
by French law since 2010, raises questions about nuclear secrecy’s
compatibility with democracy.
The recent study
Des Bombes en Polynésie (2022), funded by Polynesia’s
semi-autonomous government and edited by the French historians Renaud Meltz and
Alexis Vrignon, has kept the public’s eyes on the Pacific. Most of the recent
French declassifications also pertain to Polynesia.
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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
