France's nuclear tests in Algeria: A colonial legacy that still radiates 60 years later

France's nuclear tests in Algeria: A colonial legacy that still radiates 60 years later Submitted by Tassa Adidi on Wed, 08/26/2026 - 09:02 As France withholds maps and refuses to help clean radioactive sites from its Sahara nuclear tests, Algeria has begun decontamination efforts on its own An Algerian man looks at a danger sign at the entrance of the nuclear bomb test site of Tena Fila mountain at Ain Ekra, Algeria, on 25 February 2010 (Fayez Nureldine/AFP) Off Mokhtar Benabdelkader, a 30-year-old engineer living in Adrar, about 1,500km from Algiers, remembers the stories his grandfather Mohamed told him as a child about the Blue Jerboa. He was not talking about the small, harmless desert rodent, but about the French atomic bomb named after the animal, which exploded on 13 February 1960 in Reggane, in the heart of the Algerian Sahara. At the time, Algeria was still a French colony, and Paris, with its nuclear ambitions, had chosen the North African country for its first experiments.