The Argentella scandal: why French officials did not make Corsica a nuclear test site in 1960

ABSTRACT

Top French officials made plans in early 1960 to transform an abandoned silver mine in Corsica, called the Argentella Massif, into an underground site for nuclear explosions. By June 1960, they had canceled these plans. This article shows how a mass movement on the Mediterranean island forced their hand, and it explains why Corsicans of diverse political affiliations took to the streets. The Argentella project—and the health, environmental, and strategic risks that it entailed—looked in Corsica like evidence that Paris saw the islanders as second-class citizens, even residents of an internal colony. French police intelligence, which maintained surveillance on the Corsican anti-nuclear movement, feared that this movement might have drawn inspiration from the contemporaneous struggle for national liberation in Algeria, where French nuclear explosions began. The Argentella protests illustrated national disagreements about French nuclear ambitions that previous scholarship, proposing official consensus, has minimized. They show how, in a nuclear-armed democracy, local officials, political activists, and ordinary citizens can shape nuclear-weapons policy. But Corsican anti-nuclear action in 1960 did not demand disarmament. These protests also illuminate a longer trajectory in French nuclear history, which involved atmospheric explosions in colonized territories in Algeria and Polynesia until the 1970s, despite local and international resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• underground nuclear-weapons testing
• Corsica
• Charles de Gaulle
• French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA)
• anti-nuclear activism
• decision making

French Admiral Marcel Duval, an important participant in French nuclear history and its historiography, once joked about the difficulties of moving the French nuclear-weapons-testing program underground during the early 1960s. The Cold War superpowers, Duval explained, were pushing to outlaw atmospheric nuclear explosions, which French forces began to conduct in February 1960 near the oasis town of Reggane in the Algerian Sahara, then part of France’s colonial empire. Tripartite negotiations, including the United Kingdom alongside the United States and Soviet Union, led to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), which forbade atmospheric blasts. Duval defended French President Charles de Gaulle’s refusal—a matter “of course,” according to the admiral—to join this pact, which the French government had not helped craft. Nevertheless, French forces switched temporarily to underground explosions in 1961, using for this purpose a second Algerian test site carved beneath the Hoggar Massif, near the desert village of In Ekker. French atmospheric testing would resume in Polynesia from 1966 to 1974. The bloody course of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) had caused French officials to worry that they might have to abandon both Saharan sites if—as was starting to look likely—Algeria gained statehood. So Pierre Guillaumat, who served nearly a decade as administrator general of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and defense minister before becoming minister delegate for atomic energy in 1960 and maintaining in this role some of his nuclear-weapons portfolio, looked for a new site. “One of his last missions to this end took place, oh, the horror! in Corsica!” Duval observed. “This was a lack of judgment on my part,” Guillaumat admitted with a smile, according to Duval.¹

Why “a lack of judgment?” Why “the horror?” Political sensitivities made the Mediterranean island a tricky choice. Newly declassified documents reveal that Guillaumat and other French nuclear planners simultaneously considered using Corsica, retrofitting Reggane for underground blasts, and building the Hoggar site.² French military officials had initially rejected Corsica as a possible test site in 1958 “because of risks involving opposition from the population at a time when tourism was beginning to be developed,” as historian Jean-Marc Regnault has explained.³ Guillaumat’s ill-fated journey made these risks a reality. French plans to turn an abandoned silver mine called the Argentella Massif into a nuclear test site brought Corsicans to the streets in protest. Islanders and their elected representatives said the radiation risks made them feel like second-class citizens, France’s poorest relations, even residents of an internal colony. To the contrary, top French officials and technical specialists said that they had selected Corsica mainly for geological reasons and that these environmental factors would virtually eliminate any radiation risks for the population. The French police intelligence service, known as the Direction des Renseignements généraux (RG), maintained surveillance on the Corsican anti-nuclear critics and feared that these disagreements might not resolve quickly or peacefully. Corsican branches of French public media have recently begun recounting this history and drawing French society’s attention to it.⁴ Violent clashes since the consolidation of the Corsican nationalist movement during the 1970s between these forces and French authorities—no longer the ones overseeing the nuclear-weapons program, though—highlight the lasting political resonance of the Argentella scandal.⁵ Yet scholars have hardly studied it.

This gap in the literature matters because the Argentella scandal challenges three pieces of conventional wisdom about French nuclear history. First, Corsica illustrates national disagreements sparked by the French policy—confirmed gradually during the 1950s—to develop nuclear weapons.⁶ Much of the French literature argues that a nationalist consensus in favor of French nuclear weapons consolidated within the political leadership before spreading throughout the public.⁷ Dominique Mongin describes, in his history of the French bomb’s origins, “a convergence of men of very diverse political backgrounds, who quickly understood the necessity of equipping France with a national nuclear arsenal.”⁸ Yet Corsican officials across the political spectrum balked at bearing the costs of this project and began in 1960 to challenge French nuclear ambitions. The Corsican population literally stood behind their representatives, taking to the streets in protest. Closely watching these events, French intelligence analysts wondered if the French nuclear arsenal was worth Corsican outrage. New scholarship helps explain how the Corsican criticism of French nuclear policy was not an outlier in the way that Mongin would have it. At the parliamentary level, Grey Anderson’s careful study of the 1960 defense spending bill shows how Prime Minister Michel Debré, charged by de Gaulle with wrangling lawmakers, managed to fund the bomb project only by overcoming resistance from the left, right, and center.⁹ Another French analyst writing during the 1990s acknowledged that “de Gaulle indeed faced a strong opposition on nuclear issues,” but contended that this sentiment had transformed into a national consensus by the mid-1970s, all without exploring the French nuclear debate during de Gaulle’s presidency.¹⁰ In his recent challenge to this narrative of enduring French consensus supporting the nuclear arsenal, a narrative often propounded by French officials, Benoît Pelopidas stresses the importance of citizen attitudes in nuclear-armed democracies and demonstrates that Corsicans have not been the only ones to doubt the wisdom of French nuclear-weapons testing: in 1966, French opinion polling found that 51 percent of respondents disapproved of conducting these explosions in Polynesia, where they had moved that year; only 34–35 percent approved; and 14–15 percent had no opinion.¹¹ In this way, my work on Corsica contributes to a larger, team-driven effort to re-examine the French case using fresh sources and new methods.¹²

Second, scholarship on the global anti-nuclear movement portrays French activism as slow to emerge, relative to that kind of activism in other nuclear-armed democracies, and mostly limited to France's intellectual elite once this activism did emerge. This narrative minimizes the Argentella scandal and the stakes that Paris saw in it. Although the dean of this literature, Lawrence Wittner, briefly mentions Corsica, he does not situate it in the French national context, including the ways that Corsican anti-nuclear organizers forged links with like-minded citizens on the mainland at the same time as they garnered the attention of top French officials.¹³ The Corsican example remains highly relevant to scholarship and politics in nuclear-armed democracies because the unity of the broad coalition that successfully blocked the test site project contrasted sharply with the better-known history of ideological spats on the French left and class divisions that hobbled anti-nuclear resistance in Paris during the early 1960s.¹⁴ Moreover, a predominantly anglophone literature focused on international challenges to French nuclear ambitions can give the impression that this bomb project faced criticism outside France but not inside the country.¹⁵ French activists—including members of the Sahara Protest Team, which continues to attract scholarly attention—did participate in some of these challenges, but they did not represent, and had minimal support from, nascent anti-nuclear organizations in France.¹⁶ This perception of French nuclear consensus also stems from the lack of attention to the African member states of the French Community, a federated but inequitable reworking of France’s colonial empire whose Paris-friendly leaders mostly backed the French bomb in public but privately raised concerns to French officials about the health and environmental effects in their countries of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing in the Algerian Sahara.¹⁷ Corsican representatives made similar objections on health and environmental grounds to the proposed test site on their island, and French intelligence analysts feared that the Corsican anti-nuclear campaign might draw inspiration from African independence movements and launch one more struggle for national liberation from France. While already feared in 1960, Corsican separatism would not become a political force until the 1970s.

Last, the Argentella scandal helps show the extent to which the French nuclear-weapons program enacted and depended on racializing modes of colonial empire that the 1990s French literature either treated as wholly distinct from the nuclear enterprise or ignored altogether.¹⁸ My point about Corsica builds on recent scholarship that has focused on French nuclear imperialism, including the testing in Algeria and Polynesia.¹⁹ Studying the Argentella scandal helps correct this earlier oversight in two ways.²⁰ First, it shows how the islanders’ charges of marginalization and discrimination contributed to the failure of the nuclear-testing project. Although Corsica had barely started to industrialize and looked to Paris for economic assistance, the island and its inhabitants had long had legal equality with French territories and citizens on the mainland. French officials dreaded comparisons between Corsica and colonized, racialized Algeria, where French nuclear testing had begun. Second, the eventual success of the Corsican resistance marked a boundary that French nuclear explosions, even underground, could not cross; despite wanting a test site closer to the capital, French nuclear planners relocated to distant, exoticized Polynesia after abandoning the Algerian sites. French officials feared that anti-nuclear sentiment might fuel separatist ideas in Corsica, and Paris responded to the Corsican anti-nuclear protesters in a way that prioritized keeping them as part of a French nation being remade by decolonization struggles.²¹

This article uses novel sources to explain why the Corsican protests forced Paris to abandon its plans for the Argentella Massif. In addition to newly declassified records from the French presidency and the CEA, key sources include contemporaneous newspaper accounts from Corsica and southeastern France, which described and photographed the local anti-nuclear campaign. These demonstrations began after a team of French nuclear planners, dubbed “Project Vulcan,” surreptitiously traveled to the island in January 1960 and identified the Argentella Massif as their favored site. A higher-profile visit featuring Guillaumat followed in April 1960, when Corsican officials voiced their reservations, and these resonated among the Corsican public. Police intelligence reports—another crucial historical source—described these analysts’ concerns about left-wing elements and inspiration from the Algerian revolutionaries. Yet Corsicans tended to have more mundane objections: that Paris wanted to install a nuclear test site instead of the nuclear reactors that they hoped could power the island’s economic development. Corsicans worried about radioactive contamination from the proposed test site but discounted similar risks from nuclear energy. French intelligence was mostly correct about the Corsican Communists’ challenge to the Argentella project. A local leader emerged in Dr. Noël Franchini, a physician, peace activist, and Communist representative from Ajaccio, Corsica’s largest city and today the regional capital. Corsican anti-nuclear leadership also reached beyond the political left and incorporated diverse political groups in street protests across the island, a general strike in Ajaccio, and a lecture series on radiation risks by a French physicist and anti-nuclear campaigner. Paris would abandon the Argentella project by June 1960.

Project Vulcan

How did French officials choose Corsica for underground nuclear explosions? Although Guillaumat became one of the public faces of the Argentella scandal, the plans for this test site appeared to originate with the CEA’s nuclear-weapons branch, the Direction des Applications Militaires (DAM), after his formal departure from the agency. The CEA-DAM began, in late December 1959, preparing a secret mission to study possible sites on the island.²² Dubbed “Project Vulcan,” DAM official B. Imbert’s three-man team included a DAM engineer named Drouin and J. Barreau, a geologist in the CEA mining department (Département des Recherches et Exploitations Minières—DREM).²³ Their selection criteria included rock “coverage,” which would determine how large an explosion the site could contain, and the “mechanical effects” on the geological formation.²⁴ They estimated these mechanical effects using information from the first US underground explosions (“Rainier,” 1957; “Logan,” 1958; “Blanca,” 1958), perhaps discussed during French military leaders’ visit to the Nevada Test Site in February 1959.²⁵ To study the actual behavior of any Corsican site, Imbert’s report advised “conducting one or multiple shots using several tons of conventional explosives,” before starting nuclear detonations—at first with a “weak yield (several kilotons).” The upside, according to the report, was that this approach would “offer every guarantee to neighboring civilian populations who will certainly worry about the planned safety precautions.”²⁶ Imbert and his team expected trouble.

Project Vulcan considered five possible sites, but quickly rejected four, for a mix of geographical, hydrological, and financial reasons. Imbert, Drouin, and Barreau secretly toured Corsica by car in 1960 from January 18 to January 24. A French naval officer and French engineering official posted on the island helped facilitate the visit without blowing Project Vulcan’s cover. Imbert’s team nixed the Girolata peninsula on Corsica’s northwest coast and the Sambuco Forest in the southeast because of both sites’ “touristic interest,” because of the former’s “remoteness,” and because the latter’s watercourses emptied into a swamp where potentially radioactive water could stagnate.²⁷ Barreau noted in his own report that he and his colleagues also evaluated the harbor town of Galéria, which had “comparable geological characteristics” to nearby Girolata, but he did not specify why they rejected Galéria.²⁸ Mont Robbia in the Agriates Desert on the island’s northern coast looked viable and accessible, but the Rothschild Bank owned land nearby and had tourism plans for it, according to Imbert’s report. So Mont Robbia became a backup, in case Imbert and his team “did not find anything more interesting.” They discovered “a more favorable site” near the island’s northern coast, however.²⁹

The Argentella Massif, an abandoned silver mine dating to the 1870s, allowed relatively easy access from the nearby towns of Calvi and Bastia but stood in one of Corsica’s “most deserted” (plus désertiques) regions, according to Imbert’s team (see Figure 1). This thin distinction—that the Argentella site had been mostly deserted but was not a vast desert like the Algerian Sahara—became an important justification for French plans. At first, French nuclear planners saw Corsica as ideally situated, conveniently near the French mainland but sparsely populated. Imbert and his team estimated that fewer than 8,000 people lived within 15 kilometers of the Argentella. They figured that the distance from the closest town—Galéria and its harbor, 7.5 kilometers away, with fewer than 700 residents—would allow explosions between 5 and 10 kilotons. They hypothesized that they would be able to increase yields to 15 kilotons, “if we accept some secondary damage in the small communities of Galéria and Manso but nothing in Calvi and Calenzana.” Would French officials, for the sake of their nuclear arsenal, risk destroying and displacing Corsican towns?³⁰

Figure 1. Map of Corsica.

Source: Eric Schwartz.

Alluding to logistical difficulties in the Algerian Sahara, Imbert’s report contended that building a test site “in an inhabited area and a relatively temperate climate … presents a certain number of advantages.”³¹ French officials had exaggerated the sparseness of the population and the harshness of the climate near Reggane to justify their selection of that site.³² For logistics, the Argentella site would allow access to a small port at Crovani and a larger one at Calvi, air service at Calvi and Bastia, and roads to Calvi, Bastia, and eventually Ajaccio that heavy-duty trucks could use. Galéria had modest lodging options—with mail and telephone service, but no gas or running water—and Calvi had tourist hotels open during the summer. The Project Vulcan report proposed using these facilities in Calvi as the forward base (base vie) for the Argentella site. It suggested that economic opportunities “could help convince the population that, for them, the operation would have a positive balance sheet.” Not all Corsicans looked forward to the militarization and nuclearization of their island, as the subsequent protests would show.³³

Project Vulcan recommended “seriously” studying mechanical effects on the Argentella Massif and the likelihood of contaminated water. “Hydrological contamination does not seem to pose serious problems,” the report advised, “if we choose an insoluble rock whose vitrification after the nuclear explosion will retain the majority of the fission products,” meaning that the heat would turn the rock to glass and thus seal in the radioactive isotopes created by the explosion. Still, the report encouraged picking a site “outside useful hydrological networks” and monitoring radioactivity levels in local waterways. An ideal site would be on the coast. Although the streams near the Argentella “flowed quickly into the sea and did not seem to serve any locality on their way,” the CEA planners acknowledged they would need to determine where exactly neighboring communities sourced their drinking water. Project Vulcan recommended “detailed reconnaissance on site” before moving forward.³⁴ Additional CEA documents indicate that Guillaumat took responsibility for this on-site visit.³⁵

In late March 1960, DREM Director Jacques Mabile provided his assessment of the Argentella site. He agreed with the Project Vulcan team that Corsica offered logistical and financial advantages, including a temperate climate and existing infrastructure. Invoking the anti-colonial and anti-racist challenges that France had faced with its Reggane site, he added that Corsica “can also present a political advantage regarding the African countries, but risks, however, bringing about difficulties with the selected region (administrative, psychological, etc., difficulties) that will delay the project’s execution.” Mabile suggested that Paris was trading challenges in foreign policy—namely criticism from decolonizing African states of France’s use of its Algerian colony for nuclear-weapons development—for challenges on the domestic front. He feared drawbacks: that the Corsicans might not “welcome” such a project and that either way, “it would be necessary to find a site elsewhere for larger blasts.”³⁶ Even if the Argentella plan succeeded, it could provide only a temporary solution, and it threatened complications along the way. His last point perhaps alluded to French ambitions to develop a hydrogen bomb.³⁷

Guillaumat and company in Ajaccio

Nearly a dozen French nuclear planners landed at the airport in Ajaccio around noon on April 13, 1960. Guillaumat led this delegation alongside Francis Perrin, the eminent physicist and CEA high commissioner. The other visitors included Mabile, the DREM chief; Imbert, the Project Vulcan head; Jean Renou, the CEA director of external relations; André Gauvenet, one of Perrin’s technical advisers, specializing in radiation protection; two of Guillaumat’s advisers; and a naval engineer. Guillaumat, Perrin, and their entourage met in Ajaccio with Corsican officials. French police intelligence warned that making the Argentella Massif a nuclear test site might prove a “psychological error” on the part of Guillaumat and the rest of de Gaulle’s cabinet. “It comes at a moment,” wrote the French analysts, “when the island population is fighting for legitimate goals [aspirations],” including railroad improvements and a lower cost of living. French intelligence reported that Guillaumat and Perrin’s visit had already “sparked many comments on the patios of Ajaccio’s cafés,” and expected that “a vast protest campaign by most of Corsica’s political, professional, and labor organizations” would soon follow.³⁸

French intelligence was right. Hours after the announcement of Guillaumat and Perrin’s visit, the president of Corsica’s General Council, François Giacobbi, issued a strongly worded press release. French intelligence reported that Giaccobi’s criticism of the Argentella project had popular support:

Beyond tourism considerations and fears of possible contamination, due to radioactivity, some think that the government is making a blunder with respect to Corsica, at the very moment when its population is trying to obtain, from this same government, the necessary means for its economic development.³⁹

Nuclear weapons illuminated Corsica’s fraught relationship with Paris, where policy choices promised to determine whether the island would enjoy economic growth, suffer radioactive contamination, or perhaps both, as later became the case in Polynesia. In both instances, French officials insisted that developing tourism was perfectly compatible with developing nuclear weapons, so long as they took appropriate precautions, as defined unilaterally in Paris.⁴⁰ Yet Corsica had political leverage in the capital that colonized and racialized Polynesia, then a French “overseas territory,” lacked.⁴¹

Corsican officials opposed the test site, citing radiation risks, but said they would have welcomed power reactors. Corsican enthusiasm for nuclear energy illustrated its importance to France’s postwar modernization, as Gabrielle Hecht has described, and to Corsican goals of participating in this process.⁴² Giacobbi voiced this enthusiasm in his response to the French nuclear planners’ visit:

Perrin had obviously given us all assurances, and it is quite evident that, not being technicians, it is difficult for us to claim that these experiments will be dangerous for the population. But the fact remains that science has limits! … If it had only been a matter of installing nuclear industry and nuclear energy, and if this measure had been part of a suite of practical measures aimed at promoting Corsica’s rise, there would have been no reason for our hostility.⁴³

This argument elided the radiation risks posed by nuclear reactors, and made too neat a distinction between “peaceful uses” of nuclear energy and military applications, one deployed globally in Cold War propaganda.⁴⁴ Corsicans had good company in seeing power reactors as a path to economic development. Leaders of decolonizing states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; of poor countries in Southern Europe, such as Greece and Turkey; and of the newly founded International Atomic Energy Agency all put nuclear technology near the top of their developmentalist agendas.⁴⁵

Other Corsican officials joined the criticism, insisting that Paris was imposing its will on the island. Jean Orabona—the mayor of Calvi, a sizable town near the Argentella Massif, and the town's representative to Corsica's General Council—challenged the project. Jacques Faggianelli, the mayor of Bastia and its senator, compared the French government’s plans to conduct nuclear explosions underneath the Argentella to French use of the island as a penal colony during the 19th century. Jean Paul de Rocca-Serra—the mayor of Porto-Vecchio, its senator, and its representative to the General Council—expressed concern about impacts on tourism. After speaking with Guillaumat, Rocca-Serra complained he “had been much more informed than consulted.”⁴⁶

Corsican branches of the French Communist Party (PCF) emerged at the front of the protest campaign. Hecht explains how the Confédération Générale de Travail (CGT), a French labor union closely linked to the PCF, became one of the sharpest critics of French nuclear weapons while still supporting French nuclear energy.⁴⁷ The Communist activist and official Franchini led the island’s charge. Franchini helped produce and distribute a one-page flyer declaring “No to Atomic Death!,” which situated the Argentella project in a Cold War mix of health, economic, and military threats:

The explosion of atomic bombs imperils the life of our populations and destines Corsica to a certain economic death. Experts of all countries agree that we can no longer, without danger to [human] populations, detonate [atomic] or [hydrogen] bombs. The radiation, sent into the air, threatening births (children stillborn, children coming into the world deformed for life), causes leukemia and [other] cancers. The [French] government, which finds itself constrained to abandon the tests at Reggane (located in the middle of the desert), HAS IT DECIDED TO SACRIFICE 150,000 Corsicans? All the more because building this nuclear test site will make our island the first target for rockets in times of war.⁴⁸

Corsican Communists understood nuclear risk as multifaceted. The Argentella project threatened not only radiation exposure and health effects but a doomed tourism industry and a bull's-eye on Soviet maps for nuclear reprisal. In a television interview, the Corsican nationalist Edmond Simeoni—famous for his role leading an armed occupation of a wine depot near the town of Aléria in 1975—recalled that strategic risks heavily outweighed any environmental ones in the island’s anti-nuclear activism: “Corsicans did not want to become a potential target in case of conflict  …  in the middle of the Cold War!”⁴⁹ In opposing the Argentella project, the Communists appeared open to a “common front with all the other political and labor organizations,” but French intelligence also warned that the Communists “won’t miss the opportunity to use the size of this protest as propaganda against the [French] government.” Although it took the Communists two days to make their statement, they “were becoming the most active” participants, French intelligence surmised.⁵⁰

On April 15, the Municipal Council in Calvi held a special session, where Mayor Jean Orabona relayed details of his meeting with Guillaumat and Perrin. Orabona said that he had not known its purpose beforehand. Guillaumat told him that some “compensation” could be available for Calvi: new roads as well as airport and seaport improvements. Guillaumat’s offer reminded Orabona of the “child you promise candy [une friandise] to have him or her eat or take [illegible, probably ‘medicine’].” At the special session, French intelligence reported talk of “radioactive fallout, bombs, the fumbling [tâtonnements] of nuclear science” and “violent remarks,” including a call to arms. One attendee feared that Calvi, in five years, might become a military base, rather than Corsica’s main tourist destination. This concern accurately described CEA plans. But Orabona responded that the Argentella project “was a matter of scientific experiments for peaceful purposes,” a half-truth suggesting that Guillaumat and Perrin may have misled him. French officials did discuss using the Corsican site for nuclear construction and engineering experiments, but they also planned bomb tests. Perhaps confused about French plans, Orabona proposed that Calvi should continue “negotiating the offered compensation in order to extract the maximum benefit” for the city.⁵¹

French intelligence reported that Corsican opposition to the Argentella project was spreading across the island: “The worry, first confined to urban populations, reached the villages when many city-dwellers traveled there for the Easter holidays.” French intelligence feared that some Corsicans in the region between the Fiumboro River and Porto-Vecchio, and in the cities of Calvi and Ajaccio, might consider violence. “Still, in Bastia, the tone is more moderate,” analysts reported, “except in Far Left circles, where some propose taking advantage of this scandal for regular propaganda goals and where some consider creating a fear psychosis among the population in the press and with posters, flyers, speeches, or any other means.”⁵² Even as Corsican criticism grew to include political movements across the spectrum, Communist agitation remained especially worrisome for French intelligence.

From Corsican outrage to a French scandal

The Argentella scandal began to reach beyond Corsica when Gaston Deferre, Marseille’s longtime Socialist mayor, criticized his political rival de Gaulle’s plans for the island. Deferre landed in Ajaccio on April 20, 1960 and, during a reception at the city hall the next day, he declared,

I don’t understand, at the moment when the Island of Beauty [Corsica] is doing everything to develop its tourism industry, at the moment when it is expecting a solution to its economic problems, why the government wants to put a nuclear test site in a region of this département [a French territorial division].

Deferre invoked the concerns about tourism and livelihoods that many Corsican leaders highlighted. He also argued that the Mediterranean island would make an inappropriate replacement for France’s first, arid test site: “As far as I know, Corsica is not in the middle of the Sahara!”⁵³ A former colonial official who had served roughly a year as minister of Overseas France during the mid-1950s, Deferre normalized French use of Algeria’s desert for nuclear-weapons development, overlooking the colonized and contested nature of that territory.

Deferre’s visit to Corsica drew the attention of US officials, who had begun spying on French nuclear-weapons development in Algeria and intended to continue doing so if these explosions moved to the island.⁵⁴ “The Corsicans are especially irritated because they already feel neglected by the central government,” one US diplomat warned, “and they consider that the proposal for atomic tests on the island only adds insult to injury.”⁵⁵ This turn of phrase downplayed any risks to Corsican health and safety from the proposed underground nuclear explosions.

The Corsican criticism reached de Gaulle’s cabinet, including two of the French president’s top advisers on African and other colonial matters, Jacques Foccart and Bernard Tricot. An unsigned memo in April 1960 described the necessary technical and logistical conditions on the island and the reasons for French interest in underground nuclear testing. On this last point, the memo did not equivocate: “It is an absolute contrast with the spectacle of an atmospheric explosion.” For this reason, the memo concluded that Corsica would suffer “very little inconvenience” and promised big upsides, including new income for local businesses and workers. The memo justified French interest in the Corsican site by promising progress not only on nuclear weapons but also on using nuclear explosions to build ports, canals, reservoirs, and oil infrastructure more cheaply and more quickly than by conventional methods.⁵⁶ French officials revealed their US inspiration by referencing nuclear construction and geoengineering experiments in Alaska and New Mexico conducted as part of Project Plowshare.⁵⁷ These projects all fell under the rubric of peaceful nuclear explosions, a prevalent ambition at the time.

The Argentella scandal continued to escalate. On April 23, Jean Augustin Seta, the president of Corsica’s Association of Mayors, filed an official complaint with Prime Minister Debré. Seta highlighted the “protest movement that our population is leading against this new measure, as dangerous for its unpredictable effects on the health of its neighbors [habitants] as on tourism.”⁵⁸ In his response, Debré took the opportunity to “reiterate the assurances given to you by the Delegate Minister [Guillaumat] and the CEA High Commissioner [Perrin].” Debré expressed unshakable confidence in French capabilities to select proper sites for underground nuclear explosions and perform these detonations safely, even though French forces had not yet conducted any:

1.	The experiments that will be done [réalisées] cannot present any danger, neither immediate nor long-term [lointain], neither regular [normal] nor accidental, not for any living being, nor [can they present] dangerous consequences of any sort, notably by harmful contamination of the air or water.
2.	The “Argentella” site was chosen following an examination of the whole of the metropolitan territory. Its geographical configuration, the height and the slope of the massif, the quality of the rock, make it the best location.
3.	I will add that the projected experiments will be solely underground and of very weak yield, [and] that they will take place only between the first of November and the first of April, which is to say, outside the tourist season.59

Debré’s focus on tourist-heavy months overlooked the way that radioactive contamination persists on the scale of years and decades for common fission products and millennia for fissile material such as plutonium. The underground explosions that French forces went on to conduct in independent Algeria beneath the Hoggar site, which included a significant radiological incident and three more containment failures, would expose Debré’s confidence as misplaced.⁶⁰ He concluded his reply by highlighting “the government’s desire to do nothing that might threaten Corisca’s growth at a moment where, at my request, the many relevant ministries are preparing to settle on a definitive plan of action that will allow this French département to enjoy the highest prosperity.”⁶¹ As Guillaumat had earlier, Debré implied that public spending could compensate for what he overconfidently portrayed as little more than an inconvenience. Debré reiterated this “compensatory rhetoric,” as historian Renaud Meltz puts it, during a cabinet meeting in May 1960, where the prime minister insisted that Paris should not address the Corsican criticism directly but instead respond with a policy proposal for economic development.⁶²

In a front-page column in the Journal de la Corse, newspaper editor Fernand Poli deemed Debré’s response insufficient.⁶³ Poli wrote entire paragraphs in capital letters and quipped sarcastically, “What will we do with the benefits (?) that you’re promising us when Corsica has become a desert rock?” Poli compared France’s pro-bomb leadership to Italy’s fascist ruler who had lost the Second World War: “If Mussolini wasted billions in vain for years to detach the Corsicans from France, has M. Guillaumat almost succeeded in a few hours?” Here, Poli invoked the threat of Corsican separatism.⁶⁴

Corsican leaders went on to take their grievances personally to Debré. Corsicans living in Paris met on April 26 and signed an open letter to the prime minister, calling on his government to abandon the Argentella project.⁶⁵ Corsican representatives on the island scheduled a meeting in Paris for May 6.⁶⁶ One Corsican newspaper described “assurances” that Debré provided during this meeting—suggesting he might cancel the project—but another headline declared, “we still cannot know if the government [will] renounce its plans.”⁶⁷ The préfet in Ajaccio, a national official named Bernard Vaugon, recalled Debré saying that “the government has no need to revisit a decision that was never made; the installations considered for the Argentella Massif were one possibility among others [and] remained, like all of those, in the research phase.” The Corsican representatives understood Debré’s statement to mean he was not allowing the project to move forward, according to Vaugon, who would complain about their lack of “discretion” for saying that much publicly.⁶⁸ French intelligence reported that the Corsican delegation left Paris “uncertain and rather disappointed by Debré’s update … [which] should have been more clear-cut and more positive,” but apparently felt more “reassured” by the time they returned to Corsica on May 14.⁶⁹

French nuclear weapons between Corsica and Algeria

The history of the Argentella scandal reveals nuclear dimensions of what a leading scholar of Corsican nationalism, Peter Savigear, has described as “an Algeria closely linked to Corsicans and Corsica.”⁷⁰ Historian Donald Reid takes this insight a step further, asking how Algerian decolonization marked the start of Corsican radicalization against Paris. He observes that many Corsicans who had participated in France’s colonization of North Africa felt like victims during the Algerian War and the settler exodus that followed; that Corsicans took leading positions in the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, the terrorist group that resorted to bombings in a failed attempt to block Algerian independence; and that those Corsicans who left Algeria and resettled on the relatively poor island during the 1960s “came to see themselves not as displaced colons, but as Corsicans fighting … internal colonialism.”⁷¹ French plans to relocate nuclear explosions from the Algerian Sahara to the Argentella Massif contributed to Corsicans’ feeling like second-class citizens, living under Parisian decree. French intelligence watched anxiously as anti-nuclear resistance spread across the island in April and May of 1960, fearing violent separatism in the Algerian mold, but the analysts probably overestimated this threat. Corsicans mostly lobbied Paris to replace the Argentella project with clearer paths toward economic development, including nuclear reactors for electricity production. The Corsican nationalist movement would not consolidate until the 1970s.⁷²

French intelligence surmised that Communists were taking a growing role in Corsican opposition to the Argentella project. Analysts highlighted the “vital importance that the PCF places on the success of this protest movement” and warned that mass opposition to the proposed test site could help the Communists build a “common front.” Economic development and railroad maintenance were not merely a Communist façade, though. Like anti-nuclear resistance, these goals drew advocates of many political stripes.⁷³

A flyer printed by the Provisional Committee, the organization behind the nascent movement against the Argentella plan, described the planned test site as evidence of Corsicans’ second-class citizenship: “Corsica, once again, is treated like a département a world apart. Corsica is treated like a département worth sacrificing.” French intelligence attributed the flyer’s authorship personally to Franchini. Echoing earlier arguments, the flyer suggested that de Gaulle’s nuclear planners had proposed the wrong project: “Certainly, Corsica would have happily welcomed the construction of atomic reactors for the production of energy, electricity, etc. We are not against a new Saclay and a new Marcoule,” referring to French reactors built near Paris and in southern France during the 1950s. The flyer sharply distinguished nuclear weapons from nuclear power: “We are for atomic energy that makes human happiness, but we are against explosions that threaten [human beings’] future and contaminate the earth that they inhabit.”⁷⁴ The reference to Marcoule illuminated two ironies, however. First, the plant’s designers had prioritized plutonium output for French bombs over electricity generation.⁷⁵ Second, Marcoule secretly leaked radioactive effluent into the Rhône river, precisely the sort of nuclear contamination that Corsicans did not want for their island.⁷⁶

Local committees against the Argentella project sprang up in Corsican cities, and Algeria came up during their meetings. In Calvi, nearly 300 people met in a movie theater on April 22, 1960. Sharing the stage with Mayor Orabona, a dentist addressed the crowd. He suggested that de Gaulle’s government was not taking local risks seriously: “Can they guarantee to us, for example, that there will never be earthquakes, even distant ones, which will disrupt the geological arrangement of our soil, and create faults that will let in harmful radiation and stormwater penetration?” He argued that the French decision to begin developing nuclear weapons in a place as remote as the Algerian desert had betrayed these risks: “Either there is a danger and we continue the experiments in the Sahara, or there isn’t any, and we do them at Colombey-les-deux-Églises,” referring to de Gaulle’s home in northeastern France.⁷⁷ The dentist’s comparison between the Algerian Sahara and de Gaulle’s home recalled a famous quip about the Algerian War attributed to the French president, who reportedly joked that the inclusion in cease-fire proposals of French citizenship for Algeria's Muslim majority meant that “his village would no longer be called Colombey-les-deux-Églises, but Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées!”⁷⁸ The dentist’s comparison illustrated how Corsicans imagined their future—and the place of nuclear technologies in it—between Algerian decolonization and mainland France.

French intelligence feared that Corsican resistance to the Argentella project might draw inspiration from the Algerian revolutionaries and others fighting for African decolonization. Analysts worried that the island was “slipping toward extreme ideas,” such as Corsican separatism, shaped by anti-colonial nationalism and demands for independence voiced on the other side of the Mediterranean:

More and more one hears expressed, for a week now, the opinion [sentiment] that the Corsicans would be better off, like the Algerians and the populations in Black Africa, breaking away from France, to benefit like Algeria and our former African possessions from the [French] government’s concern.⁷⁹

French intelligence analysts did not see Corsica as colonized territory, but they worried nonetheless that Africa’s anti-colonial struggles might inspire Corsicans to pursue their own independence. Based on the meeting at the movie theater, analysts concluded that Calvi’s population “seems quite determined” to challenge the Argentella project. Responding to a tip that nuclear equipment was arriving by boat at Calvi, for example, Mayor Orabona suggested that the dockworkers refuse to unload it. If the French military called in reinforcements to handle this cargo, “the population of Calvi, women in front, should go to the port to prevent [the troops] from unloading it,” Orabona proposed. French intelligence saw political danger in the Argentella scandal: “Corsican pride has surfaced … no longer with bitterness … but with anger, outrage.”⁸⁰ Would this pride turn into separatism, or even lead to violent revolution, like it did in Algeria?

The mass movement

In May 1960, the CEA proceeded with its assessment of the Argentella site by sending two technicians to Corsica. They planned two tunnels: one “in the face of the massif” for a blast chamber and another deeper in the mountain for running the operation and collecting data. Meanwhile, Corsican leaders continued to organize against these plans. The Provisional Committee, led by the Communist Franchini, became the Departmental Committee. Local committees, like the one in Calvi, emerged in Ajaccio, Bastia, Golo, and Corte. Leadership covered the political spectrum, from Communists to Socialists and moderates to more conservative Bonapartists. These leaders proposed many tactics: daily protests, a “departmental day of struggle,” a march on the Argentella, a general strike, dockworkers’ refusal to unload nuclear equipment, and public opposition to hosting French nuclear planners on the island. French intelligence saw a “firm resolution to act energetically to prevent atomic experiments in Corsica, even if this would have to result in serious incidents.” French intelligence also described the “autonomist character” of the Corsican anti-nuclear movement, meaning it signaled a desire for greater Corsican autonomy and perhaps even secession from France.⁸¹

Public demonstrations erupted. On April 29, roughly 1,200 people faced pouring rain and took to the streets in Calvi. The crowd, which included schoolchildren, assembled at the port and marched on the town hall. French intelligence remarked that three-quarters of Calvi’s population had joined the protest, noting that the town counted only “1,600 souls.”⁸² In Bastia, the Local Committee planned a march for May 5.⁸³ Once again in the rain, a crowd of 5,000 to 6,000 gathered in front of Bastia’s veterans monument, holding banners that read, “Corsica does not want to die.”⁸⁴

In Ajaccio, the Local Committee and the Departmental Committee organized a general strike and public demonstration (see Figure 2). Flyers called on Ajaccio’s workers, of all professions, to walk off their jobs and fill the streets for two hours.⁸⁵ On May 3, the “totality” of shops, trades, and factories in Ajaccio closed from midmorning to noon, “roughly 95%” of laborers and private-sector employees stopped work, and “important proportions” of public-sector workers also joined the strike, according to French intelligence. By 11 a.m., about 5,000 people had assembled at the Place de Gaulle, where Franchini addressed the crowd and denounced the French president’s plans for nuclear explosions in Corsica. Banners in the Corsican language proclaimed the island’s unity, bridging professional and class divisions. After Franchini’s speech, the crowd of roughly 8,000 headed toward Ajaccio’s préfecture, the building housing the national government’s local representation including the préfet Vaugon. Protesters dispersed at noon “without incident,” but French intelligence warned that “this will not always be the case if the government does not renounce its plans.” The analysts feared violence.⁸⁶

Figure 2. The large banner, unfurled during Ajaccio’s strike and protest on May 3, 1960, reads, “No to atomic explosions.” Another banner reads, “Tourists and not bombs.” “A l’issue de l’entretien avec M. Debré  … ” [Following the conversation with Mr. Debré], Insulaire, May 16, 1960. Used with permission of Nice-Matin.

While street protests unfolded in May 1960, Franchini invited the French physicist, peace campaigner, and left-wing activist Jean-Pierre Vigier to give a series of talks. A specialist in theoretical physics, Vigier had worked closely with the Communist physicist and former CEA director Frédéric Joliot-Curie during the late 1940s. Vigier left the CEA following Joliot-Curie’s public refusal to build the bomb and consequent ouster, and pivoted to academic research under the guidance of physicist Louis de Broglie.⁸⁷ Vigier had ties to nascent anti-nuclear organizations in Paris, including the Fédération Française contre l’Armement Atomique (French Federation against Atomic Weapons), co-founded in 1958 by the physicist Alfred Kastler and the pastor André Trocmé, whose petition against the first French explosions in Algeria Vigier had signed.⁸⁸ In a movie theater in Bastia on May 10, Vigier alluded to his personal history, telling the audience of 700 that the French nuclear program had “peaceful” origins, which he blamed de Gaulle for subverting by developing weapons in the Algerian Sahara.⁸⁹ De Gaulle could have halted France's nuclear-weapons program, but he had not initiated it or chosen the desert test site, as Vigier implied. The decisions to pursue the French bomb and test it in Algeria had preceded de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958; the French president maintained his predecessors’ plans.⁹⁰ Vigier drew audiences of 150 in Calvi on May 11, 80 in Corte on May 12, 650 in Ajaccio on May 13, and 150 in Sartène on May 14.⁹¹

In Ajaccio, Franchini introduced Vigier to another crowd gathered in a movie theater. The physicist explained health and environmental risks that the Argentella project could pose. He described the bodily effects of fission products such as strontium-90 and carbon-14—responsible for “monstrous births,” “deformed children,” and juvenile leukemia—which could presumably leak from the Argentella site.⁹² Vigier also invoked the “suffering” of the Japanese victims and survivors of the Hiroshima bombing as an example of nuclear harm; Corsica faced a similar threat, he said.⁹³ French intelligence reports, which revealed that the police organization was keeping a surveillance file on Vigier, dismissed his claims as “a bit misleading.”⁹⁴

The local press lauded Vigier’s Corsican tour, calling his lectures “brilliant” and “magisterial.”⁹⁵ While on the island, Vigier gave an interview to the journalist Vincent Duriani, who asked the French physicist why their government wanted to switch from atmospheric blasts in Algeria to underground ones in Corsica. Vigier replied that French nuclear planners had to consider not only “the powerful protests from all the peoples of Africa and France but also … that atmospheric explosions pose much too serious dangers for all people, including [those] in the fallout zone.” According to Vigier, Paris saw Corsica as a way, on the one hand, to deflect anti-colonial resistance by halting nuclear activities in Algeria and, on the other, to limit criticism of French nuclear ambitions based on radiation exposure by suspending atmospheric blasts. He admitted that underground explosions presented “less danger” than atmospheric ones, but he warned that the Argentella project might force Corsica to “import drinking water from the [European] continent.” In a turn of phrase that the newspaper borrowed for its headline, Vigier feared that radioactive contamination might make Corsica “the Island of Monsters.”⁹⁶

In late May 1960, Franchini and other critics of the Argentella project remained unsure whether their protests, strikes, and lecture series had convinced French officials to cancel their plans. Franchini and about 20 others met in Ajaccio’s city hall on May 25. Franchini said he believed that the French government “did not intend to abandon the project since the atomic technicians [had] started preliminary work.” The rest of the discussion focused on ways to force these technicians off the island. If the preliminary work continued, the Departmental Committee promised to organize “a vast rally at the Argentella with processions of hundreds of cars,” according to French intelligence. The Ajaccio Committee also issued a statement, after the city-hall meeting, demanding that the CEA technicians halt their work and leave.⁹⁷

The threat of an Argentella drive-in appeared to do the trick. Vaugon, the préfet in Ajaccio, asked Debré and his cabinet in early June 1960 what they could all do to prevent an on-site rally. With regard to the two CEA technicians, Vaugon admitted he was “not informed about [their] mission.” Still, he proposed that “if it does not have undue importance or if it could be paused or suspended without inconvenience, there could be a possibility, by recalling the civil servants in question, of encouraging a return to calm—at least in this domain.” He implied that the Argentella project could eventually resume, even if the technicians departed, but that prospect seemed unlikely.⁹⁸ According to the RG, the CEA recalled the two technicians later that month and asked Vaugon to communicate this information promptly to the Corsican critics.⁹⁹ Vaugon’s early June appeal suggests that Debré could have made the final call to abandon the Argentella site, but it does not exclude the possibility of participation in this decision process by President de Gaulle and his advisers. Who exactly made this decision remains unclear.

The Departmental Committee circulated a flyer proclaiming the CEA technicians’ departure as “a great victory.” The flyer congratulated Corsicans on their “unanimous action,” their “grandiose strikes and protests during the month of May,” and their coming together “without distinction to party or political opinion.” It concluded that the technicians’ departure would spell the end of the Argentella project. Notwithstanding the cross-class coalition of many professions and political parties that had filled Corsica’s streets, French intelligence still treated the flyer as Communist propaganda, likely Franchini’s work.¹⁰⁰ Whatever Communist purposes it served, a Corsican mass movement had blocked the Argentella project. In 1966, CEA-DAM Director of Testing Jean Viard admitted that it was “abandoned for reasons of psychological order,” even if he added that “the allowable yields would be much too low”—a maximum of 10 kilotons—ever to reconsider that site.¹⁰¹

Understanding the scandal

By mid-1960, French officials had abandoned the plans, which they had begun to hatch roughly six months earlier, to make Corsica a nuclear test site. They had sent to the island a secret team to prospect for sites, a high-profile delegation to try to win support from Corsican officials, and two technicians to design tunnels in the Argentella Massif for underground explosions. As soon as these plans became public, the islanders and their representatives challenged them. The nuclear issue became a platform for the activist and official Franchini to build a mass movement, as French intelligence analysts concerned with this prospect anxiously explained in their reports. For all the talk about potential radiological accidents, the Argentella scandal turned on the way Paris flirted with political disaster: armed violence rather than peaceful protests in Corsica, even the prospect of a separatist group led by Communists. It is unlikely that the RG’s surveillance of the Corsican anti-nuclear movement was known to the public at the time, because this fact did not feature in the press accounts. A revelation of that kind would probably have made the scandal even worse. Top French officials had risked that much for very little. Technical experts admitted that the Argentella plan could have created only a stopgap solution for the French nuclear-weapons program, which included goals to build large, strategic weapons that they knew they could not have hoped to test using the abandoned silver mine. When French technical personnel finally left the island, Corsicans saw victory. French nuclear planners felt embarrassed, as Guillaumat would later admit.

The Corsican anti-nuclear action had limits. Although the protesters criticized French nuclear planners for risking Corsica’s radioactive contamination by planning the Argentella test site, these protesters overlooked the possibility of similar contamination from nuclear power plants, which appeared to be a potential solution for the island’s economic woes. Islanders and their representatives repeatedly asked—with disappointment—why Paris had planned a nuclear test site rather than nuclear reactors for Corsica. Moreover, Corsican critics identified vulnerabilities created by French nuclear-weapons development, but they did not demand that Paris cancel this weapons program or that other nuclear-weapon states disarm. Even partnered with the disarmament activist Vigier, Corsican leaders did not make these demands; other organizations that Vigier was involved with in Paris did. Corsican critics did not go so far as to rationalize or defend French nuclear ambitions, but their focus stayed on their island, the consequences of potential explosions on its residents, and ways to prevent any explosions from taking place underneath the Argentella Massif. At the same time, this mobilization stopped short of calls for nationhood or independence.

The failed project in Corsica illuminated how France’s nuclear-weapons program required transformations and continuity in France’s colonial empire during an era of decolonization. French nuclear planners had valued the logistical benefits that they saw in a temperate and nearby location, but Corsican protests pushed them to build new test sites in the Algerian desert and in distant Polynesia. Democratic resistance trumped, in the narrowest framing of this case, French nuclear ambitions. Corsicans did not forge new solidarities with the Algerian and Polynesian communities who similarly faced French nuclear-testing projects during the 1960s but who would be unable to achieve the same success as the Argentella protesters in blocking these projects. Not all people living under French rule, and subject to the choice that French leaders made to develop nuclear weapons, had the same rights, mechanisms, and power to contest that choice or facets of it. The Argentella scandal in 1960 helps explain a much longer trajectory in French nuclear history—one that reached across the African continent and the Pacific Ocean and that stretched several decades into the 1990s. Although French nuclear testing ended at that time, this trajectory continues to matter today as the colonized and racialized groups exposed to this radiation work to learn what risks they have inherited and to secure the compensation now promised to them by the French state.¹⁰² Corsicans nearly became eligible because the Argentella plans, had they come to fruition, would have likely required the same treatment as the Algerian and Polynesian sites under the French laws that established the compensation program beginning in 2010.

Beyond France, these events in Corsica illustrate bargaining and trade-offs involved in nuclear decision making, namely in the making of nuclear peripheries, the remote places that grew to host intense nuclear activity by virtue of their remoteness, including nuclear test sites.¹⁰³ More than 2,000 nuclear test explosions characterized the Cold War arms race, often remembered as “a period of time in which nuclear weapons were not used, but in reality, they were exploding continually,” as historian Bo Jacobs reminds us.¹⁰⁴ Domestic and international pressures to perform these blasts as safe experiments—thus distinguishing them more clearly from a nuclear attack—drove nuclear planners in search of sites they could present as vast, remote, and empty.¹⁰⁵ Most of these sites were constructed in colonized and racialized places inhabited by indigenous peoples. The Argentella scandal helps show how environmental characteristics alone did not determine that nuclear tests should take place “on the desert or a barren island,” as the Franck Report in June 1945 described the possible locations for a US demonstration of the atomic bomb as an alternative to using it in combat.¹⁰⁶ Definitions of these environmental characteristics have shaped the way that scientists and policy makers understand emptiness and where it exists.¹⁰⁷ Corsica did not prove adequately barren, even though French nuclear planners had at first seen it that way. In the French colonial–imperial context—where Algerian and Polynesian protests occurred but could not prevent French use of these territories as nuclear test sites—the Argentella scandal highlights the voices and claims that won the ear of the decision makers and those that did not.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Anne Renucci at the Archives départementales de la Corse-du-Sud in Ajaccio for making available key documents for my research. This article benefited from feedback on an earlier version presented in January 2022 at the “Des essais au désert” conference in Paris organized by Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments on this text substantially improved it. I thank Thomas Fraise, Sarah Miles, Benoît Pelopidas, and John Krige for conversations about this project. An interdisciplinary grant from the graduate-student association and the provost’s office at the University of Pennsylvania made my travel to Corsica possible, and the Fulbright–Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program supported my research in Paris.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Austin R. Cooper

Austin R. Cooper is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His article, “The Tunisian Request: Saharan Fallout, U.S. Assistance, and the Making of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” was published in Cold War History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2022). He holds a PhD in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

1 Admiral Marcel Duval, “Pierre Guillaumat et l’arme atomique” [Pierre Guillaumat and atomic weapons], in Georges-Henri Soutou and Alain Beltran, eds., Pierre Guillaumat: La passion des grands projets industriels [Pierre Guillaumat’s passion for large industrial projects] (Paris: Editions Rive Droite, 1995), pp. 48–49. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this article are by the author.

2 Gen. Ely to Prime Minister (Michel Debré), “Expérimentations nucléaires souterraines” [Underground nuclear experiments], April 12, 1960, No. 1103/CEMGDN/CAB, Archives of the French Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Military Applications (CEA-DAM), via <https://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/>.

3 Jean-Marc Regnault, “France’s Search for Nuclear Test Sites, 1957–1963,” Journal of Military History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (2003), p. 1230.

4 Lionel Luciani, “Affaire de l’Argentella: Quand la France voulait faire de la Corse son laboratoire nucléaire” [The Argentella scandal: when France wanted to make Corsica its nuclear laboratory], France 3 Corse ViaStella, May 29, 2020, <https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/corse/affaire-argentella-quand-france-voulait-faire-corse-son-laboratoire-nucleaire-1835334.html>.

5 Peter Savigear, “Corsica,” in Michael Watson, ed., Contemporary Minority Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 86–99.

6 Maurice Vaïsse, “Le choix atomique de la France (1945–1958)” [France’s atomic choice (1945–1958)], Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire [Twentieth century: a history journal], Vol. 36, No. 1 (1992), pp. 21–30.

7 On other characteristics of this literature, see Benoît Pelopidas and Sébastien Philippe, “Unfit for Purpose: Reassessing the Development and Deployment of French Nuclear Weapons (1956–1974),” Cold War History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2021), pp. 243–60.

8 Dominique Mongin, La bombe atomique française, 1945–1958 [The French atomic bomb, 1945–1958] (Brussels: Bruylant, 1997), p. 456.

9 Grey Anderson, “The Civil War in France, 1958–62,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2016, pp. 365–90.

10 Camille Grand, “A French Nuclear Exception?” Henry L. Stimson Center Occasional Papers, No. 38, January 1998, p. 22.

11 Benoît Pelopidas, Repenser les choix nucléaires [Rethinking nuclear choices] (Paris: Presses de SciencesPo, 2022), p. 234 n. 47.

12 On Polynesia, see Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie [Toxic: an investigation of the French nuclear tests in Polynesia] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2021). See also Anna Konieczna, “Nuclear Twins: French–South African Strategic Cooperation (1964–79),” Cold War History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2021), pp. 283–300; Jayita Sarkar, “From the Dependable to the Demanding Partner: The Renegotiation of French Nuclear Cooperation with India, 1974–80,” Cold War History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2021), pp. 301–18.

13 Lawrence Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 230–35.

14 Vladimir-Claude Fišera, “The New Left in France from the Resistance to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (1943–1968): Interview with Claude Bourdet,” Journal of Area Studies Vol. 2, No. 4 (1981), pp. 22–23.

15 Jean Allman, “Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom: Ghana, 1959–1962,” Souls, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2008), pp. 83–102; Mervyn O’Driscoll, “Explosive Challenge: Diplomatic Triangles, the United Nations, and the Problem of French Nuclear Testing, 1959–1960,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2009), pp. 28–56; Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 45–61.

16 Rob Skinner, “Bombs and Border Crossings: Peace Activist Networks and the Post-colonial State in Africa, 1959–62,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2015), pp. 424–25.

17 Austin R. Cooper, “How to Hide a Nuclear Explosion: French Secrets about Saharan Fallout across Decolonizing Africa,” in Jacob D. Hamblin and Linda M. Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, forthcoming).

18 For a treatment of African anti-nuclear and anti-colonial criticism as little more than anti-French propaganda, see Colette Barbier, “L’Afrique face aux premières expérimentations nucléaires françaises” [Africa facing the first French nuclear experiments], Cahiers du centre d’études d’histoire de la defense [Papers of the Center for Defense History Studies], No. 8 (1998), pp. 109–34; for an example of overlooking these interactions, see Groupe d’Études Français d’Histoire de l’Armement Nucléaire (GREFHAN), Les expérimentations nucléaires françaises [The French nuclear experiments] (Paris: Institut de France, 1992). 

19 Anaïs Maurer and Rebecca H. Hogue, “Introduction: Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2020), pp. 25–43; Roxanne Panchasi, “‘No Hiroshima in Africa’: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara,” History of the Present, Vol 9, No. 1 (2019), pp. 84–112.

20 For an important exception, see work by the anthropologist and activist Bengt Danielsson and Marie-Thérèse Danielsson, also an activist and his wife—for example, Danielsson and Danielsson, Poisoned Reign: French Nuclear Colonialism in the Pacific (Ringwood, Australia: Penguin Books, 1986).

21 This point builds on Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

22 J. Robert, “Réunion du 29 décembre 1959 concernant les explosions nucléaires souterraines” [Meeting on December 29, 1959 regarding underground nuclear explosions], January 4, 1960, 26/K/10.189, CEA-DAM Archives. 

23 On DREM activities and their importance to CEA goals, see Matthew Adamson, “Nuclear Reach: Uranium Prospection and the Global Ambitions of the French Nuclear Programme, 1945–65,” Cold War History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2021), pp. 319–36; Matthew Adamson, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Resource Surveillance, Uranium Diplomacy and Secret French–American Collaboration in 1950s Morocco,” British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2016), pp. 79–105.

24 B. Imbert, “Projet Vulcain: Reconnaissance en Corse” [Project Vulcan: reconnaissance in Corsica], 26/K/1.259, February 1, 1960, pp. 1–3, CEA-DAM Archives.

25 Jean-Damien Pô, Les moyens de la puissance: Les activités militaires du CEA (1945–2000) [The means of power: the CEA’s military activities (1945–2000)] (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), p. 133.

26 Imbert, “Projet Vulcain,” pp. 3–4.

27 Imbert, pp. 4–5.

28 J. Barreau, “Reconnaissance en Corse du 18 au 22 janvier 1960” [Reconnaissance in Corsica from 18 to 22 January 1960,” February 1, 1960, CEA-DAM Archives.

29 Imbert, pp. 5.

30 Imbert, pp. 6–7.

31 Imbert, p. 7.

32 Panchasi, “No Hiroshima in Africa,” pp. 98–99.

33 Imbert, “Projet Vulcain,” pp. 8–11.

34 Imbert, pp. 4, 10–11.

35 Gen. Ely to Premier Ministre (Debré), Ministre Délégué (Guillaumat), Ministre des Armées (Messmer), “Expérimentations nucléaires souterraines” [Underground nuclear experiments], n.d., 26/K/245, CEA-DAM Archives.

36 Exposé de M. Mabile (Directeur, DREM), “Recherche d’un site souterrain, 10e reunion du C.A.M.E.A.” [Search for an underground site, 10th meeting of the Committee on Military Applications of Atomic Energy], March 31, 1960, 26/K/213, CEA-DAM Archives.

37 For one participant’s account, see Pierre Billaud and Venance Journé, “The Real Story Behind the Making of the French Hydrogen Bomb,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2008), pp. 353–72.

38 RG, Direction générale de la Sûreté nationale, Ministère de l'Intérieur, “Voyage en Corse de M. Guillaumat, ministre délégué auprès du premier ministre” [Minister Delegate Guillaumat’s trip to Corsica], April 14, 1960, Protestations contre les expériences nucléaires en Corse, Généralités, 1361W101, Archives départementales de la Corse-du-Sud (ADCS), Ajaccio, France.

39 RG, “Création d’un centre atomique d’expérimentations souterraines en Corse” [Creation of an atomic facility for underground experiments in Corsica], April 14, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

40 For the arguments made about Polynesia, see Daniel Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 153–76.

41 Renaud Meltz, “Construire le CEP” [Building the CEP (Pacific test site)], in Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, eds., Des bombes en Polynésie: Les essais nucléaires français dans le Pacifique [Bombs in Polynesia: the French nuclear tests in the Pacific] (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2022), pp. 91–142.

42 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

43 RG, “Projet de création d’un centre d'expériences nucléaires souterraines en Corse” [Plan for creating a facility for underground nuclear tests in Corsica], April 15, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS (emphasis added).

44 John Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” Osiris, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2006), pp. 161–81.

45 On Tunisia as a case study, see Austin R. Cooper, “The Tunisian Request: Saharan Fallout, U.S. Assistance, and the Making of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Cold War History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2022), pp. 407–36.

46 RG, “Projet de création d’un centre d’expériences nucléaires souterraines en Corse.”

47 Hecht, The Radiance of France, ch. 4.

48 “Non! à la mort atomique” [No to atomic death!], enclosed with RG, “Campagne communiste de protestation contre la création d’un centre d’expériences nucléaires souterraines en Corse” [Communist protest campaign against the creation of a facility for underground nuclear tests in Corsica], April 16, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

49 Lionel Luciani, Marc-Antoine Renucci, Vanessa Culioli, and Sylvie Loigerot, “60 ans de l’Argentella” [60 years since the Argentella], France 3 Corse ViaStella, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koowDWO6DOE>, 2:45–3:30.

50 RG, “Campagne communiste de protestation contre la création d’un centre d’expériences nucléaires souterraines en Corse.”

51 RG, “Installation d’une station expérimentale nucléaire à l’Argentella” [Building an experimental nuclear station at the Argentella], April 16, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS. 

52 RG, “Projet d’installation d’une station expérimentale nucléaire dans le massif de ‘l’Argentella’ près de Calvi,” [Plan to build an experimental nuclear station in the Argentella Massif near Calvi], April 20, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

53 RG, “A/S du projet d’installation d’un Centre nucléaire en Corse” [Regarding the plan to build a nuclear facility in Corsica], April 22, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS. 

54 Jeffrey Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: Norton, 2007), ch. 5.

55 Marseille (Edgar) to State, “Corsicans Protest Planned Nuclear Test Center,” April 25, 1960, no. 116, Folder 2.22a, Nuclear Weapons Tests, 4/1/60–12/1/60, Part 4 of 4, Box 61, Office of the Secretary, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, General Records Relating to Disarmament (1942–62), Records of the US Department of State (Records Group 59), National Archives and Records Administration, Site II, College Park, MD. 

56 “Projet d’implantation d’un centre d’explosions souterraines en Corse” [Plan to build a facility for underground explosions in Corsica], April 14, 1960, enclosed with O. Guichard to de Courcel, Brouillet, Foccart, Maillard, Tricot, Lelong, de Bordas, April 22, 1960, “Explosion souterraine en Corse—1960” [Underground explosion in Corsica—1960], AG/5(1)/2616, Fonds Charles de Gaulle, Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France. 

57 Scott Kirsch, Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 

58 RG, “Campagne de protestation contre le projet de création en Corse d’un centre d’essais nucléaires souterrains” [Protest campaign against the plan to create a facility for underground nuclear tests in Corsica], April 23, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS. 

59 Debré to Seta, April 23, 1960, enclosed with RG, “Projet d’installation d’un Centre d’Expériences nucléaires en Corse” [Plan to build a facility for nuclear tests in Corsica], April 30, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

60 Christian Bataille and Henri Revol, Rapport parlementaire sur les incidences environnementales et sanitaires des essais nucléaires effectuées par la France entre 1960 et 1996 [Parliamentary report on the environmental and health effects of the nuclear tests conducted by France between 1960 and 1996] (Paris: French Parliament, 2001), pp. 34–45, <https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/legislatures/11/pdf/rap-oecst/i3571.pdf>.

61 Debré to Seta, April 23, 1960. 

62 Renaud Meltz, “Pourquoi la Polynésie?” [Why Polynesia?], in Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, eds., Des bombes en Polynésie: Les essais nucléaires français dans le Pacifique [Bombs in Polynesia: the French nuclear tests in the Pacific] (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2022), pp. 59–60. 

63 RG, “Projet d’installation d’un centre d’essais nucléaires en Corse” [Plan to build a facility for nuclear tests in Corsica], May 3, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

64 Fernand Poli, “Non! Monsieur Debré! Il faut que vous entendiez la voix de la raison !” [No! Mr. Debré! You must hear the voice of reason!], Journal de la Corse [Corsica’s newspaper], May 2–3, 1960. 

65 “Les Corses de Paris, qui se réunissent aujourd’hui, ont adressé une lettre ouverte à M. Michel Debré” [The Corsicans living in Paris, who are meeting today, sent an open letter to Mr. Michel Debré], Journal de la Corse, April 26, 1960.

66 RG, “Les parlementaires Corses et le projet d’installation d’un centre d’essais nucléaires a l’Argentella” [The Corsican representatives and the plan to build a facility for nuclear tests at the Argentella], April 30, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

67 “M. Debré, qui a reçu nos parlementaires, leur a donné des assurances engageantes, notamment sur la renonciation du projet atomique de l’Argentella” [Mr. Debré, who met with our representatives, gave them promising assurances, notably on the renunciation of the atomic plan for the Argentella], Le Courrier de la Corse [Corsica’s messenger], May 7, 1960; “A l’issue de l’entretien de M. Debré avec les parlementaires corses, on ne peut encore savoir si le gouvernement renonce à son projet de création d’un centre d’expériences nucléaires” [Following Mr. Debré’s conversation with the Corsican representatives, we still cannot know if the government is renouncing its plan to create a facility for nuclear tests], Insulaire [Islander], May 16, 1960.

68 Le préfet de la Corse (B. Vaugon) to Prime Minister (Debré), “Projet de création en Corse d’un centre souterrain d’expérimentations nucléaires” [Plan to create an underground center for nuclear experiments in Corsica], June 3, 1960, 443W34, ADCS.

69 RG, “Campagne de protestation contre le projet de création en Corse d’un Centre d’expérimentations nucléaires souterraines” [Protest campaign against the plan to create a facility for underground nuclear experiments in Corsica], May 17, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

70 Peter Savigear, “Separatism and Centralism in Corsica,” World Today, Vol. 36, No. 9 (1980), pp. 351–55.

71 Donald Reid, “Colonizer and Colonized in the Corsican Political Imagination,” Radical History Review, No. 90 (2004), pp. 116–22.

72 The sociolinguistic scholarship concurs on the 1970s’ pivotal role in this timeline; see Alexandra Jaffe, Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 126–28; Robert J. Blackwood, The State, the Activists and the Islanders: Language Policy on Corsica (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2008), pp. 58–61.

73 RG, “P.C.F.,” April 23, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

74 “Par tous les moyens, Non aux explosions atomiques” [By any means necessary, no to atomic explosions], enclosed with RG, “Campagne de protestation,” April 25, 1960.

75 Hecht, The Radiance of France, pp. 73–74.

76 Thomas Fraise, “Governing Nuclear Secrecy: A Comparative Study of Nuclear Secrecy Regimes in Liberal Democratic States (1939–1974),” PhD diss., SciencesPo Paris, in progress.

77 RG, “Centre d’expériences nucléaires de l’Argentella” [The Argentella facility for nuclear tests], April 25, 1960, Comité Ajaccio, Comités, 1361W101, ADCS.

78 See Adam Shatz, “Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées,” London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 7 (2015) <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n07/adam-shatz/colombey-les-deux-mosquees>; the original quote comes from Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, Vol. 1 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), ch. 6.

79 RG, “Campagne de protestation contre le projet de création en Corse d’un centre d’expérimentations nucléaires souterraines” [Protest campaign against the plan to create a facility for underground nuclear explosions in Corsica], April 21, 1960, Comité Ajaccio, Comités, 1361W101, ADCS.

80 RG, “Campagne de protestation.”

81 RG, “Centre d’essais nucléaires de l’Argentella” [The Argentella facility for nuclear tests], May 21, 1960, Comité départemental, Comités, 1361W101, ADCS.

82 RG, “Centre d’essais nucléaires de l’Argentella” [The Argentella facility for nuclear tests], April 29, 1960, Calvi, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS. 

83 RG, “Centre d’essais nucléaires de l’Argentella,” [The Argentella facility for nuclear tests], May 5, 1960 and May 3, 1960, Bastia, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

84 RG, “Centre d’essais nucléaires de l’Argentella” [The Argentella facility for nuclear tests], May 6, 1960, Bastia, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

85 RG, “Campagne de protestation contre le projet gouvernemental de création d’un centre d’expérimentations nucléaires souterraines en Corse” [Protest campaign against the government plan to create a facility for underground nuclear experiments in Corsica], April 28, 1960, Ajaccio, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

86 RG, “Opposition de la population de la Corse à l’installation d’un centre d’essais d’explosions nucléaires souterraines dans l'île” [Opposition of the population of Corsica to building a facility for tests of underground nuclear explosions on the island], May 4, 1960, Ajaccio, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

87 Peter Holland, “Jean-Pierre Vigier at Seventy-Five: La Lutte Continue,” Foundations of Physics, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1995), pp. 1–4. 

88 Austin R. Cooper, “Saharan Fallout: French Explosions in Algeria and the Politics of Nuclear Risk during African Decolonization (1960–66),” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2022, pp. 71–83.

89 RG, “Protestation contre les essais nucléaires” [Protest against the nuclear tests], May 12, 1960, Conférences J.-P. Vigier, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

90 Vaïsse, “Le choix atomique de la France”; Mongin, La bombe atomique française.

91 RG, “Protestation contre les essais nucléaires” [Protest against the nuclear tests], May 13, 1960; RG, “Note d’Information” [Informational note], May 15, 1960; both in Conférences J.-P. Vigier, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

92 RG, “Campagne contre la création en Corse d’un centre d'expérimentations nucléaires souterraines” [Campaign against the creation of a facility for underground nuclear experiments in Corsica], May 14, 1960, Conférences J.-P. Vigier, Manifestations, 1361W101, ADCS.

93 On the Japanese experience, see Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

94 RG, “Campagne contre la création en Corse d’un centre d'expérimentations nucléaires,” May 14, 1960.

95 “Sartène, une conférence de M. J.-P. Vigier, sur le danger des expériences atomiques” [Sartène, a lecture by Mr. J.-P. Vigier, on the danger of atomic tests], Nice-Matin, May 16, 1960; “Sartène, le savant J. P. Vigier, du C.N.R.S, expose, dans une conférence, les très graves dangers des expériences atomiques” [Sartène, the expert J.-P. Vigier, of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), reveals in a lecture the very serious dangers of atomic tests], La Marseillaise, May 17, 1960.

96 “Le savant atomiste, J.-P. Vigier: L'Île de Beauté deviendra, au fil des ans, l'île des monstres, si on laisse le gouvernement réaliser son projet” [The atomic expert J.-P. Vigier: the Island of Beauty will become, over the years, the island of monsters, if we let the government carry out its plan], La Marseillaise, May 13, 1960.

97 RG, “Activité du Comité d’Ajaccio contre le projet d’expériences nucléaires souterraines en Corse” [Activity of the Ajaccio Committee against the plan for underground nuclear tests in Corsica], May 27, 1960, Comité Ajaccio, Comités, 1361W101, ADCS.

98 Vaugon to Debré, “Projet de création en Corse d’un centre souterrain d’expérimentations nucléaires.”

99 RG, “Campagne de protestation contre le projet de création en Corse d’un centre d’expérimentations nucléaires” [Protest campaign against the plan to create a facility for nuclear experiments in Corsica], June 13, 1960, Généralités, 1361W101, ADCS.

100 “Une grande victoire” [A great victory], enclosed with RG, “Campagne de protestation contre le projet de création en Corse d’un centre d’expérimentations nucléaires,” June 13, 1960.

101 J. Viard, “Recherche d’un site souterrain” [Search for an underground site], December 16, 1966, 26/KA/1474, CEA-DAM Archives.

102 Sébastien Philippe, Sonya Schoenberger, and Nabil Ahmed, “Radiation Exposures and Compensation of Victims of French Atmospheric Nuclear Tests in Polynesia,” Science & Global Security (September 2022), pp. 1–33.

103 For discussion of a place of this kind that was not a test site, see Kristian H. Nielsen, Henry Nielsen, and Janet Martin-Nielsen, “City under the Ice: The Closed World of Camp Century in Cold War Culture,” Science as Culture, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2014), pp. 443–64.

104 Robert A. Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), p. 5.

105 Susan Lindee, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), ch. 8.

106 J. Franck et al., “A Report to the Secretary of War, June 1945,” Federation of American Scientists, <https://sgp.fas.org/eprint/franck.html>.

107 Renaud Meltz and Alexis Vrignon, “Des essais au désert? Pour une histoire comparée et transnationale des sites des essais nucléaires” [Tests in the desert? Towards a comparative and transnational history of nuclear test sites], January 2022 <https://www.cresat.uha.fr/colloque-nucleaire-2022/>.