Atomic Deserts

A Survey of the World's Radioactive No-Go Zones

By Michail Hengstenberg, Gesche Sager and Philine Gebhardt

The Soviet nuclear testing site in present-day Kazakhstan is just one of many places in the world that remain dangerously radioactive to this day.

Part 14: The Desert Rats

AFP

France was also determined not to get left behind in the nuclear arms race. The first French atomic bomb was called "Gerboise Bleue," named after a desert rodent, and was detonated on the morning of Feb. 13, 1960 in the Reggane district of Algeria, then a French colony. At 70 kilotons, it was bigger than the first nuclear tests of the UK, USSR and USA combined. Three more bombs were exploded soon thereafter. France moved its testing grounds to remote areas of the South Pacific after Algeria gained its independence in 1962.

• Part 1: A Survey of the World's Radioactive No-Go Zones
• Part 2: A New Age Dawns
• Part 3: 'Now I Am Become Death'
• Part 4: Uninhabitable to This Day
• Part 5: The Radioactive Dilemma
• Part 6: Unrelenting Bombardment
• Part 7: A Deadly Legacy
• Part 8: A Nuclear No Man's Land
• Part 9: Unfathomable Destruction
• Part 10: Long-Term Effects
• Part 11: The Irradiated Buddha
• Part 12: Underground Time Bomb
• Part 13: The First Big Accident
• Part 14: The Desert Rats
• Part 15: An Ill-Advised Test
• Part 16: Mushroom Clouds in the South Pacific
• Part 17: Dangerous Negligence
• Part 18: Hydrogen Drama in Spain
• Part 19: Harrisburg Horror
• Part 20: The Unknown Catastrophe

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,756369-14,00.html