Abstract

Atomic Solidarities and Nuclear  Reparations: France’s Nuclear Laboratories in North Africa and the South Pacific

Today, tens of thousands of people in Algeria and French Polynesia, as well as French atomic veterans have been medically and environmentally affected by the French atomic testing. This project assembles events that outline the long durée of French nuclear imperialism from the 1960s to the present, and the countervailing demands for reparations and justice by networks of everyday non-governmental alliances. France’s development of nuclear weapons relied upon its colonial possession for locations such as testing sites exposing populations in Algeria (150,000) and French Polynesia (110,000) as well as the French military on assignment (90,000.) Approximately 350,000 people were harmfully exposed to atomic radiation. Often historicized as disparate chronologies in the history of the French Republic. I argue that when the alignment of late French imperial rule and Cold War geopolitics are read concurrently with the history of Afro-Asian anti-colonial and anti-nuclear movements a network of atomic solidarity emerges. Bound together in anti-nuclear and anti-colonial struggles, resistance, and retaliation against French atomic imperialism, a socio-political genealogy is born of mid-twentieth-century Afro-Asia solidarity.