Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast with me, Dan Hardo.

Today, we're exploring the legacy of the French government's nuclear tests in Algeria in the early 1960s.

I've been speaking to Abdul Kreme Tuhami, who was just a teenager when he heard that France would be conducting a nuclear test near his home.

A few days before, the French authorities announced there would be a bomb explosion, telling the population not to panic.

They said it would cause a small earthquake and that would be it.

But the test went disastrously wrong, with grave consequences to this day.

We realized that we'd experienced our own Chernobyl.

And in the years since, we started to find explanations for all sorts of diseases in the local population.

Abdul Kreme grew up in the southern Algerian city of Taman Rasset, surrounded by the Sahara Desert.

I would describe it as a peaceful village with a lot of gardens, wild animals and migrating birds.

It was a very nice place to live, until the catastrophe.

Most people at the time were nomads who made a living from agriculture and farming.

Like many of the young people my age, I had big dreams and we lived under French military rule.

Algeria had been a French colony since 1830.

In the 20th century, as rivalries between global superpowers were hotting up,

France decided to develop its own nuclear capabilities.

It chose the wide desert expanse of the Algerian Sahara as the test site for its first explosions.

The first French nuclear test took place on the 13th of February 1960.

It was three times more powerful than the bomb America had dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.

At the time, France's defence minister Pyramir's mail insisted that the tests were safe.

All precautions were taken, so that neither the population's close to,

nor those distant from, the site of the explosion, were exposed to any danger.

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