Cloud over the Desert

The desert settlement of Hammoudia, some 25 miles down the sand track from Reggan in the southwest French Sahara, is the front gate of a huge military reserve where 4,500 French technicians and troops work among the intricate gadgets of the Atomic Age. Near by are underground workshops, rows of air-conditioned huts, and an airstrip fit for jets. To the south is the emptiness of the Tanezrouft--the "thirst country" of the central Sahara --where France will most likely test its late starter in the atomic race: a model T bomb too big for their airplanes and too crude even to compare with recent generations of U.S., British and Russian nuclear devices. Knowing their first bomb to be primitive, the French are anxious not so much to catch up with other atomic powers overnight as to capture political prestige by becoming Member No. 4 of the exclusive "nuclear club."

Nuclear politics was also plain last week in the rising clamor against the French holding the tests at all. The Communists, of course, were in full cry against the idea ("a plot to terrorize African peoples into renouncing the struggle for freedom," screamed Moscow Radio), but more important were the protests of nine independent African states meeting in Monrovia, Liberia, who voted unanimously to condemn the experiments. Finally breaking their long silence on their Sahara plans, the French told the African states that the tests would take place in a "desolate region totally uninhabited ... in the dead center of the Sahara about 2,750 kilometers (1,709 miles) from Monrovia," and closer in fact to Paris itself. Fallout, insisted the French government, would be "in regions of several hundred kilometers where there is no known life," unlike U.S. experiments within 80 miles of Las Vegas, Russian explosions less than 150 miles from Semipalatinsk.

When would the French explode their bomb? "It would be unreasonable to make such an experiment in the Sahara at the period of greatest heat," said a French official. The heat was of two kinds--the summer sun, which lasts until mid-September, and the September U.N. General Assembly session, where the French face a closer vote on the Algerian question. January seems like better political weather.

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