Qualla: Gerboise Blanche https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:09 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/e/u/x/u/gerboise-blanche-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Gerboise Blanche https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche Gerboise Blanche: Introduction https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche/ Photo credit Senate of the French Republic, Public domain. Three months after France stunned the world with its first atomic bomb, the desert near Reggane lit up again. On 1 April 1960, just after dawn, a plutonium device named Gerboise Blanche detonated on a concrete pad in the Tanezrouft. This one was small by design, barely a twentieth as powerful as the bomb that had come before. It was, French officials later admitted, an emergency weapon, the one they would have used had the first test failed. Now it served a different purpose: to prove that a useful warhead could be made small.

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Image: Senate of the French Republic | Public domain

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/u/x/u/gerboise-blanche-wp/euxu-gerboise-blanche-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Gerboise Blanche: The White Jerboa https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche/ Photo credit Senate of the French Republic, Public domain. Like its predecessor, the bomb took its name from the jerboa, the bounding desert rodent the French call gerboise. White was the second color of the tricolor, after blue. The device weighed 1,250 kilograms and was filled with plutonium, and it was fired at 6:17 in the morning wit...

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Image: Senate of the French Republic | Public domain

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/u/x/u/gerboise-blanche-wp/euxu-gerboise-blanche-the-white-jerboa.mp3 0:06 2 full Gerboise Blanche: A Bomb Moved Aside https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche/ Photo credit Senate of the French Republic, Public domain. There was a practical reason Gerboise Blanche was set off where it was. Rather than reuse the contaminated ground from the first shot, the authorities placed this bomb a few kilometers from the original ground zero, on a purpose-built concrete pad. They feared that the original s...

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Image: Senate of the French Republic | Public domain

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/u/x/u/gerboise-blanche-wp/euxu-gerboise-blanche-a-bomb-moved-aside.mp3 0:06 3 full Gerboise Blanche: The Cloud That Drifted https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche/ Photo credit Senate of the French Republic, Public domain. For all its modest yield, Gerboise Blanche left an outsized footprint. A French National Assembly report in 2001 found that while the fallout from the other three Reggane tests stayed within tidy circles less than a kilometer across, the contamination from Gerboise Blanche spread...

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Image: Senate of the French Republic | Public domain

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/u/x/u/gerboise-blanche-wp/euxu-gerboise-blanche-the-cloud-that-drifted.mp3 0:06 4 full Gerboise Blanche: A Step Toward the Arsenal https://qualla.com/gerboise-blanche/ Photo credit Senate of the French Republic, Public domain. France hailed the test as a success. The Ministry of the Armed Forces declared that Gerboise Blanche had opened the way to miniaturizing nuclear weapons, a crucial step toward the force de frappe, the independent strike force that would become the backbone of French defense for t...

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Image: Senate of the French Republic | Public domain

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/u/x/u/gerboise-blanche-wp/euxu-gerboise-blanche-a-step-toward-the-arsenal.mp3 0:06 5 full