On 13 February 1960, France detonated its first atomic bomb in the desert near Reggane. They named it Gerboise Bleue — "Blue Jerboa," after the small desert rodent and the first colour of the French flag. Its yield was about 70 kilotons, roughly four times the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and it announced France as the world's fourth nuclear power. Three more atmospheric tests followed at the Reggane site over the next fourteen months: Gerboise Blanche, Gerboise Rouge, and Gerboise Verte, white, red, and green to complete the flag. The first three were fired while Algeria was still a French colony in the midst of its war for independence; when the Évian Accords ended that war in 1962, France secured the right to keep testing on Algerian soil for years more.

The French government called the test zone uninhabited. It was not. Reggane alone held thousands of people, and across the broader region tens of thousands lived within reach of the fallout — Saharan families, oasis farmers, nomadic Tuareg, and the Algerian conscripts and laborers brought in to build and service the site. They were not meaningfully warned, not evacuated, not given protection. Some accounts describe soldiers ordered toward the blast zone with little more than ordinary uniforms. The bombs scattered radioactive debris across the sand, and afterward the contaminated material was not properly buried; the desert winds simply uncovered it again, season after season, spreading it through a landscape where people lived and grazed their animals.

The harm did not end when the testing did. In the decades since, the communities around Reggane have carried an unmistakable burden of illness — elevated rates of liver, skin, and stomach cancers, of blindness, of children born with malformed and atrophied limbs. The contamination seeped into a way of life: into the sand children played in, the metal scavenged from the site, the ground itself. For years France kept the relevant records sealed, and compensation, when it eventually came, reached only a narrow set of claimants and rarely the Algerian civilians who lived nearest. The injustice is plain in the arithmetic. A great power tested its weapons on land it ruled but did not call home, on people it counted as expendable, and then looked away from what it had left in the sand.

Today Reggane endures as it always has, by adapting to extremity. Locals call the searing zone bounded by Adrar, Reggane, and In Salah the "triangle of fire," for the heat that bakes it from May to September. The town remains a frontier post — the last stop on the Tanezrouft track before the long crossing toward Mali, where customs and police checks are mandatory before drivers commit to the emptiness ahead. East of town once stood a rocket-launching range; a small airport still serves the area. But Reggane's name now carries a double weight: the old country of the diamond, and the place where the atomic age arrived in the Sahara on someone else's terms, and never entirely left.