The Tunisian request: Saharan fallout, US assistance and the making of the International Atomic Energy Agency

ABSTRACT

Tunisia’s postcolonial leadership intervened in North African decolonisation and the Cold War arms race by monitoring fallout from French nuclear explosions in the Algerian Sahara. This article examines the international negotiations that facilitated Tunisian access to monitoring technology and Tunisian participation in nuclear weapons governance. When the International Atomic Energy Agency denied Tunisia’s request for technical assistance, Tunisian officials struck a deal with US diplomats, who cleared this arrangement with French counterparts. Radiation detection demonstrated the stakes of Tunisia’s intergovernmental relationships, enhanced Tunisia's leverage in nuclear-armed capitals, and revealed nuclear weapons' relevance to Tunisia's foreign policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• France
• international institutions
• nuclear weapons
• United States

Acknowledgements

This article took shape during the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to kind assistance from many. Elisabeth Kata, Gabriella Ivacs and Maria Rentetzi provided invaluable access to the IAEA Archives. Jake Hamblin and Linda Richards accepted an early version for their Downwinders Workshop at Oregon State University. Poldo Nuti, Giordana Pulcini and Christian Ostermann invited me to present a later draft to the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project webinar series, where Elisabeth Roehrlich and Matthew Jones generously served as respondents. I thank Gabrielle Hecht and Benoît Pelopidas for their close engagement with this text during fellowships at Stanford and SciencesPo. Susan Lindee, Heather Sharkey and Poldo Nuti read several versions, and I’m grateful to them for their advice and mentorship. I’m also grateful to the journal’s editors and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback that improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Tunisian Foreign Ministry to IAEA Director General, November 6, 1959, Health, Safety and Waste Disposal – IAEA Assistance in Determination of Atmospheric Radioactivity – North Africa, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives, Vienna.

² On the contested relationship between the Algerian War and French nuclear weapons, see Roxanne Panchasi, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’, History of the Present 9, no. 1 (2019): 84–112.

³ Tunisian Foreign Ministry to IAEA Director General, November 6, 1959.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ L. Carl Brown, ‘The United States and the Maghrib’, Middle East Journal 30, no. 3 (1976): 273–90.

⁶ Mohieddine Hadhri, ‘U.S. Foreign Policy Toward North Africa During the Cold War: From Eisenhower to Kennedy (1953–1963)’, The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 5, no. 2 (2014): 95–110.

⁷ Yahia H. Zoubir, ‘The United States, the Soviet Union and Decolonization of the Maghreb, 1945–62’, Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 1 (1995): 58–84.

⁸ Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (New York: New York Review of Books, 1977), 249–50; Irwin M. Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 99–133; Geoffrey Barei, ‘The Sakiet Sidi Youssef Incident of 1958 in Tunisia and the Anglo-American “Good Offices” Mission’, The Journal of North African Studies 17, no. 2 (2012): 355–71; Miloud Barkaoui ‘Managing the Colonial Status Quo: Eisenhower’s Cold War and the Algerian War of Independence’, The Journal of North African Studies 17, no. 1 (2012): 130–3.

⁹ Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 249–54.

¹⁰ Benoît Pelopidas and Sébastien Philippe, ‘Unfit for Purpose: Reassessing the Development and Deployment of French Nuclear Weapons (1956–1974)’, Cold War History 21, no. 3 (2020): 243–60.

¹¹ This argument builds on Gabrielle Hecht, Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). On the concept of a ‘global’ Cold War, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

¹² Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

¹³ Jacob D. Hamblin, ‘Aligning Missions: Nuclear Technical Assistance, the IAEA, and National Ambitions in Pakistan’, History and Technology 36, no. 3–4 (2020): 437–51.

¹⁴ Toshihiro Higuchi and Jacques E. C. Hymans, ‘Materialized Internationalism: How the IAEA Made the Vinča Dosimetry Experiment, and How the Experiment Made the IAEA’, Centaurus 63, no. 2 (2021): 244–61.

¹⁵ Jacob D. Hamblin, ‘Fukushima and the Motifs of Nuclear History’, Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012): 285–99.

¹⁶ Anna Weichselbraun, ‘From Accountants to Detectives: How Nuclear Safeguards Inspectors Make Knowledge at the International Atomic Energy Agency’, PoLAR 43 (2020): 120–35; Anna Weichselbraun, ‘Of Broken Seals and Broken Promises: Attributing Intention at the IAEA’, Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 4 (2019): 503–28.

¹⁷ On the Middle East, see Mohamed ElBaradei, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011). On South Africa, see Anna-Mart van Wyk, ‘Apartheid’s Bomb and Regional Liberation: Cold War Perspectives’, Journal of Cold War Studies 21, no. 1 (2019): 151–65; and forthcoming work by Robin Möser on ‘Disarming Apartheid’.

¹⁸ Gabrielle Hecht, ‘A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things’, Isis 98, no. 1 (2007): 100–8.

¹⁹ John Krige, ‘Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence’, Osiris 21, no. 1 (2006): 161–81.

²⁰ Mara Drogan, ‘The Nuclear Imperative: Atoms for Peace and the Development of U.S. Policy on Exporting Nuclear Power, 1953–1955’, Diplomatic History 40, no. 5 (2016): 948–74.

²¹ David Holloway, ‘The Soviet Union and the Creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency’, Cold War History 16, no. 2 (2016): 177–93.

²² Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the Making of the IAEA’, Osiris 21, no. 1 (2006): 25–48.

²³ Elisabeth Roehrlich, ‘The Cold War, the Developing World, and the Creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1953–1957’, Cold War History 16, no. 2 (2016): 195–212.

²⁴ Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ghana, to IAEA Secretary General, October 10, 1959, SC661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

²⁵ Letter to Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ghana, October 26, 1959, SC661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

²⁶ Maurice Vaïsse, ‘La France et le traité de Moscou (1957–1963)’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 107, no. 1 (1993): 48.

²⁷ De Laboulaye to Tunisian Foreign Minister, November 24, 1959, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

²⁸ For titles of IAEA leadership, see IAEA, ‘The Staff of the Agency’, September 27, 1960, INFCIRC/22, Accessed 15 July 2022 <https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/infcircs/1960/infcirc22.pdf>.

²⁹ Upendra Goswami, ‘Fifteen Years of Technical Assistance’, IAEA, Accessed 15 July 2022 <https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/17101282532.pdf>.

³⁰ Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, ‘Creating the Need in Mexico: The IAEA’s Technical Assistance Programs for Less Developed Countries (1958–68)’, History and Technology 36, nos 3–4 (2020): 418–36.

³¹ See Mervyn O’Driscoll, ‘Explosive Challenge: Diplomatic Triangles, the United Nations, and the Problem of French Nuclear Testing, 1959–1960’, Journal of Cold War Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 28–56; and Panchasi, ‘No Hiroshima in Africa’.

³² Verbatim Record, UN First Committee, November 6, 1959, A/C.1/PV.1045, 42, UN Library, New York.

³³ ‘Request from Tunisia’, November 13, 1959, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Vienna (Goldschlag), ‘French Atomic Tests’, November 17, 1959, Ghana – request for assistance in establishing a radiation detection centre, 5475-GE-2-40, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Ottawa.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Tunisian Foreign Ministry to IAEA Director General, November 6, 1959, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁴⁰ Response to Goswami, ‘Tunisian Request for Technical Assistance’, December 17, 1959, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Hecht, ‘Negotiating Global Nuclearities’, 44.

⁴⁴ Memo, ‘Implementation of the 1960 programme: Measurements and analysis of environmental radioactivity’ (GOV/ 472), December 15, 1959, restricted distribution, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Response to Goswami, ‘Tunisian Request for Technical Assistance’.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Hecht, ‘Negotiating Global Nuclearities’.

⁵⁴ Vienna (Goldschlag), ‘French Atomic Test: Tunisian Request to IAEA’, December 8, 1959, 5475-GE-2-40, LAC.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ See file SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁵⁹ On nuclear knowledge ‘born secret’, see Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

⁶⁰ Goswami to de Laboulaye, ‘Tunisian request for technical assistance in the measurement of radioactive fall-out’, January 27, 1960, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁶¹ De Laboulaye to Goswami, ‘Tunisian request for technical assistance in the measurement of radioactive fall-out’, January 29, 1960, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁶² Goswami to Gaardlund, January 14, 1960, SC/661/AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁶³ Draft letter from IAEA to Tunisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, enclosed with Memo, ‘Tunisian request for technical assistance in the measurement of radioactive fall-out’, January 27, 1960, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Goswami to de Laboulaye, ‘Tunisian request for technical assistance’.

⁶⁶ De Laboulaye to Goswami, ‘Tunisian request for technical assistance’.

⁶⁷ Paris to Ottawa, Vienna, London, and New York, October 29, 1959, Préparation de la campagne et réactions internationales à une éventuelle expérience nucléaire française (Oct 1959), 1809INVA/304, Fonds Questions atomiques et spatiales, Archives diplomatiques, La Courneuve, France (ADLC).

⁶⁸ D. S. Cape (Foreign Office) to J. Murray (Paris), n.d., CO 968/701, The National Archives, Kew, London, United Kingdom.

⁶⁹ London (Whitney) to State, December 24, 1959, no. 3250, 751.5611/12-159, Box 3329, Central Decimal File (CDF) 1955–59, Records of the U.S. Department of State (RG 59), U.S. National Archives and Record Administration, Site II, College Park, MD (NARA II).

⁷⁰ Goldschlag, ‘French Atomic Test’, December 8, 1959.

⁷¹ Memorandum of Conversation, ‘Tunisian requests for assistance in monitoring French bomb tests’, December 16, 1959, 751.5611/12-159, Box 3329, CDF 1955–59, RG 59, NARA II.

⁷² David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna: IAEA, 1997), 81, <https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/pub1032_web.pdf>.

⁷³ ‘Request from Tunisia’, November 13, 1959, IAEA Archives.

⁷⁴ Maria Rentetzi, ‘With Strings Attached: Gift-Giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US Foreign Policy’, Endeavour 45, nos 1–2 (2021).

⁷⁵ On the Algerian dimension, see Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War; and Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, esp. 119–70. For a critique of Wall’s assessment of US importance, see Barkaoui, ‘Managing the Colonial Status Quo’. On the nuclear dimension of Franco-American relations, see O’Driscoll, ‘Explosive Challenge’, 28–37, 54.

⁷⁶ On these loopholes, see Jean-Damien Pô, Les moyens de la puissance: Les activités militaires du CEA (1945–2000) (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), 132–4. For more on transfer and denial of US nuclear technology to France, see John Krige, Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe: US Technological Collaboration and Non-Proliferation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 108, 155–67.

⁷⁷ ‘William Ira Cargo, 88’, The Washington Post, January 11, 2006; ‘William I. Cargo, 27 February 1917–13 December 2005, Columbia, MD’, LifeStoryNet, <https://www.lifestorynet.com/obituaries/william-i-cargo.8674> Accessed 15 July 2022.

⁷⁸ MemCon, ‘Tunisian requests for assistance’, December 16, 1959.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ Toshihiro Higuchi, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 109–35; Toshihiro Higuchi, ‘Epistemic Frictions: Radioactive Fallout, Health Risk Assessments, and the Eisenhower Administration’s Nuclear-Test Ban Policy, 1954–1958’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 18, no. 1 (2018): 99–124.

⁸² Néstor Herran, ‘“Unscare” and Conceal: The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the Origin of International Radiation Monitoring’, in The Surveillance Imperative: Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond, eds. Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 69–84.

⁸³ MemCon, ‘Tunisian requests for assistance’, December 16, 1959.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ Ibid.

⁸⁸ Memorandum of Conversation, ‘Tunisian requests for assistance in monitoring French bomb tests’, December 26, 1959, 751.5611/12–159, Box 3329, CDF 1955–59, RG 59, NARA II.

⁸⁹ Ibid.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ Ibid.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ Ibid.

⁹⁷ Ibid.

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Alessandro Iandolo, ‘The Rise and Fall of the “Soviet Model of Development” in West Africa, 1957–64’, Cold War History 12, no. 4 (2012): 683–704.

¹⁰² Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 49–76.

¹⁰³ MemCon, ‘Tunisian requests for assistance’, December 26, 1959.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid.

¹⁰⁷ Tunis (Walmsley) to State, November 12, 1959, no. 673, 751.5611/9–159, Box 3329, CDF 1955–59, RG 59, NARA II.

¹⁰⁸ Tunis (Walmsley) to State, December 19, 1959, no. 880, 751.5611/12–159, Box 3329, CDF 1955–59, RG 59, NARA II.

¹⁰⁹ Tunis (Walmsley) to State, December 28, 1959, no. 905, 751.5611/12–159, Box 3329, CDF 1955–59, RG 59, NARA II.

¹¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹¹ Herter to Tunis, December 30, 1959, 751.5611/9–159, Box 3329, CDF 1955–59, RG 59, NARA II.

¹¹² Ibid.

¹¹³ Ibid.

¹¹⁴ Ibid.

¹¹⁵ Ibid.

¹¹⁶ Ibid.

¹¹⁷ Walmsley to State, January 6, 1960, no. 934, General Files – Fallout – Foreign, Box 14, Entry 73, Division of Biology and Medicine, Fallout Studies (1953–64), Records of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (RG 326), NARA II.

¹¹⁸ Ibid.

¹¹⁹ Ibid.

¹²⁰ Ibid.

¹²¹ Walmsley to State, January 11, 1960, no. 954, General Files–Fallout–Foreign, Box 14, Entry 73, Div. Bio. Med., Fallout Studies (1953–64), RG 326, NARA II.

¹²² Walmsley to State, January 25, 1960, no. 1032, 751.56/1–461, Box 1742, CDF 1960–63, RG 59, NARA II.

¹²³ Herter to Tunis, February 17, 1960, 751.5611/2–160, Box 1743, CDF 1960–63, RG 59, NARA II.

¹²⁴ Ibid.

¹²⁵ See, eg. John Krige, American Hegemony and the Post-War Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006); Jason Pribilsky, ‘Development and the “Indian Problem” in the Cold War Andes: Indigenismo, Science, and Modernization in the Making of the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos’, Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 405–26; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

¹²⁶ Tunis (McKillop) to State, February 18, 1960, no. 1192, 751.5611/2-160, Box 1743, CDF 1960–63, RG 59, NARA II.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

¹²⁸ Ibid.

¹²⁹ Rabat (Yost) to State, February 25, 1960, no. 1751, 751.5611/2-160, Box 1743, CDF 1960–63, RG 59, NARA II.

¹³⁰ Ibid.

¹³¹ Tripoli (Jones) to State, March 14, 1960, no. 659, 751.5611/3-160, Box 1743, CDF 1960–63, RG 59, NARA II.

¹³² Herter to Tripoli and Benghazi, April 6, 1960, Embtel 715, 751.5611/3-160, Box 1743, CDF 1960–63, RG 59, NARA II.

¹³³ Higuchi, Political Fallout, 172.

¹³⁴ See, eg. Susan Lindee, ‘Survivors and Scientists: Hiroshima, Fukushima, and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 1975–2014’, Social Studies of Science 46, no. 2 (2016): 184–209; Angela N. H. Creager, ‘Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation in the Atomic Age’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 45, no. 1 (2015): 14–48; Jacob Darwin Hamblin, ‘“A Dispassionate and Objective Effort:” Negotiating the First Study on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation’, Journal of the History of Biology 40, no. 1 (2007): 147–77; Soraya Boudia, ‘Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks’, History and Technology 23, no. 4 (2007): 389–406.

¹³⁵ Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 90–1.

¹³⁶ Health and Safety Laboratory (HASL), New York, ‘Report on Tunisian Gummed Film Data for February and March’, enclosed with Herter to Tunis, May 9, 1960, CA-9300, re: Report on Gummed Film Samples from Tunisian Stations, 650-8-30-3, Box 18, RG 326, NARA II.

¹³⁷ M. Susan Lindee, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 18.

¹³⁸ Joseph Masco, ‘Desert Modernism’, Cabinet Magazine (Spring 2004) <https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/masco.php> Accessed 15 July 2022.

¹³⁹ Jeffery T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: Norton, 2007), 195–218.

¹⁴⁰ Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 208; Laura A. Bruno, ‘The Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield: Science, Nature, and the Atom during the First Decade of the Cold War’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33, no. 2 (2003): 239–40.

¹⁴¹ Philip F. Gustafson, Div. Bio. Med., Argonne National Laboratory, to Hal Hollister, Environmental Sciences Branch, Div. Bio. Med., U.S. AEC, March 9, 1960; M. D. Thaxter, Health Chemistry, Radiation Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, to Alfred W. Klement, Jr., Fallout Studies Branch, Div. Bio. Med., U.S. AEC, March 14, 1960; L. B. Lockhart, Jr., U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Interim Report, ‘Fission product radioactivity of the air along the 80^th meridian (west) during Feb 1960’, April 5, 1960; all in French Tests, Box 18, Entry 73, Div. Bio. Med., Fallout Studies (1953–64), RG 326, NARA II.

¹⁴² Herran, ‘“Unscare” and Conceal’, 78.

¹⁴³ Ibid.

¹⁴⁴ Herter to Tunis, re: Report on Gummed Film Samples from Tunisian Stations, May 9, 1960, CA-9300, 650-8-30-3, Box 18, RG 326, NARA II.

¹⁴⁵ Ibid.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid.

¹⁴⁷ Herran, ‘UNSCEAR and Conceal’, 79–80.

¹⁴⁸ Herter, re: Report on Gummed Film Samples.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid.

¹⁵¹ McKillop to State, ‘Tunisian Fallout Data’, May 28, 1960, no. G-425, French Tests, Box 18, Entry 73, Div. Bio. Med., Fallout Studies (1953–64), RG 326, NARA II.

¹⁵² Ibid.

¹⁵³ Goswami, ‘Fifteen Years’.

¹⁵⁴ Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, ‘Creating the Need in Mexico’.

¹⁵⁵ Tunis to Paris, March 8, 1960, no. 915–16, Dossier 1960, 1666INVA/254, Fonds Pactes, ADLC.

¹⁵⁶ Division of Health, Safety, and Waste Disposal to Division of Technical Supplies, ‘Atmospheric Radiation Measurements – Government of Tunisia’, June 17, 1960, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

¹⁵⁷ Division of Technical Supplies to Division of Health, Safety, and Waste Disposal, ‘Reply to Memo dated 17 June 1960 […] asking about the suitability of Equipment to Measure Atmospheric Radioactivity (Question from Tunisia)’, July 7, 1960, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.

¹⁵⁸ Division of Technical Supplies (IAEA) to Commission for Scientific Research and Atomic Energy (Tunisia), July 8, 1960, SC/661-AFR, IAEA Archives.