The Bomb
p. 39 · Read in the full issue
First Picture of
This photograph, published in the French Press recently, and reproduced here from “Le Journal de Tahiti”, is the first ever published of a French atomic bomb.
It is four metres long, weigh ing more than a ton, with 60 kilotons of power—four times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The nuclear ex plosive occupies only a small part of the bomb. The rest contains electronic instruments, mainly the firing system.
It is presumably a bomb like this that France will test at its Mururoa testing base in the Pacific. No date for these tests has yet been announced, but French Navy headquarters in Brest revealed in May that France’s naval strength in Tahiti would be built up in the near future (see d. 107).