 The unit, seen as a flagship of French industry by the new president of the Republic in 1981, was considered unnecessary after the integration of Thomson's telephony division with Alcatel in 1984 and suffered heavy redundancies from the end of the 1980s, before closing in 1997 at the end of a difficult social conflict.Between the 1970s and 1990s, the two major projects of northern Cotentin, the La Hague reprocessing plant and the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant, accentuated the industrial development of a city that saw a golden age through what the journalist François Simon called "industries of death", since about two thirds of the local industrial fabric was related to defence and the nuclear industry.Cherbourg is also the cradle of the Halley family and society, which became Promodès in the 1960s ( hypermarkets, Champion supermarkets).