Under The Spreading Mushroom Cloud  The anti-Communist fervor of
the early fifties was partly a legacy of the 1949 Soviet
explosion.  Eight years elapsed before France entered the game
on February 13, 1960, through an airborne test (of which there
had by then been more than two hundred in the world) of a
plutonium bomb in the Sahara. It was described as having a power
“approximately” that of the twentykiloton bomb that had razed
Hiroshima, a weapon that by this time seemed almost too
primitive to inspire awe. Nonetheless, there was truth to the
single-column subhead’s declaration, “Successful Shot Puts Paris
With U.S., Soviet and Britain as Nuclear Power.” That was
exactly what General de Gaulle, the President of France, wished:
to prove that his country was again a major power that did not
need the support of any alliance. His official announcement
unveiled further developments in the emerging and sometimes
perplexing philosophy of war prevention. The French Republic was
now “better placed to make its action