April 1961

Shocking news out of French Algeria, were a number of French Army officers have attempted to seize control of French Algeria. The generals, with a corps of a few thousand loyal paratroopers, attempted to seize the province in the wake of the referendum on self determination. President de Gaulle appeared on French National Television in his uniform from the Second World War to address the nation:

An insurrectionary power has established itself in Algeria by a military pronunciamento... This power has an appearance: a quartet of retired generals. It has a reality: a group of officers, partisan, ambitious and fanatical. This group and this quartet possess an expedient and limited knowledge of things. But they only see and understand the Nation and the world distorted by their delirium. Their enterprise leads directly towards a national disaster ... I forbid any Frenchman, and first of all any soldier, to execute a single one of their orders ... In the face of the misfortune which hangs over the country and the threat to the Republic, having taken advice from the Constitutional Council, the Prime Minister, the president of the Senate, the president of the National Assembly, I have decided to invoke Article 16 of the Constitution. Starting from this day, I will take, directly if the need arises, the measures which seem to me demanded by circumstances ... Frenchwomen, Frenchmen! Help me!

The majority of French troops in Algeria, however, have remained loyal to President de Gaulle. The rebellion has failed, and its leaders have been arrested and sent to Paris to await their fates. President de Gaulle has invoked Article 16 of the new French constitution, granting the president emergency powers to deal with the ongoing crisis.

In the backdrop of the tumult, another kind of explosion rocked the Algerian desert. The French Republic has detonated it's fourth nuclear warhead, code named Gerboise Verte, a 1 kiloton device. French authories say that the test was scheduled to occur and went as planned, while sources within the Defense Ministry have hinted that the test was moved up in order to prevent the device from falling to the rebels.