A fundamental tenet during the forest-climate debate was that evapotranspiration cools the surface climate and provides water vapor that condenses and falls back onto the land in a recycling of precipitation. It is this process by which tropical forests lessen the heat and promote rainfall through a positive feedback between forest cover and rain. The premise, too, of irreversible climate change, voiced in the decline of ancient civilizations due to deforestation, was common. In today’s climate science, the Amazonian rainforest is a case study for forest-climate coupling, and one in which deforestation is a possible tipping point that irreversibly changes the climate. Many participants in the debate speculated that planting trees in the Sahara would increase rainfall. A green Sahara has, in fact, occurred in the past and increased rainfall at the time. This, too, provides another climate tipping point. The boreal forest presents a further example of positive feedback by which the northward advancement of the treeline in a warmer climate decreases albedo and reinforces the warming; the southward retreat of the treeline with a cooler climate conversely exacerbates the cooling.

This chapter locates Ghana’s quest for nuclear power within the context of French bomb tests in the Sahara that sent radioactive materials across West Africa. In 1959, French scientists announced plans to detonate a series of bombs in their colony of Algeria, where resistance fighters sought to remove the French occupation. The French bomb tests further exacerbated tensions between the European nation and African leaders like Nkrumah, who supported the Algerian independence struggle. The prospect of French nuclear weapons extended the terror of Western atomic bomb activity from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the South Pacific test fields to the African continent. Once fallout from the French detonations reached Ghanaian towns, the outrage from Nkrumah’s government and his international supports was tremendous. The French bombs helped to mobilize interest in fallout monitoring at the University of Ghana and led to Ghana’s bid to join the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ghana’s efforts to eliminate bomb testing across Africa through the United Nations.