For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the number of atomic weapons in the world has increased in 2023. Nuclear testing has been abandoned by most nuclear powers, but they have found other ways to test and develop their arsenals. In France the 193 tests that took place in Polynesia, on the atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa, between 1966 and 1996, were catastrophic for the inhabitants of the Pacific archipelago. North Korea was the only country in the twenty-first century to test its nuclear bombs.