While the recent history of Morocco, including its contested de facto colony of the Western Sahara, involves international power struggles over mineral resources, those resources rarely feature in historical accounts, which tend to be very partial in terms of periodization, regional focus, or general topic. The search for and exploitation of mineral resources are often treated as the static background of a larger geopolitical story in which colonization, the Cold War, and decolonization are seen as the historical processes to be understood.

In this paper I examine the history of uranium prospection in the early Cold War in Morocco. In this unique case, Morocco’s status as a protectorate was of decisive importance in the development in the 1950s of an unprecedented collaboration between the French and American atomic programs to prospect for uranium. This prospection program did not last; the reality of low-grade deposits, untrusted refining techniques, as well as the last push towards Moroccan independence, led both sides of the collaboration to call a halt. Interest in Morocco’s uranium revived in the 1970s, but even today a combination of technical and political factors leave those uranium minerals – even those locked in Morocco’s abundant phosphates – dormant in their beds.