France and weapons of mass destruction

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France is said to have an arsenal of 350 nuclear weapons stockpiled as of 2002 ^[1]. The weapons are part of the national Force de frappe, developed in the late 1950s and 1960s to give France the ability to distance itself from NATO while having a means of nuclear deterrence under sovereign control.

France is one of the five "Nuclear Weapons States" (NWS) under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which France ratified in 1992. France has never ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty, leaving it open to conduct nuclear tests. However, it has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

France is not known to possess or develop any chemical or biological weapons.

1 History
2 Non-nuclear WMD
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

[edit] Initial interest

France was one of the nuclear pioneers going back to the work of Marie Curie, and Curie's last assistant Bertrand Goldschmidt became the father of the French Bomb. During the Second World War Goldschmidt invented the standard method for extracting plutonium while working as part of the British/Canadian team participating in the allied Bomb project. But after the Liberation in 1945 France had to start again almost from scratch. Nevertheless the first French reactor went critical in 1948 and small amounts of plutonium were extracted in 1949. There was no formal commitment to a nuclear weapons programme although plans were made to build reactors for the large scale production of plutonium^[2].

In May 1954 the French were losing the war in Indochina against Ho Chi Minh. At the height of the decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu France's nuclear bosses sent a request to the chairman of the British Atomic Energy Authority. It was a shopping list of items that would help them build nuclear weapons including a sample quantity of plutonium "so we can take the steps preparatory to the utilisation of our own plutonium".^[3]

Before the letter even arrived the French had lost the battle and the war but later that year the French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, made the formal decision to build the atom bomb. Britain agreed to supply the requested nuclear materials, including enriched uranium. Among the most important parts of the agreement was an arrangement for the British to check the blueprints and construction of French plutonium production reactors.

According to one source, this not only helped the French get their military plutonium reactor at Marcoule into operation quickly but it also averted a disaster, for the British found defects which could have caused a catastrophic explosion at the Rhone Valley site.^[3] The same source says that when Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 he personally thanked Harold Macmillan for the team's work.

There remained France's request for plutonium. In 1955 Britain agreed to export ten grams but "...we would not tell the US that we were going to give the French plutonium nor about any similar cases..." ^[3]. France was eager to cooperate with other countries on nuclear weapons. In 1956 the French agreed to secretly build the Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel and soon after agreed to construct a reprocessing plant for the extraction of plutonium at the site. The intervention of the United States in the Suez Crisis in the same year is also credited with convincing France that it needed to accelerate its own nuclear weapons program to remain a global power ^[4].

The following year Euratom was created and under cover of the peaceful use of nuclear power the French signed deals with Germany and Italy to work together on nuclear weapons development ^[5]. The West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told his cabinet he "wanted to achieve, through EURATOM, as quickly as possible, the chance of producing our own nuclear weapons" ^[6]. The idea was short-lived. In 1958 De Gaulle became President and Germany and Italy were excluded.

[edit] First nuclear tests

For more details on this topic, see Gerboise Bleue.

De Gaulle accelerated the French weapons programme and on 13 February 1960 after many twists and turns they detonated their first atom bomb in the French Algeria desert Sahara. The bomb had a 70 kiloton yield. Although Algeria became independent in 1962 France continued nuclear tests there until 1966 although the later tests were underground rather than atmospheric.

For more details on this topic, see Opération Canopus.

The French began development of the hydrogen bomb and built a new test range on the French Polynesian islands of Mururoa and Fangataufa. On 24 August 1968 France succeeded in detonating a thermonuclear weapon - codenamed Canopus - over Fangataufa. A fission device ignited a lithium 6 deuteride secondary inside a jacket of highly enriched uranium to create a 2.6 megaton blast which left the whole atoll uninhabitable because of radioactive contamination.

[edit] Anti-test protests

By 1968 only France and China were exploding nuclear weapons in the open air and the contamination caused by the H Bomb blast led to a global protest movement against further French atmospheric tests ^[7].

In 1972, Greenpeace managed to delay nuclear tests by several weeks by trespassing with a ship in the testing zone. During the time, the skipper, David McTaggart, was beaten and severely injured by members of the French military.

In 1985 the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk by the French DGSE in Auckland, New Zealand, as it prepared for another protest of nuclear testing in French military zones. One crew member, Fernando Pereira of Portugal, photographer, drowned on the sinking ship while attempting to recover his photographic equipment. Two members of DGSE were captured and sentenced, but eventually repatriated to France in a controversial affair.

French president Jacques Chirac's decision to run a nuclear test series at Mururoa in 1995, just one year before the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was to be signed, caused worldwide protest, including an embargo of French wine. These tests were meant to provide the nation with enough data to improve further nuclear technology without needing additional series of tests.^[8]

[edit] Possibility of use

In 2006, French president Jacques Chirac, noted that France would be willing to use nuclear weapons against a state attacking France via terrorist means. He noted that the French nuclear forces had been configured for this option. ^[9]