Pierre Marie Gallois
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| Pierre Marie Gallois | |
| Born | 29 June 1911 |
|---|---|
| Residence | Paris |
| Nationality | France |
| Occupation | Geopolitician |
| Spouse | Françoise Marie Gallois |
| Children | François Gallois, Richard Gallois, Phillip Gallois |
Pierre Marie Gallois (29 June 1911) is a French air force brigade general and geopolitician. He was instrumental in the constitution of the French nuclear arsenal. This earned him the nickname of father of the French atom bomb. However, Bruno Tertrais, a research fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, argued that other contemporaries of Gallois in the community of French defense intellectuals deserve perhaps credit in "Destruction Assurée : The Origins and Development of French Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1981," an essay in Henry Sokolski, ed., Getting Mad: Nuclear mutual assured destruction, its origins and practice.
[edit] Biography
He was born in Torino, Italy in 1911. After studies at Lycée Janson de Sailly and the War School in Versailles, Gallois was made a Sous-Lieutenant in 1936 in a Sahara wing at Colomb-Béchar, and later promoted to Lieutenant the same year. In 1939, he was transferred to the General staff of the Fifth air region, in Algiers.
In 1943, Gallois reached Great Britain and joined the Royal Air Force Bomber Command as a bomber crewman. He took part in raids against German industries until March 1945.
After the war, Gallois was detached to civil aviation and took part in conferences of the International Civil Aviation Organisation. He rejoined the Air Force in 1948 as an aid in the cabinet of the chief of staff of the Armée de l'air. A specialist of equipment and manufacturing, he wrote the quinquennal plan for aeronautic production, which was accepted by the Parliament in August 1950, and studied production plans at the European level. He took part in discussions regarding the use of US aid in Western Europe.
From 1953 to 1954, Gallois, by then a colonel, was affected to the cabinet of the minister of Defence. He also worked for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe at the same time, working on the consequences of the existence of weapons of mass destruction on modern strategy. From 1953, he campaigned for a French nuclear deterrence, stressing the notions of "personal deterrence" (French: dissuasion personnelle) and "weak-to-strong deterrence" (French: dissuasion de faible au fort).
Gallois retired from the Army in 1957.
In 2003, he co-founded the Forum pour la France ("Forum for France"), which supports "sovereignty and independence of France". Gallois campaigned against the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe
