France and weapons of mass destruction

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France is said to have an arsenal of approximately 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

Main article: Nuclear weapons and France

France was one of the nuclear pioneers going back to the work of Marie Curie (a Polish scientist living in France), 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 Manhattan 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 program although plans were made to build reactors for the large scale production of plutonium.^[2]

France was eager to cooperate with other countries on nuclear weapons. 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 that 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.

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.

Further information: New Zealand's nuclear-free zone

By 1968 only France and China were exploding nuclear weapons atmospherically, and the contamination caused by the H Bomb blasts led to a global protest movement against further French testing.^[7]

From the early 1960s, New Zealand peace groups CND and Peace Media had been organising nationwide anti nuclear campaigns in protest of testing in French Polynesia. These included two large national petitions presented to the New Zealand government, leading to a joint New Zealand and Australian government action to take France to the International Court of Justice (1972).^[8]

In 1972, the newly founded Greenpeace with financial and tactical support from other New Zealand peace groups managed to delay nuclear tests at Mururoa by several weeks by trespassing with their yacht the Vega in the testing zone.The crew was entertained by the Admiral of the French Navy in charge of the atoll when Vega was towed into the atoll. The following year, in a return voyage into the forbidden zone, the skipper, David McTaggart, was beaten and severely injured by members of the French military. ^[9]

In 1973, Peace Media and New Zealand CND organised an international flotilla of protest yachts to sail into the test exclusion zone at Mururoa. ^[10] ^[11]

In 1973, New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk, as a symbolic act of protest sent a government representative the Hon. Fraser Colman and two navy frigates, HMNZS Canterbury and the HMNZS Otago, to Mururoa.^[12]

In 1985, under the orders of the then French President Francois Mitterand, ^[13] the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk by the French DGSE secret service in Auckland, New Zealand, as it prepared for another protest of nuclear testing in French military zones. One crew member, the photographer Fernando Pereira, drowned while attempting to recover his 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. The tests were intended to provide France with enough data to improve nuclear weapons without needing future testing.^[14]

The French Military conducted more than 200 nuclear tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls over a thirty year period ending 1996, 40 of them atmospheric. In August 2006 people of French Polynesia welcomed an official report by the French government confirming the link between an increase in the cases of thyroid cancer and France's atmospheric nuclear tests in the territory since 1966. ^[15] ^[16]

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.^[17]