France and weapons of mass destruction
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France never ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty, leaving it open to conduct nuclear tests at will.
France had been one of the pioneers of nuclear physics but in 1945 it had to start again almost from scratch. The first French reactor went critical in 1948 and first plutonium was extracted in 1949 but there was no formal commitment to a nuclear weapons programme although plans were made for large scale production of plutonium. [link]
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". Britain had exploded its own bomb less than two years earlier and so they realised the significance of the request.
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. 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". [link] 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 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 [Strauss, F.J., "Die Erinnerungen", Berlin, 1989, p. 314]. 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" [link]. The idea was short-lived. In 1958 De Gaulle became President and Germany and Italy were excluded.
De Gaulle accelerated the French weapons programme and on 13 February 1960 after many twists and turns they detonated their first atom bomb in Algeria which was still a French colony at the time. The bomb had a 60 kiloton yield.
Around this time France began development of the hydrogen bomb. On 24 August 1968 France succeeded in detonating a thermonuclear device over the Pacific atoll of Fangataufa. A fission device ignited a lithium 6 deuteride secondary inside a jacket of highly enriched uranium to create a 2.6 megaton blast. The atoll was heavily contaminated and this led to a protest movement against further French atmospheric tests. [link]
- In 1972, Greenpeace managed to delay nuclear tests by several weeks with its ship illegally trespassing in the testing zone. The skipper, David McTaggart, was beaten and severely injured by members of the French military. Later, 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 sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in New Zealand.
- President Chirac's decision to run a nuclear test series at Mururoa in 1996, just one year before the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was to be signed, caused worldwide protest, including an embargo of French wine. Those last tests were meant to provide the nation with enough data to improve further nuclear technology without needing additional series of tests.
See also
Internal link
External links
- [Britain's dirty secret - Secret papers show how Britain helped Israel make the A-bomb in the 1960s], New Statesman by Meirion Jones, 13 March 2006. Article refers to British assistance given to Israeli and French governments during he 1950s and 1960s.
- Charles Rault, [A Change in the French Nuclear Doctrine ?], ISRIA, January 25, 2006.
- [Nuclear Threat Initiative on France]
- [Nuclear Notebook: French nuclear forces, 2005], Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2005.
- [Nuclear policy: France stands alone] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2004
- [Greenpeace film on the French bombing of a Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior]
- [Nuclear Files.org] Current information on nuclear stockpiles in France!
- [link] Nuclear Weapons archive
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