About Nuclear Weapons

If France gave up its nuclear weapons, it would be a gesture unique in human history, a truly noble act that would crown the glory of the tradition-blessed nation and confirm its status as a cultural superpower.

At a stroke, a French renunication of its nuclear arms would break the monopoly nuclear weapons states hold on the UN Security Council. France would become the only “official” (i.e., allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) nuclear weapons state to fulfill its share of the NPT’s goal of eventual nuclear disarmament. And continental Europe west of Russia would no longer have any indigenous nuclear weapons.

I cannot understand why the French have not yet taken this step. Their policy, in their public statements at least, is unconcerned with the grandest problems of strategy. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, in his recent op-ed in the Financial Times, wrote of the challenges Europe faces in its economic governance, its agriculture, its R&D, its domestic security, and its democratic character, but de Villepin did not mention a compelling need for France to retain its independent nuclear deterrent of around 350 warheads.

To be sure, de Villepin’s political master, embattled President of the Republic Jacques Chirac, said in 2001 (according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) that France needs to preserve “the capability to signal, when the time comes, to a potential adversary, both that our vital interests are at stake and that we are determined to safeguard them.” The United States is clearly afraid of China, North Korea, and Iran, and–distantly–Russia. That explains why Washington may not give up nuclear weapons within our lifetimes. But who is France afraid of?

Americans, caught up in the business of running a superpower, disparage the military efforts of our allies. France is the paradigmatic example: when I last wrote about the French military, some people thought I couldn’t be serious in taking France’s military posture documents seriously. The thought of three hundred and fifty nuclear weapons, however, is more than enough to focus my mind–all the more so when the reasons that have been advanced for the necessity of their existence are dubious at best and outright deluded at worst.

France is in a happy position in terms of its security, the happiest position it has enjoyed in some decades–perhaps, in fact, since it was a part of the Pax Romana. The principal challenges France, and Europe, face to their security are from terrorists and rogue states. To combat the former, France has a wealth of resources, and has been willing to share those generously with the United States and other countries. To stop the latter, France must prevent them from acquiring the only weapons with which they can threaten la belle pays, WMD. The marginal benefit of the French nuclear deterrent being so small, and the potential advantage of giving up that deterrent so great, one really wonders what vision of the strategic environment–or what intrigues in the French security establishment–have led the Fifth Republic to persist in the upkeep of a dangerous and useless arsenal.

What seems most plausible to me is not that the French are really terrified of a threat to their security by a nuclear weapons state. Even if France faced the sort of acute threat to its national existence that could justify its army and navy maintaining an arsenal capable of killing a billion people, certainly such a threat would menace all of Europe, and the French would be better off leaving the arsenal in the hands of an alliance. More likely, given the history of the French nuclear program, the French arsenal is primarily a legacy of the French quest to maintain their role as a Great Power. But by any standard, those days are over. France would be more powerful without its nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are hard to acquire, but they are harder still to give up. Some countries have abandoned their arsenals, stopped highly-developed research programs, or refrained from even seriously beginning those programs despite their clear capacity to successfully produce nuclear weapons. At the very least, global public opinion has a right and a duty to continually challenge the leaders of governments to justify their acquisition, maintenance, and presumption of the prerogative to use nuclear weapons. For a state such as France, with its avowed dreams of a Europe successfully challenging through economic and social means what its leaders claim to think is the militaristic power of the United States, to give up its nuclear arsenal would be unprecedented. It would be one of the few acts in modern diplomacy to deserve the word glorious.

Le jour de gloire est arrive.