Force de dissuasion
Following the end of the Cold War, France decommissioned all its land-based nuclear missiles, thus the Force de dissuasion today only incorporates an air- and sea-based arsenal.
On 27 January 1996, France conducted its last nuclear test in the South Pacific and then signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in September 1996.
In March 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed reports giving the actual size of France's nuclear arsenal and he announced that France would reduce its French Air Force-carried nuclear arsenal by 30%, leaving the Force de Frappe with 290 warheads.
The decision to arm France with nuclear weapons was made in 1954 by the administration of Pierre Mendès-France under the Fourth Republic.
This principle is usually referred to in French political debate as dissuasion du faible au fort ("deterrence from the weak to the strong") and was summarized in a statement attributed to de Gaulle himself: Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians.
[6]While not referred to as such, the French nuclear posture of the time bears some significant similarities to other common policies of the era such as mutually assured destruction and massive retaliation.
Perhaps the most significant difference in French strategy is that it includes the option of a first strike attack, even in response to non-nuclear provocation.
[citation needed] France carried out its first test of an atomic bomb in Algeria in 1960[7] and some operational French nuclear weapons became available in 1964.
[5] They were considered marginal for a strategic bomber role, and work began almost immediately on a replacement resulting in the Mirage III.
Since the French military judged a full-scale invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact Allies to be unlikely to be stopped by conventional armaments, the short-range nuclear missiles were meant as a "final warning" (ultime avertissement in French), which would tell the aggressor that any further advances would trigger a nuclear armageddon upon its major cities and other important targets.
The French fixed S3 IRBMs at the Plateau d'Albion were considered to be approaching obsolescence and also deemed to be no longer necessary following the fall of the Soviet Union and so also were disposed of.
The French Navy includes a nuclear strategic branch, the Force Océanique Stratégique, which has contained as many as 6 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines in service at one time.
[12] The locations of the nuclear missiles are secret (although many storage facilities are already known to the public, the number of warheads inside is classified and changes frequently).
It is placed under the supervision the Ministry of Armed Forces and plays a major role in the security chain of the nuclear devices.
More specifically, the gendarmes of this unit are responsible for ensuring the protection and the readiness of the different kinds of missiles used by the French Navy and Air Force.
