Deterring terrorists with madness.

last updated 8 January 2015

France

Bruno Dive

Gaullism is now officially dead, said Bruno Dive in Bordeaux’s Sud-Ouest. President Jacques Chirac killed it last week with his “quasi-historic” change in France’s nuclear doctrine. France, Chirac declared, is prepared to use nuclear weapons not only against nuclear states, but against states that practice terrorism or use weapons of mass destruction. And the terrorist attack that draws such a response need not even be on French soil; it could be an attack on an ally or on a “strategic interest”—read: oil. With this surprise pronouncement, Chirac has definitively taken France away from “deterrence of weakness with strength,” and embarked it on a course of “deterrence of strength with madness.” He’s certainly put the world on notice that France still considers itself a great power. But back home, we’re left to wonder whether a country that has a 46 billion euro deficit each year can afford a 3.5 billion euro nuclear deterrent. Whoever replaces Chirac as president next year is sure to be “far less convinced than he of the primacy of nuclear weapons.”