French Nuclear Weapons - Fifth Republic
France had pressed hard since the end of the Second World War to regain its credibility since surrendering to the Nazis in 1940. In the postwar period France was in a difficult position, as far as its national identity was concerned; it had to show dignity and pride and at the same time cultivate US favor.
The return of General de Gaulle after the crisis of 13 May 1958 marked the end of French indecision in nuclear matters. A number of factors on the international scene began to impact on the debate in France. The fall of Diên Biên Phu in 1954 demonstrated the extent to which France could be isolated in certain risk situations, just as two years later, during the Suez Crisis, when the Soviet Union threatened France with a nuclear attack.
Under the previous government, on 05 December 1956, a Committee for the Military Applications of Atomic Energy was created secretly; this committee provided for co-operation between the Atomic Energy Commissariat and senior military officials. On 5th October 1956, there was an order for the establishment of a programme concerning vehicles of delivery. Finally, a program was outlined on 19th December 1956 for a future strategic nuclear bomb. The choices were clear; at the meeting of the Defence Council on 17th June 1958, he confirmed the date of the first French nuclear explosion and decided to accelerate the French nuclear program.
To General de Gaulle, Founder of the Fifth Republic, the development of a thermonuclear capability was a means for France to strengthen its nuclear deterrence, and even make it irreversible. The first Soviet bomb exploded in 1949, that of the British in 1952, that of the French in 1960, and that of the Chinese in 1966. In parallel, these countries developed the vectors able to carry the bomb: planes initially, land-based missiles, then missiles launched by submarines.
The first generation of weapons produced by CEA/DAM were fission devices. During a meeting of the Council of Ministers on July 18, 1962, the Minister for Scientific Research, Atomic Energy and Space Questions, Gaston Palewski, announced the development of France's first operational nuclear device, the AN 11. Two years later, it was in service on the Mirage IV aircraft.
The role of full-scale nuclear tests became key to the credibility of nuclear deterrence. Testing was, at the time, the only way to guarantee the weapons' operational reliability and safety. It was a matter of credibility, both technical and political.
During that period, one of the major challenges which the DAM had to overcome was related to thermonuclear technology. France finally mastered it in 1968, not without some difficulty. This consolidated its status as a nuclear power, since it meant it had (for equal mass) more powerful, more precise nuclear weapons which could, if necessary, break through enemy anti-missile defenses more easily. To General de Gaulle, Founder of the Fifth Republic, the development of a thermonuclear capability was also a means for France to strengthen its nuclear deterrence, and even make it irreversible.
General de Gaulle's belief that the success of the development of the nuclear defense program was dependent on budget planning can be seen in the subsequent definition of the five-year nuclear energy plans, which had underpinned the launch of atomic energy in France. The first two Military Planning Acts (LPM) laid the foundations and ensured the long-term build-up of the "Strike Force", starting with the commissioning of the Strategic Air Forces (FAS) in October 1964, then equipped with Mirage IV-A aircraft.
Compagnie des Machines Bull produced an experimental computuer, Gamma-2 in 1949. When Bull produced the Gamma-60 in 1958 it had a computer that could match some of the American capabilities. The French Atomic Energy Authority (Commissariat àl'Énergie Atomique or CEA) started to investigate electronic computing in 1952 and in 1956. It bought its first digital computers in 1957. From then on it continually acquired the most powerful computing equipment available to meet the needs of both civilian and military nuclear research. The first French atomic test came in February 1960, much later than the Americans and the Soviets. And the test only occurred after the Gamma-60 was created.
David Warren Kirsch wrote " "By 1963, in an effort to avoid nuclear conflicts in the future, President Kennedy proposed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. But the U.S. soon bypassed the treaty’s restrictions using Seymour Cray’s CDC 6600 supercomputer. The computer was powerful enough to simulate thermonuclear explosions without actually detonating a device. ... It was able to do thermonuclear modeling on a whim. Nothing the Soviets or anyone else had could match it. This simply meant that the United States did not in fact have to limit its nuclear testing."
By 1964, the General was faced with a somewhat unanticipated set of problems. Bull, the only French company that specialized in computers for management, lost its majority holdings and became dominated by the American General Electrics Company.
The Third Generation of computers (1963-1972) brought huge gains in computational power. In 1964, Seymour Cray developed the CDC 6600, which was first machine to be labelled a supercomputer. It had the first architecture to use functional parallelism. By using 10 separate functional units that could operate simultaneously and 32 independent memory banks, the CDC 6600 was able to attain a computation rate of 1 million floating point operations per second (1 Mflops). The IBM 360/91, released during the same period, was roughly twice as fast as the CDC 6600. Many of these went to various nuclear bomb-related labs, and quite a few found their way into university computing labs.
The CDC 6600 had about one megabyte of memory and a peak performance of less than one megaflops. To put that into perspective, all contemporary personal computers perform in the tens or hundreds of megaflops and regularly contain at least a gigabyte of memory – more than 15,000 times that of the CDC 6600. In the United States, the 6600 provided a quantum leap in the computing power available to Livermore and its competitor nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos.
The CDC6600 even gave the United States a temporary lever in its attempt to control French nuclear weapons development. A minor crisis erupted in 1966 when it became publicly known that the U.S. government had turned down the proposed export of an American Control Data 6600 supercomputer in order to slow France's development of nuclear weapons. This meant reviving the attempts to resume French computer production. Under the personal supervision of the French president Charles de Gaulle, the Plan Calcul was created.
By 1970 France was among the European leaders in the use of computers. French companies had developed a few models of general purpose computers and several special purpOse types, but most of the successful production models had been licensed versions of US designs. Economic problems forced the merger of France's largest computer company with the US General Electric Company to form the GE—Bull company.
In efforts to gain an independent computer capability, the French Government participated in formation of a consortium of French companies under Plan Calcul. This group displayed a prototype model, the IRIS-50, which was comparable to the IBM 360/40, but planned production had not been achieved by 1970. Successful production under Plan Calcul involved licensed versions of computers designed by Scientific Data Systems of the US. Plan Calcul had publicized intentions to develop very large scale computers competitive with the largest and fastest US models. Th emain quantative needs in France, however, were for smaller types and economic considerations could prevent Plan Calcul from making any significant number of large machines.
In spite of news statements to the contrary, by 1970 France probably had enough large computers to support the design of refined nuclear weapons, provided they can supply adequate programs and make efficient use of computers installed outside as well as inside nuclear facilities. Among the large scale computers installed in France by 1970 were several CDC 6600, CDC 6400, CDC 3600, IBM 7094, and Univac 1108 models, as well as an IBM 7030 model. French concerns like Electronic Marcel Dassault also demonstrated abilities to make special purpose computers for airborne applications.
The development process of the first French H-bomb was quite lengthy, requiring 21 nuclear tests spread over eight years. Unlike the UK, when creating a national nuclear weapon, France did not receive any assistance from the United States at the first stage. On the contrary, the Americans obstructed the acquisition of the supercomputers CDC 6600 by the French. This computer was required for calculations in the development of French thermonuclear weapons. France managed to circumvent the export ban, the supercomputer still turned out to be purchased through a dummy commercial firm. The requisite calculations were performed surreptitiously on an apparently civil 6600.
France had an effective nuclear force de frappe, the ultimate demonstration of the triumph of De Gaulle's independent line.
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