Response to the article ‘Unfit for purpose: reassessing the development and deployment of French nuclear weapons (1956–74)’ by Pelopidas and Philippe

Abstract

In ‘Unfit for Purpose: Reassessing the Development and Deployment of French Nuclear Weapons (1956–74)’, we developed an interdisciplinary methodology combining archival material from France, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as technical analysis of the performance of French nuclear weapon systems, to reassess the strategic rationality of the first generation of the force de frappe and its credibility. This is particularly important as, over the last three decades, claims about the strategic rationality of the procurement and credibility of the French nuclear force, which are at odds with discoveries about other nuclear weapon programmes, have been made across history and security studies. We found that ‘the development of the French nuclear force was chaotic and absent of any strategic rationality’ (p. 258) and that ‘French nuclear weapons lacked credibility until at least 1974’ (p. 259). We also corrected claims in security studies about the supposed security drivers of the French nuclear procurement strategy and the labelling of the French nuclear posture as ‘asymmetric escalation’, and confirmed an ‘existential deterrence bias’ in existing scholarship. Maurice Vaïsse and Dominique Mongin, in their response to our article, focus on our first two claims only but disprove neither. They engage in a critique of our scholarly methodology and standards, failing to address the fact that the article underwent a rigorous peer-review and editorial process. Finally, they attempt to undermine our findings by casting our work as ‘an ideological attempt to deconstruct history’. On the rationality of French nuclear weapon strategy, Vaïsse and Mongin rely solely on official French stated intentions as if they were adequate and sufficient evidence of the outcomes and technical performance of the arsenal. They are absolutely not, and we have established this in our article. We define ‘rationality’ as