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, 2002) The weapons are part of the national '' Force De Frappe '', developed in the late 1950s and 1960s to give France the ability to distance itself from NATO while having a means of Nuclear Deterrence under sovereign control. France is one of the five "Nuclear Weapons States" (NWS) under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , which France ratified in 1992. France has never ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty , leaving it open to conduct nuclear tests. However, it has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty . France is not known to possess or develop any Chemical or Biological Weapons . HISTORY See Also: Nuclear weapons and France Initial interest France was one of the nuclear pioneers going back to the work of Marie Curie (a Polish scientist living in France), and Curie's last assistant Bertrand Goldschmidt became the father of the French Bomb. During the Second World War Goldschmidt invented the standard method for extracting Plutonium while working as part of the British/Canadian team participating in the Manhattan Project . But after the Liberation in 1945 France had to start again almost from scratch. Nevertheless the first French reactor went critical in 1948 and small amounts of plutonium were extracted in 1949. There was no formal commitment to a nuclear weapons program although plans were made to build reactors for the large scale production of plutonium.'' Origin of the Force de Frappe '' (Nuclear Weapon Archive) France was eager to cooperate with other countries on nuclear weapons. In May 1954 the French were losing the war in Indochina against '', 13 March 2006 ) Before the letter even arrived the French had lost the battle and the war but later that year the French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France , made the formal decision to build the atom bomb. Britain agreed to supply the requested nuclear materials, including enriched uranium. Among the most important parts of the agreement was an arrangement for the British to check the blueprints and construction of French plutonium production reactors. According to one source, this not only helped the French get their military plutonium reactor at Marcoule into operation quickly but it also averted a disaster, for the British found defects which could have caused a catastrophic explosion at the Rhone Valley site. The same source says that when Charles De Gaulle came to power in 1958 he personally thanked Harold Macmillan for the team's work. There remained France's request for plutonium. In 1955 Britain agreed to export ten grams but "...we would not tell the US that we were going to give the French plutonium nor about any similar cases...". France was eager to cooperate with other countries on nuclear weapons. In 1956 the French agreed to secretly build the Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel and soon after agreed to construct a reprocessing plant for the extraction of plutonium at the site. The intervention of the United States in the Suez Crisis in the same year is also credited with convincing France that it needed to accelerate its own nuclear weapons program to remain a Global Power .''Stuck in the Canal'', Fromkin, David - Editorial in the '' The New York Times '', 28 October , 2006 The following year Euratom was created and under cover of the peaceful use of nuclear power the French signed deals with Germany and Italy to work together on nuclear weapons development.''Die Erinnerungen'', Franz Josef Strauss - Berlin 1989, p. 314 The West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told his cabinet that he "wanted to achieve, through EURATOM, as quickly as possible, the chance of producing our own nuclear weapons".'' Germany, the NPT, and the European Option '' (WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor) The idea was short-lived. In 1958 De Gaulle became President and Germany and Italy were excluded. First nuclear tests De Gaulle accelerated the French weapons programme and on 13 February 1960 after many twists and turns they detonated their first atom bomb in the French Algeria desert Sahara . The bomb had a 70 kiloton yield. Although Algeria became independent in 1962 France continued nuclear tests there until 1966 although the later tests were underground rather than atmospheric. For more details on this topic, see Opération Canopus The French began development of the hydrogen bomb and built a new test range on the French Polynesia n islands of Mururoa and Fangataufa . On 24 August 1968 France succeeded in detonating a thermonuclear weapon - codenamed Canopus - over Fangataufa. A fission device ignited a lithium 6 deuteride secondary inside a jacket of highly enriched uranium to create a 2.6 Megaton blast which left the whole atoll uninhabitable because of radioactive contamination. This test was the subject of the 1998 film '' Godzilla '', with the fallout creating the monster. Anti-test protests
Possibility of use In 2006 news, Thursday 19 January 2006 NON-NUCLEAR WMD France denies currently having Chemical Weapon s, ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1995, and acceded to the Biological And Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1984. France had also ratified the Geneva Protocol in 1926. SEE ALSO
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