WION (India): Can French Nukes Protect Europe? Macron’s Nuclear Plan For Europe

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Yesterday’s ‘Game Plan’ interview program focused on a single very topical issue, President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that his country stood ready to put its nuclear deterrent force at the service of all Europe. The French ‘nuclear umbrella’ would replace the decades long American nuclear umbrella which Europeans no longer trust given Donald Trump’s wavering support for NATO. It would place France at the head of all European defense planning.

The program host poses directly the question whether France’s 290 nuclear warheads can be considered truly dissuasive when facing Russia’s 1600 deployed warheads (on intercontinental missiles) plus 2800 stockpiled warheads, if one speaks exclusively of strategic weapons.

Of course, at present, given the Russian deployment of medium range (5,000 km) hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles like Oreshnik reaching all of Europe and carrying great destructive force even with nonnuclear warheads, the preponderance of Russian strength is still more dramatic.

The net result is that Russia would have a first strike capability that nullifies the French force de frappe in a single blow. In that sense, the French proposal cannot match what Europe loses with US withdrawal of support. The US nuclear triad is not just close in numbers to the Russian strategic force but by its diversity is less easily targetable for assured destruction.

I invite readers to peruse the Comments from the largely Indian audience. Quite exceptionally, they seem uniformly anti-European and anti-Macron.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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One thought on “WION (India): Can French Nukes Protect Europe? Macron’s Nuclear Plan For Europe”

  1. Take no notice of the rhetoric and the posturing it is all smoke and mirrors.

    France and Germany with the collusion of Trump is neutering NATO and creating an EU defence force.

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