The newspapers here in Britain are rammed with stories about an unprecedented defence pact between the UK and France. Given that the agreement is supposed to last for about half as long as the hundred years war between the two countries, the whole thing is bound to raise eyebrows.
But the nuclear weapons aspect of the agreement has really caught my attention. According to the terms of the agreement, the French and British will be all but merging the science portions of their nuclear weapons programmes. According to the UK Ministry of Defence, this will include the construction of a new non-nuclear hydrodynamic test facility at Valduc, the primary French nuclear weapon laboratory 45 kilometres northwest of Dijon. A support facility will be built at the UK’s Atomic Weapon’s Establishment in Aldermaston, and UK and French nuclear scientists will be regularly exchanged between the two laboratories.
This would represent a big change in the nuclear relationship between the two countries. The UK has historically been much more closely aligned to the United States. UK weapons scientists are pretty commonly seen at US laboratories like Los Alamos, and recently it emerged that critical components of the UK’s warheads are actually built by America (which also manufactures the Trident missiles that deliver them to their targets).
The French, on the other hand, are known for their fierce independence. Their nuclear deterrent is home grown, and not too much is known about it (relative to other programmes). France was one of the last Western countries to test nuclear weapons in 1996, and its submarine-launched, 100 kilotonne TN-75 warheads are considered to be among the most sophisticated weapons out there.
So how will the UK and France work together? The UK’s Ministry of Defence tells me that a lot of the collaboration will surround stockpile stewardship activities — the scientific evaluation of warheads, in the absence of testing, to determine whether they are still effective as they age. The implications of the collaboation are still somewhat unclear — not least in its impact on the relationship between US and UK weapons scientists.
Credit: Wikipedia