Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The culmination of De Gaulle’s irritation with the United States came during the five years 1953-1958, during which he was retired from public life and had to watch, in helpless impotence, John Foster Dulles’s studied belittling of France’s role in world affairs. The American Secretary of State’s unilateralism and “brinkmanship,” his emphasis on the Far East and his ignoring of Europe, his refusal to consult with his NATO allies, and his lack of sympathy for the French position in Indochina, Algeria, and Europe itself—all this drove De Gaulle into an icy antipathy for American policy and a conviction that the interests of France could be protected only by France itself and could be furthered as well by collaboration with the Soviet Union as by alliance with the United States.

De Gaulle was especially irritated by the American lack of concern for French and European interests in nuclear-weapons policy. Dulles’s willingness to go to war with the Communist Powers over Asiatic questions (such as the Chinese offshore islands or the Formosa Strait) without consultation with its European allies, when the most immediate consequence of any Soviet-American war would be a Russian attack on Europe and the exposure of France to a threat of nuclear attack over an issue on which Paris had not even been consulted gave De Gaulle (perfectly justifiably) profound irritation.

When the disruption of French political life over the Algerian dispute brought De Gaulle back to public life as premier in June 1958, he took steps to end this situation. What he wanted was a “Western troika,” that is, a tripartite consultation of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France on all world disputes that could involve NATO in war in Europe. In this way he hoped to prevent in the future such events as Dulles’s unilateral cancellation of the American offer of credits for the Aswan Dam that had led to the Suez crisis of 1956. This suggestion by De Gaulle was rebuffed, and led by logical steps to his decision to disentangle France from its NATO obligations and to establish an independent French nuclear force de frappe .

According to De Gaulle’s line of thought, Washington not only ignored French interests and ideas on a worldwide basis, but involved it, without consultation, in the risk of war in Europe. The general also argued that the growth of nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union left Europe unprotected so long as it based its security on an American threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Washington, he felt, would not reply to a Soviet aggression in Europe by any nuclear attack on the Soviet Union when it realized that the Soviet counterreply to such an attack would be the nuclear devastation of American cities by Soviet missiles. Why, according to De Gaulle, would the United States destroy its own cities in retaliation for a Soviet aggression, at any level, on Europe? This opened the whole problem of “nuclear credibility,” with De Gaulle at such a high level of skepticism of American good faith that he saw little credibility and thus little deterrent value in the American threat to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union to defend France. According to De Gaulle, the only secure French defense must be based on France’s own military power, which must, inevitably, be nuclear power.

At first glance, the idea of modest French nuclear armaments serving as deterrence to the mighty Soviet threat to Europe, either conventional or nuclear, seems even less credible. But De Gaulle was one of the first to recognize, as a feasible policy, an idea that was subsequently adopted by the Soviet Union itself. This was the idea that a nuclear deterrence does not require the possession of overwhelming nuclear power or even the nuclear superiority in which Washington long believed, but may be based on the capacity to inflict unacceptable nuclear damage. In De Gaulle’s mind, the explosion of French hydrogen bombs over three or four major Soviet cities, including Moscow, would constitute unacceptable damage in the Kremlin’s eyes and would thus provide effective deterrence against a Soviet aggression in Europe (or at least against France) without any need for France to rely on any uncertain American response.

To provide for such a French threat of nuclear response to Soviet aggression, De Gaulle’s regime accepted the great economic and financial burden of obtaining a force de frappe . In its first stage, to be achieved by 1966, this would consist of 62 Mirage IV supersonic manned jet bombing planes to carry France’s first-generation, 60-kiloton plutonium bombs. By the end of 1964, when twenty of these planes were operational, they were being produced at a rate of one a month and were being matched by the production of one bomb a month from the atomic pile at Marcoule. By 1966 the power of the bomb is expected to increase to its maximum size of about 300 kilotons.

The Mirage IV, as vehicle for the French nuclear threat, will be replaced by twenty-five land-based missiles fired from underground silos. These will be operational about 1969, and will shift their warheads from A-bombs to H-bombs some time in the early 1970’s. The third generation of French nuclear weapons will probably be Polaris-type nuclear submarines to become operational some time in the 1970’s. If these can be speeded up and the Mirage IV could be retained, it is possible that the brief transition stage of land-based missiles might be skipped completely. The total nuclear submarine fleet will probably not exceed three vessels, even in the late 1970’s.

These plans do not seem impressive in comparison with the nuclear armament of the two Superpowers, but they are expected to make France an independent nuclear Power and allow it to exercise an independent nuclear deterrence. However, if countermeasures, such as the development of an anti-missile missile, become more successful, the additional penetration devices needed to allow the French nuclear threat to be credible may raise the financial cost of the whole effort to a level that would put a very severe strain on the French budget. In that case, France must either give up the effort or try to persuade the European Community to do it as a joint effort. (This might reactivate the West European Union or fall to the largest fragment of a divided NATO.) But in this case, France, despite De Gaulle, will have to accept some kind of European political union.

All of this points up the fact that the future political and military structure of Europe revolves about two quite separate problems: (1) Will it be a united Europe or a Europe of national states? (as De Gaulle wants), and (2) Will it be aligned with the United States or will it be an independent neutralist factor in the Cold War? The United States wants Europe to be united and allied; De Gaulle wants it to be disunited and independent; the Kremlin wants it disunited and neutral; London’s policy, until 1960, was to see it disunited and allied to the Atlantic system. It seems likely, for reasons already given, that Europe’s interests and those of the world as a whole might be served best if Europe could be united and independent. Moreover, in view of the conflicting forces involved, it seems very likely that Europe, after a considerable delay caused by De Gaulle, will finally emerge as united and independent.

Thus the future of Europe, like that of France itself, depended, in the mid-1960’s, on De Gaulle’s continuance in office. This was ensured, at least until the next presidential election in 1965, unless interrupted by death, by the fact that no alternative to De Gaulle could be seen clearly even by his opponents. In the early 1960’s, the political pattern of France was dominated by four factors: (1) the terrorism of the extreme Right, led by the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which resisted the Algerian settlement even after it was completed in 1962 and made several efforts to assassinate De Gaulle; (2) the disorganization and discontent of the older political leaders as De Gaulle continued to change French politics to a simple administrative structure with himself as an almost monarchical figure standing as a symbol of France above political considerations; (3) the steady, if not always enthusiastic, support of De Gaulle by the passive mass of Frenchmen who saw the general as a center of solidity in the middle of a sea of confusions; and (4) the unpredictable and despotic control of the political initiative by De Gaulle himself.