France Gives Up Sea-Based Tactical Nukes
By France has acknowledged that it will no longer deploy nuclear weapons on board the Charles De Gaulle, at least under normal circumstances:
France no longer deploys nuclear weapons on its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle under normal circumstances but stores the weapons on land, according to French officials.
President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in March 2008 that France “could and should be more transparent with respect to its nuclear arsenal than anyone ever has been.” But while the other nuclear powers declared long ago that their naval weapons were offloaded or scrapped after the Cold War ended, a similar announcement has – to my knowledge – been lacking from France.
The French acknowledgment marks the end of peacetime deployment of short-range nuclear weapons at sea.
It is not clear when the French offload occurred; it may have been instigated years ago. But it completes a worldwide withdrawal of short-range nuclear weapons from the world’s oceans that 20 years ago included more than 6,500 British, French, Russian, and U.S. cruise missiles, anti-submarine rockets, anti-aircraft missiles, depth bombs, torpedoes and bombs.
The degree to which the great powers have denuclearized is remarkable. We speak about disarmament as if it were an impossibility, and I suspect that mutual zero will remain out of reach. Nevertheless, comparing the number of deployed nuclear weapons in the world today to the number in the 1980s shows a drastic reduction in nuclear arsenals, at least on the part of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia. The shift hasn’t been universal, as China has modestly increased its nuclear arsenal, and North Korea, India, and Pakistan have become acknowledged proliferants. The exact number of Israeli weapons remains unknown. Still, reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons was a dearly held goal of arms reductionists in and out of government in the 1970s and 1980s, and we’ve seen progress towards that goal under just about any conceivable metric.
