Abstract
The French political consensus supports both civilian and military nuclear programs as part of a national identity that presupposes France’s global influence. It is technically possible for the French government to maintain its nuclear deterrent force as it is today without a civilian nuclear power industry; the channels of production of weapons and their delivery systems are distinct from those used for the power industry. Because many aspects of the civilian and military nuclear programs have been intertwined for decades, however, the end of financing for civilian nuclear research projects would increase the cost of maintaining the nuclear arsenal. And in France, the link between the civilian and military nuclear sectors is far more than a budgetary matter. From its beginnings after World War II, the French nuclear effort has occupied an exalted position in the country’s national identity. In fact, one could reasonably argue that it would take a reimagining of that identity, and a reconsideration of France’s nuclear deterrent, before a French exit from civilian nuclear power could become a serious possibility.
Even a cursory study of history shows that the French nuclear industry was military before being extended to civilian uses. That same history reveals an especially close relationship among scientists, engineers, industrialists, and political and military officials involved in nuclear matters. In fact, University of Michigan Professor Gabrielle Hecht, a specialist in the history of technology, emphasizes that the establishment of the French nuclear complex—in both the civilian and military domains—played a significant role in the construction of a postwar French identity that includes the ideals of international greatness and influence (Hecht, 2004). It’s an identity that was reflected in the travels of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who, during his trips abroad, almost invariably made himself a salesman for the nuclear industry, offering to build new power plants and signing memoranda for the opening of negotiations with Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and China, among other target countries. The list of such targets is long, even if, in the end, few contracts were actually signed.
The symbol of the mutual dependency between the military and the civilian nuclear establishments is the CEA, the French acronym for the Atomic Energy Commission, created in 1945 following World War II. This body supervises all French atomic research, basic and applied, in both the civilian and military fields. It remains the major actor in research, development, and innovation in the nuclear domain, even though its name was changed in 2010 to, in a strict English translation, the Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies. The closest American parallel to the CEA would be the US Energy Department.
This research entity—which has scientific, technical, and industrial characteristics—constitutes by itself a distinct category of state-public institution. That’s to say, it has unique prerogatives among the institutions of the French Republic; among other things, the CEA is accountable for its decisions only to the French president, and it is not subject to the same financial controls as other state agencies. State financing provides 47 percent of the civilian and 89 percent of the defense resources of the commission. 1
The CEA’s principal military missions involve providing nuclear warheads to the armed forces; maintaining the reliability of the country’s deterrent force through a nuclear weapon test simulation effort that includes the
At the civilian level, the CEA initiated the development of the French nuclear power industry in the late 1940s, started work on its first nuclear power plant in 1962, and led a massive expansion of civilian nuclear power after the 1973 Arab oil embargo; it now helps to optimize the operations of the existing reactor fleet. It is also responsible for the dismantling of civilian nuclear installations and for waste management. At the same time, it participates in research on fourth-generation reactors and fuels. Last, it pursues studies on thermonuclear fusion via the ITER project, which, if successful, will be the world’s first commercial fusion power plant. 2
The ITER project is an enlightening example of the interweaving of civilian and military interests in the French nuclear program. Research on nuclear fusion was strictly military for a long time, before a peaceful project arose that aimed to provide all-but-unlimited amounts of electricity through fusion reactors. ITER is attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of a nuclear fusion power plant through an experimental reactor under construction at the Cadarache research center in France. 3 The project permits basic research teams to apply formerly exclusive military applications to the civilian sector—for example, for the production of tritium, which is also necessary for hydrogen bombs (Barrillot, 2005).
Areva SA, a multibillion-euro industrial conglomerate created in September 2001 by the merger of three firms—Framatome, Cogema, and Technicatome—is majority-owned by the French state. Though to a lesser degree, Areva also bears the mark of the interdependency of the civilian and military sectors. It mines and enriches uranium, designs and builds nuclear plants in France and around the world, and handles waste disposal and processing. But Areva also participates in the development of military technology, including nuclear submarine reactors.
Another firm also majority-owned by the French state,
An exit from civilian nuclear power would necessarily involve a reorientation and some diminishment of the activities of the Atomic Energy Commission, Areva, and EDF, even though waste management and the dismantling of nuclear installations would burden both Areva and EDF with important responsibilities for decades.
On a purely technical level, the French government could maintain the deterrent force as it is today—and indeed modernize it, as happens regularly—without a civilian nuclear power industry, because the channels of production for weapons and their delivery systems are distinct from those used to create nuclear fuel assemblies in the power industry. Moreover, with the cessation of nuclear tests, the government now has at its disposal sufficient reserves of the main raw materials necessary to manufacture bombs (estimates for France: around 31 tons of enriched uranium and 6 tons of weapon-grade plutonium; see SIPRI, 2012). 4
The end of financing for various civilian nuclear research projects would, however, have a definite effect on the cost of maintaining the deterrent force. The interdependency between the civilian and the military nuclear establishments makes it possible for a certain number of costs to be shared and even, in some cases, charged to the civilian track when their purpose is above all military. Within the limits of this article and due to a lack of information in the public realm, it is not possible to reliably estimate the total of such transfers of expenses from military to civilian accounts. (As the former Defense Minister and Prime Minister Pierre Messmer said: “There are military secrets that result in budget silences. … You will not find anywhere in the military budget the ability to accurately calculate our atomic weapons. It is very deliberately [something] we did.”) 5
Bringing civilian nuclear energy production to a halt would mean an automatic increase in costs related to possessing and maintaining the nuclear arsenal. The impact would be all the more important at the present time, when France is experiencing serious fiscal pressures that impel it to reduce public spending. But the link between the civilian and military nuclear sectors is, in France, far more than budgetary. From its beginnings in the years after World War II, the French nuclear effort has occupied an exalted position in the country’s national identity. In fact, one could reasonably argue that it would take a reimagining of that identity, and a reconsideration of France’s nuclear deterrent, before a nuclear exit could become a serious possibility.
Nuclear energy, the DNA of France
When Charles de Gaulle decided to bring France into the nuclear powers club, the United States had just used atomic weapons against the Japanese populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombings also demonstrated US power to all nations, particularly the Soviet Union. Almost immediately, de Gaulle concluded that, for France to continue as one of the few countries that count in the community of nations, and to maintain a certain independence from the United States and Russia, it also had to possess nuclear arms.
Indeed, as the French scholar and diplomat Pierre Buhler has rightly emphasized, during the Cold War, “the nuclear weapon appeared as the ultimate symbol of power, relegating all those who do not possess it to an undifferentiated and inferior category and conferring on its possessors a new preeminence in the distribution of power” (Buhler, 2011: 75). Moreover, implementing these weapons systems requires mastery of many cutting-edge, high-level technologies—not only the construction and operation of nuclear reactors and the acquisition and disposal of reactor fuel, but also radar arrays, highly secure communications systems, and so forth—that increase and reinforce the technological gap between nuclear powers and other nations.
The history of the French nuclear program and its focus on the nation’s global influence and prestige get to the heart of the reason that France is unlikely to exit the nuclear power industry in the near term: Beyond the strategic, financial, and technical stakes, a decision to pursue a civilian nuclear exit would create a political shock wave that would affect the country’s very identity, its perception of its place in the community of nations. Large sections of French society would splinter, not only at the level of industrial policy but also in diplomacy and defense policy. And the consensus that exists today on the deterrent force—a consensus that includes the political forces of the right, as well as a large part of President François Hollande’s government of the left—would be brought into question, because that consensus includes the use of nuclear energy for civilian and military purposes, as a matter of national security.
Even though it is based on dogma established more than 50 years ago in a Cold War context, this consensus on nuclear matters continues to be central to French politics; any political force aspiring to govern France must join it. During the 2012 national elections, this reality was verified again by the fallacious linking of France’s status as a nuclear power with its role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Indeed, when the Greens, a minority party, proposed eliminating nuclear weapons, the country’s two major parties—the left-leaning Socialists and the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement—argued that nuclear weapons make France heard in the Security Council (Libération, 2012). Of course, France became a permanent Security Council member in 1946 because it was one of the five great powers that were victorious in World War II; at that time, only the United States had atomic weapons. France would retain the veto power granted to any permanent member of the Security Council even if it gave up its nuclear weapons.
It would be possible, in the technical sense, for France to exit the commercial nuclear power industry while maintaining its nuclear deterrent. Such a move would require, of course, a huge shift in the types of energy the country relies on, including, as in Germany, a fundamental reorientation toward solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources. It would also require significant administrative changes, as well as additional investment in the military to make up for the shared benefits it would no longer receive from a civilian nuclear power bureaucracy.
But perhaps the largest impediment to a French nuclear exit is the consensus belief that France’s standing in the world is dependent on its being a nuclear power. Indeed, the civilian nuclear and military nuclear sectors appear so closely linked that to challenge or renounce one—in this case the civilian—would seem to undermine the basis of the other. At least, that is how such a move would appear to a large part of French society, which remains wedded to the idea that the nuclear sector is essential to the greatness of France and its place in the world.
Human security and the nuclear regime
Following the Fukushima catastrophe, the European Union established security standards to re-evaluate the risk of accidents in Europe and, above all, to find out if existing nuclear power plants pose a threat to society. Judging from these stress tests, it would appear that France has been a poor nuclear student; according to reports of test results made public by the European Union, all French nuclear power plants showed defects that increase the risk of accidents. In February 2012, however, President Sarkozy decided to extend the life of existing nuclear reactors beyond 40 years, following a report by the Court of Accounts that determined that adding new nuclear or other energy capacity would take too long and be more costly than extending nuclear operating lifetimes. Within a decade, 22 of France’s 58 civilian power reactors will have been operating for more than 40 years.
The cessation of nuclear power production would doubtless diminish the risk of accident, increasing the security of the French population by some measure. But public opinion and the political establishment stand firmly behind civilian nuclear power at present, for reasons grounded in concern about climate change, economics, secure energy supplies, and, yes, national identity. For a nuclear exit to gain political support in France, it would have to be seen as increasing France’s safety and security on the whole, in an international context. That context has changed since Charles de Gaulle set France on a nuclear course in the shadow of World War II. Clearly, nuclear weapons can do nothing against terrorism or the inequalities that are the most likely causes of tomorrow’s wars.
Still, most of France’s military experts have so far not questioned the need for a level of nuclear deterrence that enables the country to confront a strategic surprise. A decision by France to exit from the civilian nuclear sector without a parallel re-examination of its nuclear armaments would seem to create a new and discordant situation in regard to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has, since 1970, legally framed the status of nuclear relations among nations. Within this framework, the Security Council members—the only five nations recognized as nuclear weapon states under the treaty—committed themselves, on the one hand, to collaborate with non-nuclear nations on the peaceful use of nuclear energy and, on the other hand, to conduct good-faith negotiations for general nuclear disarmament.
The nuclear powers of course have not achieved disarmament and are, on the contrary, pursuing modernization of their arsenals (Acheson, 2012). If France continued on this nuclear military path as it was shuttering its own nuclear power industry, the future of Areva itself could come into question. The conglomerate now operates in 100 countries around the world, with some 47,000 employees and more than $8 billion in annual revenue. It is unclear how France’s global standing would be affected if Areva’s international operations were diminished. The inequity of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime would, however, be highlighted. France would still have nuclear weapons, yet would be less involved with helping non-nuclear nations gain civilian nuclear power capabilities.
From the beginning, France’s pursuit of nuclear capacity was military in nature and strongly linked to a certain conception of French national security and international standing. When the country turned to nuclear power to supply the majority of its electricity following the Arab oil embargo in 1973, that decision, too, was grounded in concerns about national security and international influence. In France, the military and civilian uses of nuclear energy are intimately linked. If France ever decides to seriously consider exiting the civilian nuclear power industry, it will also need to reconsider the military component of its nuclear program and to decide whether the French deterrent is required to maintain a leadership role on the international scene—or, indeed, to be a great nation—in the post-Cold War era.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is part of a three-part series on the implications of phasing out civilian nuclear power in Germany, France, and the United States. Additional editorial services for this series were made possible by grants to the
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.