Following Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian deterrence forces, including the nuclear arsenal, to be put on high alert. A few days earlier, the head of the Kremlin warned those “trying to interfere” with the actions of Russian troops “that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead to consequences (…) previously unknown.” Anxiety about a nuclear attack is growing in Europe. According to Benoît Pelopidas, founder of the Nuclear Knowledges program at Sciences Po and author of the book Rethinking the Nuclear Choice (Presses de Sciences Po, 2022), France has relied on nuclear deterrence rather than defense.
Challenges. Is France ready for a nuclear attack?
Benoit Pelopidas –If a nuclear strike is understood as the explosion of several warheads (the front part of the projectile, containing the lethal charge, editor’s note) Nuclear in territory, that is, France is not ready for a scenario other than a terrorist attack. Already in 1954, the National Civil Protection Service noted that fifteen thermonuclear bombs were enough to destroy France. The Russian arsenal today includes 4,500 nuclear warheads, not counting 1,500 awaiting dismantling, and we remain vulnerable to this kind of attack. This is partly due to the invention in the early 1960s of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which fly about 20 times faster than the previous generation of launch vehicles – bombers. This makes it almost impossible to intercept the missile after launch. The invisibility of the submarines that carry some of these missiles makes it impossible to destroy the missile before it is launched. The hypersonic missiles that Russia possesses today continue this acceleration dynamic, which increases vulnerability and reduces decision time. As for missile defense systems, France does not have a national system of this type, and American systems still perform very poorly in tests, which excludes the possibility of interception protection from a massive attack.
Switzerland has 360,000 nuclear shelters, which became mandatory during the Cold War to protect itself if attacked. Isn’t it the same in France?
Unlike Switzerland, which made efforts during the Cold War to build nuclear shelters for its population, France did not develop such a program. Switzerland is an exception; Sweden also developed a major population program during the Cold War. More recently, private companies have been selling individual shelters. Faced with the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war, these shelters turned out to be an illusion of protection anyway, in the sense that survival there was supposed to be precarious and short-lived.
in your book Rethinking nuclear options, you explain that the choice of nuclear deterrence is not the choice of defense. Why?
The French strategy was to think of defense in terms of state continuity and a chain of command that would order nuclear reprisals rather than protecting the population. Nuclear deterrence is a threat-based strategy, a bet on vulnerability as a security condition, assuming that said threat will intimidate the adversary, that this fear will make him cautious to the point of persuading him to abandon plans of attack, and that neither side will lose control and will not be harmed by an accidental or unauthorized nuclear explosion. According to this logic, there is no need to protect populations. It is based on the fact that it is enough to be able to inflict unacceptable damage to the enemy in order to dissuade him from attacking. Moreover, in the face of an enemy with a large nuclear arsenal seeking to limit the damage it can do, our nuclear weapons become a priority target.
For you, we have created the illusion of protection…
The concept of defense refers to the ability to limit or avoid damage in the event of an attack. We don’t have that ability, so I’m talking about illusion. We have wrongly turned vulnerability into protection, believing that the bet on nuclear deterrence will always be won. The illusion of protection comes from the temptation to confuse what you want to believe with what you can prove. Three sources can be distinguished. First, nuclear vulnerability is not related to the daily lives of our fellow citizens. Recall that the last atmospheric nuclear tests date back to 1980. For forty years they were literally invisible.
Then the discourse of governmental or semi-official experts on nuclear deterrence is intended not only to describe the strategy, but also to convince of its effectiveness. As a result, this goal makes them unable to describe all nuclear vulnerabilities. For example, they erroneously write that all cases of preventing unwanted nuclear explosions could be called successes in nuclear deterrence and arms control, when some of them can be shown to be due to chance.
What is the third source of this illusion of protection?
This is due to the difficulty of believing in the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, even if it is established. Even political and military elites do not escape this difficulty. However, from the 1950s to the early 1990s, fiction and popular culture helped us overcome this disbelief and test the possibility of disaster. This is no longer the case since the 1990s, when nuclear war is almost non-existent and popular culture minimizes the consequences of nuclear weapons or makes them indispensable tools of salvation in the face of existential threats. Thus, we have lost significant help in overcoming our disbelief in the face of the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.
Can we completely rule out Vladimir Putin’s use of nuclear weapons against France?
Of course, I know nothing about the plans of the Russian president. Russian military documents and his speeches open up the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine or as demonstration fires, rather than against France. But there is a question what answer it will lead to. You should also be aware of the danger of escalation. If Russian troops violate NATO airspace, it could be a casus belli.