Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Emmanuel Macron has said France has offered to temporarily move nuclear warheads to allied European countries for the first time, as he pledged to increase the size of the country’s arsenal.
On Monday, he laid out a new doctrine of “forward deterrence” that would involve deeper co-operation between France and seven other European countries, including Germany and Poland.
It would also allow European partners to take part in exercises or deploy their conventional armies on support missions.
“Today, a new step of France’s deterrence can now be taken. We are entering the path of what I call forward deterrence,” the French president said in a speech at the Île Longue naval base in Brittany, which houses the country’s nuclear-armed submarines.
“It will, finally, provide for the temporary deployments of elements of our strategic air forces to allied countries,” he added.
Macron invited other European countries to engage in a “strategic dialogue” with France over nuclear deterrence in 2020, but few countries were interested at the time.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and doubts over the US’s commitment to European defence following Donald Trump’s return to the White House last year have prompted an urgent rethink in European capitals.
The developments have prompted the French president to flesh out how France’s nuclear deterrent could help protect the rest of Europe.
France said in-depth talks had already been conducted with Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece and Sweden, and they were willing to move ahead with deeper co-operation.
With these countries, joint committees would soon be created to work on the new initiatives. Germany said in a joint statement with France that the “first concrete steps” would begin this year, including German participation in French nuclear exercises and visits to strategic sites.
Macron emphasised that France had consulted and co-ordinated with both the US and Nato and that the moves “are perfectly compatible” with the existing systems. He added that they would not alter nuclear deterrence provided by the US, the UK and Nato.
At the outset of the talks with allies, some were concerned that any moves to expand French nuclear support for Europe risked alienating the US, which has since the 1950s had fighters and nuclear weapons stationed in five European countries. Berlin in particular wanted to make sure nothing undermined US leadership, but Paris has managed to assuage those fears.
The countries said in a joint statement: “This Franco-German co-operation is based on the shared understanding that the nuclear dimension of deterrence remains a cornerstone of European security, relying on US extended deterrence, including US nuclear weapons forward-deployed to Europe and on the independent strategic nuclear forces of France and the United Kingdom.”
“This is genuine strategic convergence between our countries [aimed] at giving real depth to the defence of our continent,” Macron said.
But he emphasised that the key aspects of French deterrence — no shared decision-making and absolute autonomy for France — would stay the same. The principle of France only having enough warheads to have “strict sufficiency” would be unchanged. He also did not specify how many additional warheads Paris would develop.
Macron’s remarks came hours after a suspected Iranian drone struck a British RAF base in Cyprus, in the first such attack on European soil after US-Israeli air strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the weekend.
Successive presidents, going back to Charles de Gaulle, have said the French bomb benefits Europe and is a key part of regional security.
In 2020, Macron said that “the vital interests of France from now on have a European dimension”. But Paris never defined the terms, keeping the president’s options open and the adversary guessing — the essence of nuclear deterrence. The speech on Monday provided new details, but Macron again reiterated that there would be no specific guarantees or definitions of red lines.
France has the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, with about 300 warheads. They can be deployed from four submarines, at least one of which is constantly at sea, or delivered by Rafale fighter jets. Officials say France spends about 13 per cent of its defence budget maintaining its nuclear deterrent.
The US, Russia and China each possess thousands of warheads, but French doctrine holds that it needs only enough weapons to inflict “unacceptable damage” on an adversary, thereby deterring attacks on French soil.