French Nuclear Strategy and European Theater Nuclear War Planning: Europe Reacts to Trump

American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the third year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.

April 1, 2025

In early March, Emmanuel Macron, the French President, raised the prospect of addressing the issue of nuclear sharing with other European countries. His remarks responded to Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, who raised the possibility of France considering or extending its nuclear deterrence to include Europe. This is a change from the traditional French approach to nuclear deterrence.

The decision for France to develop nuclear weapons was made in 1954, the year after the Korean War ended. That war had an impact on Charles de Gaulle, who became President of France in 1958. De Gaulle believed that the United States could become preoccupied with its security concerns elsewhere in the world, and as a result, Europe would become a lesser priority for the United States. So, de Gaulle envisioned a French nuclear force to ensure that France, at least, had a nuclear deterrent against the then-Soviet Union. The Korean War’s impact on de Gaulle could be seen in a statement he made in 1950, the year the war began:

The Korean war is the preliminary sign. The whole world knows that one day or another the aggression could be unfurled on Europe and on France.

And later he added:

[W]ar is encroaching and will not stop . . . France will not recover in time [and] will be invaded, bombarded. [French leaders will be] hung, because the communists are tough, and the people will have suffered.

Britain also possesses nuclear weapons, but I believe focusing on France is crucial to assess how Europe, particularly the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is responding to Donald Trump's return to the White House. However, Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, sounded like de Gaulle when he reflected on the start of the Korean War. Starmer had the Ukraine War in mind when he stated:

In our heart of hearts, we’ve known this moment was coming from just over three years ago, when Russian tanks rolled across the border [of Ukraine]. We have to treat this as a galvanizing moment and seize the initiative.

Trump repeatedly has pushed his claim (which is incorrect) that NATO countries need to pay their “bills”; otherwise, the United States might not be there to protect the continent against a Russian invasion. Essentially, Trump is resuming where he left off during his first term in the White House. This time, however, with Trump trying to end the Ukraine War, essentially by siding with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, against Ukraine, the situation for Europe looks worse. It is, therefore, understandable that rethinking European nuclear deterrence is an issue that will likely receive considerable attention over the next several years.

While de Gaulle’s thinking focused only on France, Macron has opened the possibility of a broader role for France’s nuclear force. This might lead to increased considerations about theater nuclear war.

Nuclear war thinking has been a part of NATO's strategy since the alliance was established in 1949. Carte Blanche was a NATO exercise in 1955 that considered the use of nuclear weapons. Generally, “tactical” or “theater” indicates a distinction from strategic nuclear weapons. Typically, tactical or theater nuclear weapons are associated with lower yields and shorter ranges, whereas higher yields characterize strategic nuclear weapons. Yields are expressed in terms of equivalent TNT, with higher yields producing a more significant blast and greater radiation; lower yields result in a lower blast and less radiation.

However, in the case of Carte Blanche, the nuclear weapons that were part of this military exercise had yields that were equal to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, toward the end of the Second World War. There has been an increase in yields since the use of atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Hydrogen bombs, which began to be developed in the 1950s, have a greater yield than atomic bombs and cause a more enormous explosion. One nuclear scientist stated:

With the [atomic] bomb[s] we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it killed everybody within a mile radius. [A hydrogen bomb’s reach would be closer to 5 or 10 miles.] In other words, you kill more people.

Carte Blanche took place at a time when there was an East Germany and West Germany; it was understandable that, stimulated, nuclear blasts took place over German territory, which would be the focus on any conflict between NATO and the then Warsaw Pact (headed by the Soviets). One study stated regarding the impact on the West German public:

Operation Carte Blanche proved ‘devastating’ to the German people, because of fallout and excessive blast effects. Rather than intimidate the Russians, as it was designed to do [emphasis added], it succeeded in demonstrating to the German people that for them, at least, a tactical nuclear war fought over their territory might be essentially indistinguishable from a strategic nuclear war.

While the German chancellor raised the issue of French nuclear deterrence as a potential nuclear umbrella for Europe as a whole, it will be interesting to consider how the public in different European countries might react to any developments regarding the use of nuclear deterrence in the absence of the United States’ presence.

Henry Kissinger's 1957 book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, raised the issue of a tactical or theater nuclear war; however, three years later, he concluded that the idea made no sense. Kissinger created a situation where opposing atomic forces would be contained, similar to 16th-century ships fighting each other. Critics pointed out that a contained nuclear war on European territory was flawed thinking on his part.

How nuclear thinking will develop and begin to come together around something that might start to look like a European nuclear doctrine where nuclear war planning and nuclear weapons development begin to interact will have to be an outgrowth of any formalized relationship where France agrees to reconsider how it might consider its role beyond just a defense of France.

When Richard Nixon was president in the 1970s, he proposed what became known as the Nixon Doctrine. Nixon stated in 1970:

[T]he central thesis [of the Nixon Doctrine] is that the United States will participate in the defense and development of allies and friends, but that America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world. We will help where it makes a real difference and is considered in our interest.

This aspect of Nixon’s thinking — that the United States might not always be there for its allies — contains elements that can sound like those of Trump. However, Trump has managed to create the impression that he is willing to disengage from European defense in a manner far more extensive than what Nixon was considering. One defense analyst stated at the time Nixon was expounding his doctrine:

[The doctrine] might view with equanimity the emergence of a European defense community, even if such a community was to construct a ‘European’ nuclear force around an Anglo-French nucleus.

Trump's views on the world sound more like the isolationist thinking of the 1930s (I addressed some of this in my last article, Trump is Doing Putin’s Negotiating for Him to End the Ukraine War and That Matters to Issues Beyond Ukraine). Trump and his almost disregard for Europe have begun to force Europe’s hand to consider its defenses, both with conventional and nuclear weapons. The Russian invasion of Ukraine added more fuel to the fire, and this particular defense analyst’s thinking from fifty years ago is starting to sound feasible.

France withdrew from NATO in 1966, although the French government had announced its intention to withdraw its Mediterranean fleet from NATO control as early as 1959; the 1966 announcement was merely a final step. France, then, rejoined NATO in 2015. Just as France gradually withdrew from NATO, it gradually returned to it. Two decades before formally rejoining, it had begun participating in NATO operations. The Bosnian War, which took place between 1992 and 1995, saw French troops participate in peacekeeping operations.

France has gone through changes in how it looks at the use of nuclear weapons. The United States felt that de Gaulle was more inflexible than the French leaders who followed him. However, changes in military thinking were underway in the last years of his presidency. De Gaulle resigned as president in 1969, and by then, French military thinking began to consider the combined use of conventional and nuclear weapons, influenced by developments in the United States during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The United States was developing flexible war-fighting options, and briefly in this period started to address limited nuclear war options more openly than was the case during the 1950s.

By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had achieved a state of nuclear parity, prompting a reassessment of the defense strategies of European countries. A military analyst from this era addressed European thinking and stated:

The West Europeans are beginning to realize that there is a need for establishing countervailing deterrence locally, at levels below the strategic exchange.

Reflecting on developments from the Cold War years is important because Europe has memories and plans it can draw upon to consider its current direction.

Trump still has more than three years remaining in his second term, and he has the potential to cause more damage than he has already inflicted on the Western Alliance. While Europeans are focused on Trump and probably impatient for his second term to end, the fact that it is several years away means they still need to plan as though the damage that is being done cannot quickly be rebuilt after he is out of the White House, so their nuclear war planning needs to proceed separately from the United States' nuclear considerations.

Nuclear war planning cannot take place in a vacuum but needs to address how the Russians are looking at nuclear use situations. Putin is in his 26th year as ruler, and Europeans must wonder what type of leader will follow him. At this point, Putin has ruled longer than several czars. Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who unexpectedly resigned in December 1999, three months before the Presidential election in which Putin won 53 percent of the vote. Putin was an unknown to the West during this time. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2000, a panel moderator, focused on Russia, asked, “Who is Mr. Putin?”

Some of that confusion or puzzlement about Putin aided him in dealing with the West for several years. The Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of parts of Ukraine in 2014 did not have the type of wake-up call that the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had on Europe.

When Putin became acting president after Yeltsin’s resignation, his first decree was to grant Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. His second decree, however, may not have received sufficient notice, in that decree, he ended the no-first-use-of-nuclear-weapons doctrine. As this decree stated, “[nuclear weapons could be used] if other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted or deemed ineffective.” Nuclear doctrine has been changing for some years in Russia, well before any Russian military actions involving Putin’s rule.

It would be incorrect to see Putin’s decree as an abrupt break from the past: Putin formalized what had been underway for at least six years before replacing Yeltsin. In 1993, the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council stated:

Russia reconfirms its principle of non-use of nuclear weapons against any state except in cases when nuclear or non-nuclear allied forces would lead an aggression against Russia. [This new doctrine is] in complete accord with the world practices [of the United States, Britain and France].

When Leonid Brezhnev was the Soviet leader in 1982, he made a no-first-use pledge at the United Nations. In 1993, when the deputy secretary announced the change in nuclear doctrine, it was not taken seriously in the West. Again, as with Putin and his actions, the West has been slow to react or accept that what has been underway in Russia concerns the stability of world affairs.

In the period roughly between the mid-1950s and the 1960s, the Soviet Union placed a lot of emphasis on developing strategic nuclear weapons. As a result, there was a decline in attention on theater warfare. Western military analysts at the time struggled to determine whether Soviet strategic and theater war thinking were closely tied together or distinct. Somewhere toward the end of the 1960s, it appeared that the Soviets were contemplating a limited theater war that might not escalate into a full-scale strategic nuclear conflict. Some of this shift in Soviet military thinking may have been a response to what they perceived as changes in the United States’ military thinking. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, in Congressional testimony, stated in 1965:

I do not quite share the thought that the use of tactical nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to full-scale nuclear war. I think there is a great risk that the use of tactical nuclear weapons will lead to general nuclear war, but I do not believe it is inevitable.

Three years later, in 1968, McNamara stated:

It seemed to us in 1961 that one of the first things we had to do was to separate the problem of strategic nuclear war from that of all other kinds of war.

I bring up this earlier period because, if the Soviets were developing their ways of envisioning warfare, separating strategic nuclear war from theater war (which could include both conventional and nuclear weapons), there was an interaction at a military level of thinking between the United States and the Soviet Union. I can assume that any developments regarding France and its plans to integrate its nuclear forces into a broader NATO defense plan will prompt the Russians to adjust their defense thinking and respond to any developments between France and NATO.

The Ukraine War has undoubtedly had an impact on the Russian use of nuclear weapons thinking, and, as a result, on NATO and the United States’ considerations about how to proceed with their involvement in this war. It is still unclear how seriously the West took Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine War (I addressed some of this in an earlier article, Putin's Political Use of Nuclear Threats and the Ukraine War: A Way to Look at a Longer History of Nuclear Threats and Ponder Whether Something Has Changed). Russia possesses somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 low-yield nuclear weapons. I went over this with a military officer who served for a time with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He explained that the Russians were either developing or already possessed nuclear weapons that, when detonated, could make it possible to walk over the ground where such weapons were used, several days after an explosion—in other words, the radiation had dissipated to levels where it was safe for people to walk the grounds. This suggests that if radiation drift is a concern, given prevailing winds that would carry radiation in the direction of Russian territory, the Russians may be attempting to mitigate this issue. If so, this would indicate that they are working at developing situations where they see the credible use of nuclear weapons that would not lead to radiation blowback on them.

What is the current Russian military doctrine, and has it undergone significant changes since the end of the Soviet era? The Soviet Union ended in 1991. That issue will receive increased attention as France more clearly articulates its vision for changes to its nuclear deterrence. In addition, Russian nuclear thinking, or what it calls escalate to de-escalate, was developed before their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This may be important since it will help to address how Putin and his military advisors interpret the lessons they take away from Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine War, and how those lessons fit in with nuclear weapons-use thinking that was developed before the full-scale invasion in 2022. A Trump presidency that brings forth new ways of addressing the possibility of a theater nuclear war can be a nasty side effect of his legacy.

We are only at the beginning of a new era when scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons are receiving increased attention. This will not only impact Europe and its military interactions with Russia but also have ramifications for other parts of the world. The type of attention focused on theater nuclear war planning and weapons development might have an impact on how Pakistan and India reconsider their nuclear forces. Or, in the case of the Middle East, if Iran develops nuclear weapons, how will European nuclear thinking affect scenarios for any war in the region? Trump's attitudes toward the United States' ties to the Western Alliance can have broad implications beyond his utterances of disregard or even disgust toward our long-time allies.

I envision this article as the first of several that will examine changes in European defense thinking in response to Trump’s policies toward NATO and the broader European context.

NOTES

Melissa Chan, “What Is the Difference Between a Hydrogen Bomb and an Atomic Bomb?” Time (September 22, 2017): https://time.com/4954082/hydrogen-bomb-atomic-bomb/

Brendan Cole, “Macron Raises Prospect of New European Nuclear Weapons,” Newsweek (March 1, 2025): https:// www.newsweek.com/france-macron-nuclear-weapons-2038175

Daniel Dale, “Fact Check: Debunking five false Trump claims about NATO,” CNN Politics (February 13, 2024): https:// www.cnn.com/2024/02/13/politics/fact-check-trump-nato/index.html

Robert T. Davis, II, “Cold War Infamy: NATO Exercise Carte Blanche,” in Beatrice Heuser, Tormod Heier and Guillaume Lasconjarias, Military Exercises: Political Messaging and Strategic Impact (NATO Defense College, 2018): https://www.academia.edu/70791173/Military_Exercises_Political_Messaging_and_Strategic_Impact

Sonni Efron, “Russia Discards Soviet Legacy of No First Use of A-Weapons,” Los Angeles Times (November 4, 1993): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-11-04-mn-53224-story.html

“France: Back in NATO after 43 years,” The Week (January 8, 2015): https://theweek.com/articles/507396/france-back-nato-after-43-years

Masha Gessen, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York, Riverhead Books, 2012)

Phillip Gordon, “Charles de Gaulle and the Nuclear Revolution”: https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2016/MVZ235/um/62791483/Gordon.pdf

Wynfred Joshua, Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance, Strategy Papers No. 18 (New York, National Strategy Information Center, Inc., 1973)

Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1957)

Mark Landler, “Keir Starmer on Putin, Trump and Europe’s Challenge: ‘We’ve Known This Moment Was Coming,’” New York Times (March 23, 2025): https:// www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/europe/keir-starmer-trump-interview-uk.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Robert McNamara, testimony in Hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Department of Defense of the Committee on Appropriations, Military Procurement Authorization. Fiscal Year 1966 (89th Congress, 1st Session, 1965). I have my original notes, so I do not have online links to this hearing. If you are interested in this and the following note, start with the following link: https://archive.org/details/RobertSMcNamaraFiscalYear19661970DefenseProgramand1966Defense

Robert McNamara, testimony in Hearings before the House Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1969, Part 1 (90th Congress, 2nd Session, 1968)

Robert Osgood, “The Nixon Doctrine and Strategy,” in Osgood and Others, Retreat from Empire? The First Nixon Administration (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1973)

James Ragland, Adam Lowther, James Petrosky, Robyn Hutchins, “Just How Radioactive Are Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons?” TWZ (December 19, 2022): https://www.twz.com/just-how-radioactive-are-low-yield-nuclear-weapons

Report by President Nixon to Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy For The 1970s: A New Strategy For Peace, Office of The Historian, February 18, 1070): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d60

Thomas Wolfe, “Trends in Soviet Thinking on Theater Warfare and Limited War,” in John Erickson, Edmond Crowley, Nikolai Galay, eds., The Military-Technical Revolution (London, Pall Mall Press, 1966)