469 



Space-Age Europe 1 83 



Gaulle pronounced on NATO and military matters, his rhetoric 

 aimed, in every case, not at Moscow but at Washington." 



But technical independence, the mark of a Great Power abroad, 

 dictated a revolution at home, and, after seven years of the Fifth 

 Republic, France was scarcely familiar to those who had known her in 

 the 1950s. For 150 years French business had distinguished itself by 

 jealousy, traditionalism, and acrimony with labor; and state policy by 

 vacillation between nationalization and laisser-faire. But the constitu- 

 tion of the Fifth Republic enhanced the power of the executive, which 

 in turn reformed the universities, folded small industrial concerns into 

 mighty semipublic corporations, and linked them to state agencies in a 

 coordinated national team for the force-feeding of technological 

 change, with the state itself as managerial czar. In space technology, 

 de Gaulle's technocrats combined the air force's office for aeronautical 

 research and the private firms of Nord Aviation, Sud Aviation, Engins 

 MATRA, and Dassault into the new SEREB. Gradually French public 

 and private aerospace concerns became a single team, with contracts 

 drawn from the Defense Ministry and CNES, distributed among firms, 

 overseen by the tough, ubiquitous inspecteurs des finances, and the results 

 exploited by bureaucratic managers. Thanks to this national complex 

 for R&D, solid-fueled IRBMs and submarine-launched missiles en- 

 tered flight testing as early as 1967, and the first nine nuclear-tipped 

 missiles were put into silos in Haute Provence in 1971. Nuclear-armed 

 submarines entered service the following year, and, together with the 

 Mirage jet bombers, completed France's litde triad of nuclear forces.^ 



"For instance, de Gaulle declared early in 1958 that "I would quit NATO if I were 

 running France. . . . NATO is no longer an alliance, it is a subordination" (C. L. Sulzber- 

 ger, The Last of the GianLs [New York. 1970], pp. 61-62). Although the of hcial justification 

 of the force de frappe was to provide France with a modern deterrent, Gaullist ministers 

 invariably spoke of it as the only way for France to rejoin the ranks of the Great Powers, 

 make herself heard in world councils, receive equal treatment in the Western alliance, 

 and qualify for American nuclear aid. See Wilfrid Kohl, French Nuclear Diplomacy (Prince- 

 ton, N.J., 1971), pp. 98-100. Even Raymond Aron, a friend of NATO, saw xht force de 

 frappe as a "political trump" in dealings with the United States. 



"•On the domestic revolution promoted by de Gaulle in the name of technological 

 dynamism, see especially Robert Gilpin, France in the Age of the Scientific State (Princeton, 

 N.J., 1968). On the evolution of the force de frappe, see: Kohl, French Nuclear Diplomacy; 

 Wolf Mendl, Deterrence and Persuasion: French Nuclear Armament in the Context of National 

 Policy 1945-1969 (London, 1970); Bertrand Goldschmidt, L'Aventure atomique (Paris, 

 1962); Lawrence Scheinmann, Atomic Energy Policy in France under the Fourth Republic 

 (Princeton, N.J., 1965); Charles Ailleret, L'Aventure atomique franfaise (Paris, 1968). 

 French nuclear research was well advanced in 1940 when the (icrman conquest put a halt 

 to the work of the Curies. The Founh Republic founded the French atomic energy 

 commission, which worked steadily toward the fabrication of weapons-grade plutonium. 



