(451.4463) WISE-Paris - In the fall of 1995, after the French government had launched its surprise offer to extend its nuclear umbrella to Germany, one institution analysed carefully the reactions of their Western ally: the Western European Union (WEU). The result written up by that rather discrete European defence institution sounds frustrated. "The reactions of the German political officials can be qualified as prudent and polite. One could in fact expect nothing better, given the vivid hostility of public opinion to the nuclear tests and to nuclear arms in general."1
The French offer, just like in the case of the decision to resume nuclear testing, was not preceded by any major consultations with any of France's European partners. The offer itself was fairly vaguely defined in speeches by President Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé at the end of August 1995.2 Alain Juppé has invented the term "concerted deterrence" because the term "extended deterrence", as he explains, "can lead to the suspicion of paternalism".3 The new expression is in fact not even far from the concept of the strategic consultations as envisaged even by some SPD leaders in Germany.
By the end of the year, both heads of state, President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had signed a joint letter to the heads of State of the other member states of the European Union, where they defined as a priority goal in particular "to permit the Union to have a more visible and more determined common foreign and security policy ... This implies that the foreign and defence policies of each of our countries are brought significantly closer to each other around clear objectives and priorities"4 ... Which have still to be defined.
Nevertheless the WEU in particular is far from giving up the perspective of a joint European defence system. "Everybody agrees not to interpret the French offer as if the question was 'to have a finger on the button'," states its report. "The question is rather to think over a project of concerted strategy in the nuclear domain." The question is how, when and with whom.
The complexity of the political and strategic problems involved has left earlier attempts to solve the European nuclear question without further steps towards any integrated system. The specific German situation has always been a particular barrier. It is all the more surprising that the quoted WEU report considers it "interesting to recall" the secret agreements on defence and armaments, including the nuclear arms dimension, between France, Germany and Italy in 1957-58. On New Year 1957, the French and German defence ministers Bourgès-Maunoury and Strauss signed a secret agreement which included common efforts towards a nuclear weapons program. In a protocol dated 25 November 1957, Italy joined the agreement. That protocol covered as "a matter of priority" the cooperation in the fields of aeroplanes, missiles and military applications of nuclear energy. On 8 April 1958, a further agreement was signed on the construction of the primarily military uranium enrichment plant at Pierrelatte. But with the installation of De Gaulle as President on 1 July 1958, the agreements were cancelled. In fact, the man who blocked the agreement was Pierre Guillaumat, De Gaulle's minister of defence. Almost ten years ago, Guillaumat told me (Mycle Schneider) in an interview: "We perfectly knew that military atomic energy in Germany would have meant the entry of the Russian army into the FRG. They would not have tolerated that. I told Strauss so." To the question whether Strauss did understand or merely accepted that point of view, Guillaumat answered: "What do you want, it was me who said no. If I had said yes, he would have accepted. I had not signed [the agreement], so I did not renounce my word."
The situation back then can "under no circumstances be compared to the current French proposal", stresses the WEU report. But it is "also interesting that the Germans have not always been hostile towards a discussion concerning the military nuclear problems". The German position is considered crucial. "The nature of the German response will be very important from a political point of view. A positive response would open the door to a European doctrine of deterrence where the nuclear guarantees of the United Kingdom, but also of France, would be extended to other countries."
A solution to the nuclear question on the horizon?
In fact, the European defence establishment remains rather pessimistic. The third surprise announcement - after testing resumption and the nuclear umbrella offer - orchestrated by the French government over the last few months is its potential reintegration into NATO's military command structure. Jacques Baumel, president of the defence commission of WEU and vice-president of the French National Assembly's defence commission, commented that France's comeback into NATO - France left the integrated command in 1966, but stayed a member of NATO - "is an important turning point of our strategy, the end of a certain idea of France and the sad consequence of the European's incapability to create a real European defence outside of NATO".5 What does not work outside NATO shall work from inside?
Whereas the direct approach to the nuclear weapons question continues to pose inextricable problems since the Franco-German nuclear weapons connection came to an abrupt end, the cooperation of the two countries' plutonium industries flourished ever since.
Already in 1959, the international consortium Eurochemic was founded under Franco-German leadership. Its primary goal was the construction and operation of a spent fuel reprocessing plant in Mol, Belgium. The plant was already put into active operation in 1966, exactly at the same time when the French CEA (Commissariat l'Énergie atomique) started up its UP2 plant at La Hague. The Eurochemic plant operated only until 1974; the consortium was dissolved in 1982. At that time Germany and France were, with 34% and 28%, by far the largest shareholders.
In 1971 United Reprocessors was founded; the capital was divided in equal shares between the CEA, the German KEWA6 and British Nuclear Fuels. United Reprocessors aimed at the commercialisation of reprocessing. The UP2 plant was financed at least in half out of the military budget of the CEA. Between 1966 and 1975, UP2 reprocessed only gas-graphite-reactor fuel, some of it for defence purposes. In 1976 Cogema was established as a daughter company and got the reprocessing plant with a new light-water-reactor head-end as a birthday gift. In the 13 years from 1976 to the end of 1988, COGEMA reprocessed only 245JMT of fuel for EDF, while it reprocessed more than 2,000JMT of foreign, mainly German spent fuel. Between 1979 and 1983, the UP2 plant reprocessed also some fuel from the French Phénix breeder reactor in dilution with gas-graphite fuel. Phénix is known to have produced weapons-grade plutonium in its blankets for defence purposes. German utilities have also signed contracts over the reprocessing of 2,498 t of spent fuel to be reprocessed at the UP3 plant which started operation in 1989. This corresponds to a 35% share of the total investment into the construction of the plant. The quantity under contract is to be reprocessed until the year 2000.
The Franco-German-Italien triangle was "re-established" in 1972 with the creation of NERSA7, the builder and owner of the Superphénix fast breeder reactor. This reactor operates with about seven tons of plutonium in the core. It produces excellent weapons-grade plutonium in its blankets. Its destination is unclear. So far, in ten years of operation, fuel has not yet been discharged because of the reactor's very bad operating record.
Currently the German utilities are renegotiating with Cogema post-2000 reprocessing contracts which were originally signed in 1990 but contain a "political" clause which allows the utilities to renegotiate the terms of the agreements. According to various sources, it seems that the new wording of the contracts would allow for the transfer of German origin plutonium to France. In parallel, German utilities are negotiating with the French MOX industry on the fabrication of MOX fuel for German reactors. It is obvious that the realisation of these contracts would mean a significant step backward in the limitation of the plutonium economy in Europe.
It is remarkable to note that the cooperation between French and German plutonium industries has been going fairly smoothly for almost 40 years. The strategic significance of tons of German separated plutonium - at least ca. 1.7 tons in Germany8, and probably around 15 t mainly in France and Belgium - without any use for the immediate future is obvious. The risk export - on health and proliferation levels - of the German plutonium problem should not be carried into the next century.
Sources / Footnotes:
- UEO , "La reprise des essais nucléaires francais dans le Pacifique", document 1488, 7 November 1995;
- Jacques Chirac declared for example: "While building up its defense, the European Union could wish that the French force de dissusion plays a role in this defense." And Alain Juppé stated that "cooperation can no longer ignore the nuclear dimension of our common security". ibidem;
- Allocution de M. Alain Juppé, Premier Ministre, l'Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale, SIRPA, N.32, 23 September 1995;
- Le Monde, 9 December 1995;
- Le Monde, 19 January 1996;
- 100% Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Wiederaufarbeitung von Kernbrennstoffen;>
- Originally 51% EDF (F), 33% ENEL (I), 16% RWE (D); RWE left its share to SBK, the Kalkar builder/owner company; SBK is now 68.85% RWE, 14.75%SEP (NL), 14.75% ELECTRABEL (B), 1.65% NE (UK);
- IANUS, Fact Sheet, January 1996, draft
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