WI: France Uses the Bomb?

What, against one of the coastal cities where most of the French colonists lived?

This scenario faces the same problem as the British Thread did except more so.

More so? The French had no restraint with nukes. They asked the US to give them one to use in Indochina but Ike thought it was such an outrageous demand that he cut off ALL supplies to the French in Indochina. The French started building nukes after Suez to keep their standing in the world, not as a deterrent but so they could keep acting like a big boy.
 
The French started building nukes after Suez to keep their standing in the world, not as a deterrent but so they could keep acting like a big boy.

Not really. They considered (unlike the UK) that French vital interests couldn't be guaranteed by the sole US alliance, which of course was even more pregant in French doctrine after De Gaulle came back to power.

Note that the French nuclear force has two distinctive features :

-it is a "arme tous-azimuts", which implies that nuclear arsenal might be directed at any immediate threat for the country's vital interests (primarily the USSR, but technically, it could be as well China or the US)

-it is supposed to be fired once French territory is entered, with no warning strike. The idea, as De Gaulle told, was that "even if the Russians may kill 800 million Frenchmen -assuming there would be 800 million French people-, they'd hesitate to cross the Rhine if we were able to kill 80 million Russians."

This said, any other option that a major conventional war with imminent invasion of French metropolitan territory belongs to the realm of ASB. As for operation vulture, it's not as if the US never considered using nukes in a contemporary war is some not-so-distant peninsula...
 
They certainly used it on some French controlled Pacific islands during testing destroying the lifes of many local inhabitants in the process!!!!
 
There's Operation Vulture, where France asked for a nuclear bombing mission from the US to give it an assist in Dien Bien Phu and the Eisenhower Administration rightly said "You're fucking nuts"...

Checkmate113 said:
More so? The French had no restraint with nukes. They asked the US to give them one to use in Indochina but Ike thought it was such an outrageous demand that he cut off ALL supplies to the French in Indochina.

A web search on Operation Vulture reveals that it was a proposed US air strike with 3 nuclear weapons that was proposed by the US military. Eisenhower said he WOULD IMPLEMENT it only if Winston Churchill says it is ok. Thankfully, Churchill advised against it and so Eisenhower shelved the plan. That does not sound like Eisenhower said "You're fucking nuts". He was considering it.

We basically have Churchill to thank for the fact that no nuclear weapons have been used since WW2, not Eisenhower.

Furthermore, the US has been considering nuclear strikes against North Korea since the Korean War in the early 1950s. North Korea is using that as an excuse to develop its own nuclear weapons. You can thank the US for contributing to nuclear proliferation.
 
I can't figure out just who France would use The Bomb on, aside from Greenpeace (didn't they once sink one of GP's ships that got a little too close to a test site in Polynesia?). In any of their colonial wars, nuking things would be excessive.
 
Nuclear weapons become seen as a legitimate counter-insurgency weapon.
That idea could easily form the basis of a time line so dystopian it would make Threads look like a laugh a minute fun fest.

Is it wrong that I'm vaguely curious how it would turn out?
 

The Vulture

Banned
That idea could easily form the basis of a time line so dystopian it would make Threads look like a laugh a minute fun fest.

Is it wrong that I'm vaguely curious how it would turn out?

For one, atomic weapons aren't seen as being quite so horrible outside of Japan and Indochina that everyone and their mother is trying to make one. South Africa will probably retain their weapons "just in case". Numerous other independent and nominally unaligned nations that do not possess weapons in ATL such as Sweden, Mexico, and Brazil, among others, will eventually develop weapons, probably by the early 90s.
 
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