French Nuclear Doctrine Explained

Wikipedia - André Beaufre:

André Beaufre (25 January 1902 – 13 February 1975) was a French Army officer and military strategist who attained the rank of Général d’Armée (Army General) before his retirement in 1961.

By the end of World War II, he had attained the rank of colonel and was well known in the English-speaking world as a military strategist and as an exponent of an independent French nuclear force. He commanded the French forces in the 1956 Suez War campaign against Egypt in 1956. Beaufre later became chief of the general staff of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe in 1958. He was serving as chief French representative to the permanent group of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Washington in 1960 when he was promoted to général d’armée.

. . .During the early 1960s Beaufre came to prominence as a theoretical military strategist and as an advocate of the independent French nuclear force, which was a major priority of President Charles de Gaulle. Beaufre remained on good terms with the U.S. authorities who opposed Nuclear proliferation but argued that French nuclear independence would give the West greater unpredictability vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and thus strengthen the deterrent capacity of the NATO alliance.

At the same time Beaufre published “An Introduction to Strategy” and later “Deterrence and Strategy”. His insight greatly influenced deterrence-theory analysis within international-relations circles. Military historians characterized “An Introduction to Strategy” as the most complete strategy treatise published in that generation. The Vatican analyzed the papers extensively at the fourth session of Vatican Council II in 1966 and later commented on them in the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.”

Beaufre defined nuclear deterrence as the only kind of deterrence that produces the effect seeks to avoid or to end war.

Beaufre developed “Deterrence and Strategy” in the context of the bipolar world of the Cold War where the threat of nuclear war was effective. The existence of this threat caused a psychological result and prevented adversaries from taking up arms. Adversaries had to measure the risk they were running if they unleashed a crisis, because the response would have produced political, economic, social, and moral damage from which recovery wouldn’t have been easy; material damage and psychological factors played a decisive role in deterrence.

Beaufre believed that military action should be avoided in a nuclear scenario and that victory should be won by paralyzing the adversary through indirect action. It is not simply a matter of terrifying the enemy; it is also a matter of hiding one’s own fear by executing those actions that show the opposite. This equilibrium-through-terror axiom ruled during the Cold War and prevented a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

For Beaufre, deterrence was above all the threat of nuclear war. The atomic threat guaranteed peace better than conventional arms did. Of course Beaufre saw the problem principally from the French strategic viewpoint. He was not convinced by conventional deterrence: “The classical arms race creates instability, just as the nuclear race creates stability.”

An excerpt from, “Grand Strategy Is Total: French Gen. André Beaufre on War in the Nuclear Age” By Michael Shurkin, War on The Rocks, October 8, 2020:

Gen. André Beaufre (1902 – 1975), the father of contemporary French strategic thought and required reading at French military schools, epitomizes better than anyone two traits that make modern French military theory unusually rich. The first is failure. Beaufre had a hand in 20th-century France’s greatest military catastrophes, the trauma of which spurred his generation to think — hard — about modern conflict. The second is an intellectual tradition that goes back more than two centuries and has been dominated by highly analytical and literate generals “sick with rationality,” to cite Gen. Lucien Poirier (1918 – 2013), another of France’s great warrior-philosophers from Beaufre’s generation. Beaufre’s thinking is Cartesian: He began by challenging the most fundamental premises and then, step by step, logically built out complex intellectual structures with the rigor of a geometrician. Bernard Brodie, the eminent RAND political scientist who in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the architects of American nuclear strategy and no intellectual lightweight, went so far as to complain in a review of Beaufre’s books of the French general’s insistence on riding an “intellectual high horse.” Brodie clearly knew French but apparently not the French, and the self-described “pragmatist” of the American school understandably was at once deeply impressed and put off by Beaufre’s foreign method. For less particular Americans, Beaufre is a marvel of lucidity. He is also a key for accessing a rich and distinctly different way of thinking about war with direct applications for today, whether one is pondering Afghanistan or how to deal with China.

There is a single thread that runs through Beaufre’s half-dozen books about strategy, which he wrote in the years between his retirement from the French army in 1961 and his death. That thread is a desire to understand the nature of war in the modern nuclear era, and to use that insight to resurrect strategy and elaborate a strategic method appropriate for great powers today. Beaufre of course was not alone. On this side of the Atlantic, men like Brodie and Herman Kahn did brilliant work on the subjects of nuclear strategy and deterrence. Beaufre was fluent in English and well versed in the Americans’ thinking. On the French side, Beaufre shared the space with Raymond Aron and three other generals (Charles Ailleret, Pierre Marie Gallois, and Poirier) who, together with Beaufre, are considered the architects of French nuclear strategy and referred to as “the Four Generals of the Apocalypse.”

Compared to the Americans, at least, strategy was not a parlor game for Beaufre. He was a member of the generation of French officers that was at war without reprieve from 1940 to 1962: Beaufre served on the headquarters staff during the fall of France in 1940, a defeat whose effect on the officers who lived it cannot be overstated; commanded field units with the Free French in Tunisia, Italy, France, and Germany from 1943 to 1945; worked on the staff of Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in Indochina; led a division in Algeria; and was the overall commander of French forces in the Suez War in 1956. These disasters (not counting the 1943 – 1945 campaigns, wherein the French forces rallied to the Allied cause fought brilliantly and victoriously) saw France stripped of its empire and its great-power status. They compelled Beaufre to strive to understand what had gone wrong. “After 25 years of almost uninterrupted failures,” he wrote, “we have the duty to search down to the bones to discover the deep reasons for such a contrary fate.”

Video Title: French Nuclear Doctrine Explained. Source: Pax Americana. Date Published: April 1, 2025. Description:

A discussion of French nuclear doctrine. Why does France have nukes? What good do the French think they do? Who were the “Four Generals of the Apocalypse”?

The leading French expert on nuclear doctrine is Bruno Tertrais. If you can read his work, do so. If he says something that contradicts what I said, go with him.

Tertrais: https://amzn.to/42ioNof