Nicolas Sarkozy was in Cherbourg to name the latest French SSBN, the appropriately named Le Terrible, this week; and he had a few things to say about the circumstances under which she might be called on to fire her M51 SLBMs. The headline grabber, which everyone picked up on, was that France is going to [...]

Everyone’s now blogged about Jacques Chirac’s unexpected remarks about Iranian nuclear weapons.
But I think there may still be some angular momentum to be had. Chirac stated that, should a hypothetically nuclear Iran launch a nuclear weapon, Tehran would be destroyed before it had gone 200 metres. This is a pretty basic statement of nuclear deterrence, [...]

No, this is not a Litvinenko post…or at least not primarily. Recently, the Georgian ex-KGB said it had caught a Russian smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia, who was nailed in a sting operation where Georgian agents posed as representatives of an Islamist terrorist group that wanted to buy fissile material. He handed over a sample, [...]

In more ways than one. On Saturday night, between 2230 and 2300 local time, a huge chunk of the European power grid fell over, affecting supply from northwest Germany, through Holland and Belgium, and mostly in France. Further afield, small areas of Austria and Italy lost power, and the Spain-Morocco interconnection was shut off to [...]

If you want news about nuclear tests, nonproliferation and other arms control topics from people who actually know their throw weights from a hole in the ground, go and visit the Arms Control Wonk blog. They’re low on heh-indeed, and high on things like “Cooperative Monitoring in Outer Space to Manage Crowding and Build Confidence,” [...]

This post serves as a small addendum to Edward’s post Not Amused about Chirac’s threat to use nuclear weapons if necessary. This addendum will hopefully broaden and continue the discussion his statements generated. I won’t be talking about the possibility of nuking Iran or other rogue states here, that element has been covered extensively by [...]

The Financial Times reports this morning that:
“Jacques Chirac, France’s president, has threatened to use nuclear weapons against any state that supported terrorism against his country or considered using weapons of mass destruction.“.
According to the FT Chirac’s actually words were:
“The leaders of states who use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider [...]

Leafing through the comments on Brussels Gonzo’s last post, I can’t help getting the feeling that this news about Iran’s decision to resume its nuclear programme may well serve to focus our energy debate a little.
Britain yesterday vowed to report Iran to the United Nations Security Council, intensifying diplomatic pressure over Tehran’s nuclear [...]

Here’s the link to the EU Energy green paper I mentioned yesterday. As is to be expected, the report is ‘fair and balanced’. The section on nuclear energy focuses mainly on the sovereign decision making process as to its adoption and emphasises the role of Brussels in ensuring environmental safety. It does, however, contain this [...]

It was the late AJP Taylor who suggested that the efficient (or proximate) cause of the first world war was to be found in the the way the national railway timetables had been drawn up. Without wishing to take issue with Taylor (either for or against), it does occur to me that a certain amount [...]