An Irishwoman's Diary

When Frank Aiken was Ireland’s minister for external affairs in the 1960s he pushed a resolution to stop nuclear weapons proliferation, year after year at the UN General Assembly, so assiduously that the text became known as the Irish resolution. It eventually passed, whereupon Ireland and Finland proposed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Aiken was the first minister to sign in 1968.

I thought of Frank Aiken’s anti-nuclear campaign on a recent, bone-shaking military flight from Villacoublay, outside Paris, to the airbase at Orange, southern France.

President Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered the defence and foreign ministries and the Atomic Energy Commissariat to invite journalists to the inner sanctum of the French military-industrial complex – the now disused fissile materials facilities at Marcoule and Pierrelatte. Both stopped production in the 1990s, but we were the first journalists ever allowed to visit.

Frank Aiken, who died in 1983, would be pleased to know that arms control and disarmament are back in fashion. They’ve been buoyed up by Barack Obama’s charm and conviction, twinned with dread of nuclear-armed (or likely to be) nutcases in North Korea and Iran.

Never one to miss a trend, Mr Sarkozy jumped early onto the disarmament bandwagon. “Rather than making speeches and promises that are not translated into deeds, France acts,” he said on launching the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine Le Terrible in Cherbourg in March 2008.

“France has an exemplary record, unique in the world, with respect to nuclear disarmament,” Mr Sarkozy boasted. France was, along with Britain, the first state to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. She was “the first state to shut down and dismantle its fissile material production facilities... the only state to have dismantled its nuclear testing facility in the Pacific; the only state to have dismantled its ground-to-ground nuclear missiles; the only state to have voluntarily reduced the number of its nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines by a third.”

Mr Sarkozy announced a ceiling of 300 nuclear warheads for the French Force de Frappe – half the maximum number during the Cold War. “France applies a principle of strict sufficiency,” he said, calling for reciprocity from other nuclear powers. Perhaps by coincidence, before he became the US ambassador to Nato in May, Ivo Daalder advocated a similar doctrine of sufficiency, calling on the US to unilaterally reduce its warheads to 1,000.

Cynics point out that nuclear weapons are exceedingly costly to manufacture and maintain, and that if France has cut back so dramatically, it is because it is in her interest. She has more than enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium to maintain 300 warheads, which must in any case be recycled every couple of decades, because radioactivity makes them expand.

French nuclear cutbacks actually started in the mid-1990s, but France was so chastened by the tsunami of protest that greeted her last nuclear tests in the South Pacific that she kept quiet.

At the Pierrelatte highly enriched uranium plant, we put on hardhats, white doctors’ coats and disposable white booties. “This is the first time a state endowed with nuclear weapons has made such a gesture,” says Commandant Antoine Beaussant, of Mr Sarkozy’s military staff. “It shows the commitment of France to disarmament, and her desire for transparency.”

France claims to be the only country that is dismantling fissile materials facilities, though the US, Britain and Russia have also stopped producing weapons grade material. In the interest of transparency, we watch through a thick plate glass window as a 200-tonne shearing press cuts and compresses contaminated machinery, making an infernal racket. Some 75 tonnes of waste are removed from the plant every month, then buried in mounds near Troyes, northeastern France. In the 12th century, the town was the home of the author Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote medieval romances about chivalry...

France’s civil and military nuclear programmes have been intricately intertwined since the 1950s, as shown by the presence of civil and military facilities on both sites. If Western powers really want to stop proliferation, I wonder, then why are they still flogging nuclear power reactors – the quickest way to obtain weapons grade material -- around the world?

We travel 40km past olive groves, vineyards and men fishing in the Rhône, to Marcoule. Inside a huge corrugated steel warehouse stands a concrete cylindrical behemoth, the G2 reactor, where France manufactured plutonium for its warheads.

Though the reactor was shut down long ago, its graphite core is too radioactive to be opened before 2020, and it will then take 15 years to remove 47,000 tonnes of waste, which will be stored in a 500 metre deep hole. It will cost € 5 billion just to dismantle Marcoule and Pierrelatte.

In a country so inclined to tear itself apart over big issues, I wonder why French society has largely supported the nuclear power and weapons programmes. “The trauma of 1940,” replies Jean-Dominique Merchet, a reknowned defence analyst who toured the plants with me. “We thought we won the First World War, that we had the strongest army in the world. In 1940, it all ended in six weeks. Nuclear weapons are our life insurance policy, the guarantee it will never happen again.”