France Plans Early Nuclear Arms

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31770, 29 August 1968, Page 11

France Plans Early Nuclear Arms

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

PARIS, August 28.

Given necessary Government finance, French forces would be armed with thermonuclear weapons within a few years, the Armed Forces Minister, Mr Pierre Messmer, told a press conference in Paris yesterday.

“I am convinced the Government will give us the necessary credits,” he said. A decision would be made at the end of the year. Earlier, the French science minister, Mr Robert Galley, said that the French hydrogen bomb tested last Saturday had an explosive power of two megatons—equal to that of two million tons of T.N.T.

The weapon was about the size of a saloon car. Efforts would now be devoted to “militarisation and miniaturisation" of the weapon, he said.

Mr Galley said the test had been a complete success and “we can congratulate ourselves on the fact that with this successful experiment our country has become the equal of the great Powers. . . .” Asked how long it would take to develop a warhead and a missile capable of delivering a thermo-nuclear charge, Mr Messmer said that “10 years would be a very pessimistic estimate.” To another question on where France’s thermonuclear strike force would be aimed, he said the Government’s attitude would be like that of the United States and Russia.

“In all countries a strategic nuclear armament is an anticity armament,” Mr Messmer said. Both Ministers emphasised the “cleanliness” of the test weapon.

The volume of radioactivity on the test site at Fangataufa atoll 3} hours after the ex-

plosion was comparable to that in a nuclear research laboratory, they said. Reporters were shown a film of the explosion in which the stem of the typical mushroom cloud was seen to be far longer than in films of American explosions. The bomb was detonated from a balloon 600 metres above the Pacific test ground. Mr Galley said an aircraft landed him on Fangataufa atoll, site of the test, some 750 miles south of Tahiti, 3) hours after the blast.