Published in French on 4 October 2024
The firmest commitment, perhaps the only one that our new Prime Minister clearly made at the National Assembly - applauded by the far-right and the right - was to carry out the wishes of President Macron in nuclear matters. So, despite a period of financial weakness, France will perpetuate the nuclear arsenal, permanently "modernising" it at a cost that keeps on growing, and relaunch the nuclear power programme with 6 new EPR reactors. It seems irrelevant that the EPR at Flamanville, a "flower of French knowhow" has cost 20 billion euros instead of the 3 originally estimated, and has taken not 5 years but 17 years to not yet provide our electricity network with a single kilowatt-hour. If it does work before 2025, it will have to pause after one year to replace a large vat lid that was judged defective even before being used.
These are two enormous sources of waste, yet M. Barnier (the PM) promises not only to not wind them down but even to inflate them. They are both ruinous. And inseparable - M. Macron said himself (at Le Creusot in December 2020): "The one doesn’t go without the other. Without nuclear power-generation there is no nuclear weaponry, without nuclear weapons, there is no nuclear power."
In fact the military side needs the civilian side absolutely: so as to produce both the explosives for its H bombs (plutonium & tritium) and the fuel for the reactors on the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier and our submarines - 4 missile-carrying nuclear subs (SNLEs) and 6 attack subs (SNAs). So as long as we have military nuclear technology, we need civilian too. Yet, as Macron said, if you close down the military side the civilian side will collapse of itself having lost its only real raison d’être : to feed and to "whitewash" the bomb. The "power reactors" are in fact the most complex and long and onerous and insecure and eternally dangerous means of boiling water to produce electricity. It is also the method most exposed to the effects of global warming and the least able to respond to it.
As for atom bombs, they too are useless. If we were attacked by a nation possessing them, to use them first (as planned for by our "final warning" strategy) would only provoke equal or greater retaliation. If used in second place, as a revenge strike, they would lead to our annihilation. Far from preventing terrorist attacks (they failed on 9/11/2001, on 13 November 2015, on 7 October 2023...), far from preventing wars, nuclear weapons encourage them by imposing the law of the strongest murderer, the reign of state terror, and the double standard between nuclear states and others, inciting the possessors to trample on the rules of international law - as the USA did in Iraq, France in Libya, Russia in Syria and Ukraine, and Israel in Palestine. Even if the bombs are not used, they produce fire and blood. And what if someone did use them? That would put an end to "energy transition". And humanity. And all our debts.
The debate on the "2025 finance bill" should be the opportunity to see that there is one simple way to reduce France’s "deficit abyss" while averting Armageddon: we should "freeze" the planned expenses on the nuclear strike-force and the White Paper on Defence. Now or never is the time to apply Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which France signed in 1992, which calls for planned elimination, total, universal and strictly controlled, of these nuclear and radioactive weapons which are instruments for crimes against humanity. Now is the time to act for a world without wars or nuclear weapons. and to exit at last from all this craziness.
Jean-Marie Matagne, President of ACDN (Action des Citoyens pour le Désarmement Nucléaire) contact@acdn.net
