Let Them Eat Yellow Cake Understanding the History of France’s Sensitive Nuclear Export Policy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Between 1957 and 1981, France was a liberal supplier of sensitive nuclear technology, material and equipment. During these years, France signed a total of nine contracts for sensitive nuclear assistance, six of which contributed to covert nuclear weapon programs. However, in the early 1980s, France stopped exporting sensitive nuclear technology and formally defined its nuclear export policy. This thesis attempts to understand why France exported sensitive nuclear technology to non-nuclear weapon states for over two decades and why France then halted its sensitive export activity and became a more responsible nuclear supplier in the early 1980s. It concludes that in the absence of a definitive national nonproliferation and nuclear export policy, economic interests and pressure from the domestic bureaucracy – namely, the French Atomic Energy Agency and its subsidiary firms – drove France’s nuclear export policy. However, in 1974, a new leader came to power in Paris, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whose conception of France’s strategic interests differed drastically from his Gaullist predecessors. In the interest of preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons and fostering a closer French-US relationship, President Giscard established a new executive council charged with upholding a responsible export policy. Through this institution, in the late 1970s, the President enacted several policies that effectively reined in France’s liberal export activity. Situated in the broader context of global nuclear trade, the findings of this thesis offer insights into the motivations of nuclear suppliers in the international system and contain lessons on how to promote policies that constrain the spread of proliferation-prone technology.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 16, 2011 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Tandler, Jaclyn |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Sagan, Scott |
| Advisor | May, Michael |
Subjects
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
|---|---|
| Subject | CISAC |
| Subject | Stanford University |
| Subject | France |
| Subject | nuclear weapons |
| Subject | non-nuclear weapons states |
| Subject | policy |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Tandler, Jaclyn. (2011). Let Them Eat Yellow Cake Understanding the History of France’s Sensitive Nuclear Export Policy. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/sq753cn3113
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- jaclyn.tandler@gmail.com
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