European Nuclear Nationalism: UK and French Perspectives on Nuclear Disarmament

Benoît Pelopidas (1) , Nick Ritchie (2)

1 CERI - Centre de recherches internationales (Sciences Po, CNRS)
2 University of York [York, UK]

France and the UK have had different approaches to the possibility of nuclear disarmament; these derive from the different post- Second World War national narratives in which the development of nuclear weapons has been embedded. This started from two different attitudes toward the NATO Alliance and its nuclear component, two different sets of lessons learned from the 1956 Suez crisis (Pelopidas 2015a), and it culminated in two different reactions to the increase in nuclear disarmament advocacy worldwide, which is the focus of this chapter.

Keywords: nuclear weapons; France; United Kingdom; nuclear Disarmament; Post-WWII History

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Political science

Benoît Pelopidas, Nick Ritchie. European Nuclear Nationalism: UK and French Perspectives on Nuclear Disarmament. Global Nuclear Disarmament. Strategic, Political, and Regional Perspectives, Routledge, pp.225 - 250, 2015, 9781138832725. ⟨hal-03470011⟩