As faith in the US wavers, can France’s nuclear umbrella deter Russia

French President Emmanuel Macron has offered to hold talks on extending the protection offered by France’s nuclear arsenal to its European partners, amid fears of an American disengagement from Europe. 

While the US has made no mention of plans to withdraw the nuclear umbrella that has protected the continent since the Cold War, its dramatically shifting stance on Ukraine, Russia and NATO has sparked alarm across Europe about the strength of America’s decades-long commitment to European security. 

In a measure of the mounting anxiety, the leaders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania – countries closely aligned with Washington – all welcomed Macron’s offer on Thursday as they gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit on European security. 

That offer has, in fact, been on the table for years. The difference is that France’s European partners are now taking an interest, eager for security alternatives should US President Donald Trump leave them to dry – at the mercy of Russia. 

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Addressing the French public on the eve of the summit, Macron described Russia as a “threat to France and Europe” and said he had decided “to open the strategic debate on the protection of our allies on the European continent by our (nuclear) deterrent”. He added: “Europe’s future does not have to be decided in Washington or Moscow.” 

Distrust of America 

The French nuclear deterrent is rooted in a lingering distrust of its American ally that dates back to the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Washington forced France and Britain to abandon efforts to recapture the strategic Suez Canal in a humiliating setback for Europe’s declining colonial powers. 

Seen as an American “betrayal”, Suez convinced the French to develop their own nuclear deterrent in order to protect the nation’s “vital interests”.  

A decade later, distrust of America and a desire to pursue strategic autonomy underpinned President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated command, resulting in the removal of US military assets from French soil. 

Over the years, successive French leaders have urged European allies to reduce their reliance on the US – none more so than Macron, who has repeatedly called on Europe to guarantee its own security. 

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As Washington turns its back on Ukraine, warms to an aggressive Russia and cuts Europe out of peace talks, French officials are now feeling vindicated. One analyst described the continent’s current predicament as “Macron’s told-you-so moment”. 

France’s ‘vital interests’ 

France is one of two nuclear powers in Europe, along with Britain, which is no longer part of the European Union and relies on US input to maintain its nuclear arsenal. 

French nuclear deterrence is strictly conceived as defensive, designed to protect the country’s “vital interests”. The deliberately vague nature of these interests has traditionally given France greater leeway compared to Britain, whose nuclear capabilities are explicitly assigned to the defence of NATO.  

Since a 2020 keynote speech, Macron has said that France’s “vital interests” have a “European dimension” – comments that he reiterated in recent days. His predecessors have made similar statements in the past, with former president François Mitterrand once touting the need for a “European doctrine” on nuclear deterrence.  

“Maintaining a certain vagueness about France’s vital interests is at the heart of the ‘strategic ambiguity’ that underpins nuclear deterrence,” said Alain De Neve, a researcher at the Royal Higher Institute for Defence in Brussels.  

The idea, he added, “is to keep opponents in the dark about the scope of France’s nuclear umbrella”. 

Keep adversaries guessing 

Nuclear deterrence involves maintaining ambiguity about which circumstances would lead to the use of nuclear weapons, in order to prevent a potential aggressor from calculating risks.  

In this case, it means striking a balance between giving substance to French claims of a vested interest in Europe’s defence and avoiding detail about how far Paris would go to defend the continent. 

France “likes to remind people of its capabilities in order to be credible in its deterrence”, said Emmanuelle Maitre, a senior research fellow at France’s Foundation for Strategic Research.  

“But there’s also an element of ambiguity, because it’s not a question of telling our adversary exactly what our red lines are,” she added. “No nuclear power does this.” 

Engaging in a constructive and permanent dialogue with its European partners would be an important first step towards extending France’s nuclear umbrella, argued De Neve. 

“The mere fact that a permanent dialogue has been established could already leave Russia wondering whether an attack on, say, a Baltic state might lead to a nuclear escalation,” he explained. 

Credibility gap 

Responding to Macron’s televised address on Thursday, Russian officials lambasted the French leader’s “confrontational speech”, noting that his tough rhetoric was not backed up by military power.  

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Macron of “threatening” Russia and warned him against dragging the continent into a wider conflict. The ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested the French president might want help measuring his country’s true military size. 

The US and Russia possess approximately 88 percent of the world’s total inventory of nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists. They are followed at a distance by China, with France in fourth position and Britain in fifth. 

“Without US support, the balance of power appears largely unfavourable to France, which has a total of 290 nuclear warheads compared to at least 1,600 deployed warheads and nearly 2,800 stockpiled warheads on the Russian side,” noted Benoît Grémare, a defence analyst at the Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, writing on The Conversation. 

“Moving toward a Europeanisation of nuclear force means increasing deterrent capabilities and, therefore, expanding the French arsenal so it can respond to threats affecting all 27 EU member states,” Grémare added. 

America’s vastly superior firepower, and the greater diversity of its arsenal, explain why European countries have so far relied on Washington for their protection rather than Paris or London.  

In contrast, the discrepancy with Russia’s nuclear arsenal points to a credibility gap for France’s deterrent. 

As a lawmaker from the hard-left France Unbowed party argued during a heated debate in parliament this week, if France doesn’t trust mighty Americal to defend it, why should its European partners trust Paris to risk a nuclear war for their sake? 

‘French through and through’ 

Any French commitment to Europe’s defence would also be vulnerable to the type of radical policy U-turn that the Trump administration has ushered in.  

France’s European partners are keenly aware that Macron’s pro-Europe camp leads a minority government, and that two-time presidential runner-up Marine Le Pen is fiercely opposed to any sharing of the country’s nuclear deterrence. 

Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which has long harboured Russian sympathies, supports France’s rearmament but to defend French borders only. Her nationalist camp has described talk of extending France’s nuclear umbrella as a betrayal of its strategic independence. 

“Sharing (nuclear) deterrence is equivalent to abolishing it,” Le Pen told French lawmakers on Monday. She argued that “unleashing the nuclear fire cannot be separated from national and popular legitimacy”, which is vested solely in the French president, elected by universal suffrage. 

In his address on Wednesday, Macron reiterated that France’s nuclear deterrent would remain a prerogative of French presidents, describing it as “complete, sovereign, French through and through”. 

“The use and production of nuclear weapons is French and will stay French,” added his Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu, even as he repeated calls for a strategic debate with the rest of Europe. 

“While the hand on the button remains that of the head of state, the way in which we contribute to the continent’s global security architecture remains an important debate,” Lecornu said. All European capitals “are going to ask us the question, so we want to be ready to answer”, he added. 

Giving ‘concrete form’ to European deterrence 

De Neve said European countries would need to “come out into the open” about what they expect from France’s nuclear umbrella – and in what capacity they might contribute. 

Speaking on the sidelines of the Brussels, Germany’s outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Europe should not give up on US involvement in nuclear deterrence but rather complement it with European resources. His likely successor Friedrich Merz has already called for a discussion on “nuclear sharing” with France and Britain, saying he feared NATO may not survive “in its current form” beyond June. 

The issue of whether EU partners could contribute to the cost of maintaining or upgrading the French deterrence is likely to be on the table. 

Any upgrade of France’s nuclear arsenal would be extremely costly and require significant logistical and operational changes at a time when governments are already stretched financially. Analysts have warned it could take France up to a decade to increase its arsenal by only 100 warheads. 

The point is not to match the American or Russian arsenals, but rather to ensure France maintains its ability to inflict “unacceptable” damage on any foe, cautioned Maitre.  

“Although France has a limited arsenal, it is considered sufficient to cause unacceptable damage to its adversary,” she explained. “It was designed to be able to retaliate under any circumstances with weapons considered indestructible. That’s why there is always at least one (nuclear-armed) submarine on patrol, whose location is kept secret.” 

In the short term, a change in France’s nuclear doctrine, which prohibits the stationing of atomic weapons outside France, could give an extended French nuclear umbrella greater credibility. Allies could be integrated into French nuclear exercises and training through the provision of air escorts and by the development of supply and logistical support, aiming to create a degree of interoperability. 

France possesses Rafale warplanes capable of carrying nuclear missiles. Their deployment across Europe “would give concrete form to European strategic autonomy”, adds Grémare, sending a signal of “European solidarity that would make Moscow’s calculations more difficult”.  

France24