One of the most enduring images of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution is of Charles de Gaulle proclaiming “Vive le Qu?bec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal City Hall. The incident laid bare Canada’s unity crisis and has since dominated interpretations of the Canada-Quebec-France triangle. David Meren demystifies this cri du balcon by looking beyond de Gaulle to Quebec’s evolving relationship with France after the war and the clash of nationalisms that resulted. By seeking to understand Quebec, Gaullist, and Canadian nationalism, Meren not only casts doubt on established interpretations of events, he also reveals how the challenge of responding to American superpower and influence shaped the triangle.
This book offers the first non-official history of French nuclear policies which goes beyond the divide between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policies. It addresses the sizing of France’s nuclear forces, technological assistance to countries with nuclear weapons programs, uranium prospection, nuclear testing, its health effects and protests against it, as well as plans to prevent and manage accidents in nuclear power plants. It is based on new questions and new sources from France and abroad. The chapters in this volume show how independent and interdisciplinary scholarship free from conflicts of interests can uniquely advance our understanding of nuclear history and politics. This is the case because it does not treat the categories and judgments of official discourse as neutral starting points of the analysis. This volume is based on untapped primary sources from France, the UK, the US, India, South Africa and Iran, on a new assessment of the health consequences of French nuclear testing in Polynesia thanks to a modern atmospheric particle transport code coupled with historical weather data, open-source information about radioactive debris (“mushroom”) clouds, as well as data on the composition and particle sizes of the fallout; and on new survey data about French knowledge of and attitudes towards nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. They show notably that the first generation of French nuclear forces lacked technical credibility despite reliance on outside help. Several French officials knew this, as did France's allies and adversaries. Moreover, French strategic collaborations associated to nuclear programs extended to India and South Africa; nuclear safety regulations changed fundamentally after the Cold War, and approximately 110,000 people, i.e. 90% of the French Polynesian population in the 1970s, could have received doses that would qualify them for compensation according to French law. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of history, politics, international relations, military history, war studies, conflict and global governance. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in Cold War History. A few chapters were first published in the Nonproliferation Review, Diplomacy & Statecraft and Science & Global Security.
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
How do diplomats interpret treaty rules in the field of international security? In a situation of increasing global legal complexity, do past regimes survive the entry into force of new and contradictory regimes? Who decides how legal rules should be interpreted when contradictions exist between overlapping regimes? This book answers such questions by exploring how successive generations of American and European policymakers promoted various regimes to solve the problem of nuclear proliferation in Europe and in the rest of the world.--Résumé de l'éditeur.
Can we trust France? Apparently not. After more than 200 years of shared history and interests, the U.S.-France marriage looks as if it's ending in an acrimonious divorce. Here is the shocking insider account. In the wake of French behavior at the United Nations, where Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin systematically undermined the efforts of Secretary of State Colin Powell to convince the Security Council to authorize force against Iraq, Americans have at best come to suspect our ally of double dealing, and at worst come to view them as the enemy. Almost daily over the past year, new stories have emerged of how the government of French President Jacques Chirac has sought to undermine the U.S. war on terror, publicly sniping at America and inciting other countries to do the same. What's wrong with France? What's behind their recent perfidy? According to bestselling author Kenneth R. Timmerman, the American public doesn't know half the story. After they read The French Betrayal of America, American anger at France will turn to outrage. Timmerman, who worked as a journalist in France for eighteen years and knows the players on both sides, lifts the veil of Jacques Chirac's scandalous love affair with Saddam Hussein, beginning in 1975, when he took him on a tour of top-secret French nuclear facilities. The French attitude toward the dictator, which seemed to baffle American politicians, was in fact entirely predictable. Put bluntly, it was all about money, oil, and guns. Chirac needed Saddam's oil and Saddam's money, and Saddam needed French weapons and French nuclear technology. Despite this, the relationship between France and America was not only amicable but at times very mutually beneficial. That was until the most recent war on Iraq, where France turned the tables, engaging in dirty diplomacy and helping to sway other European countries to their side. French war coverage was not merely one-sided: It was viciously inaccurate, skewed, and openly anti-American. Timmerman also presents incredible new evidence of France's duplicity, including the fact that the French stood to gain $100 billion from secret oil contracts they had concluded with Saddam Hussein. The French Betrayal of America raises questions of whether the nuclear cooperation agreements still in force with the French today should be canceled in light of France's behavior. Our security interests no longer converge, and our economic systems increasingly appear to be at loggerheads. The war in Iraq harshly exposed French treachery and their desire to do business with the worst of international tyrants, putting their economy, their international standing, and their relationship with a 200-year-old friend in severe jeopardy.
Thirty years ago, an international antiglobalization movement was born in the grazing lands of France’s Larzac plateau. In the 1970s, Larzac farmers were joined by others from around the world in their efforts to prevent the expansion of a local military base: by ecologists, religious pacifists, and urban leftists, and by social activists including American Indians and South American peasant leaders. In 1999 some of the same farmers who had fought the expansion of the base in the 1970s—including José Bové—dismantled the new local McDonald’s. That gesture was part of a protest against U.S. tariffs on specified French exports including Roquefort cheese, the region’s primary market product. The two struggles—the one against expanding a French army camp intended to train troops for postcolonial wars, the other against American economic might—were landmarks in the global campaign to preserve local cultures. They were also key episodes in the decades-long attempt by the French to define their cultural heritage within a much changed nation, a new Europe, and, especially, an American-dominated world. In Bringing the Empire Back Home, the inventive cultural historian Herman Lebovics provides a riveting account of how intense disputes about what it means to be French have played out over the past half-century, redefining Paris, the regions, and the former colonies in relation to one another and the world at large. In a narrative populated with peasants, people from the former colonies, museum curators, former colonial administrators, left Christians, archaeologists, anthropologists, soccer players and their teenage fans, and, yes, leading government officials, Lebovics reveals contemporary French society and cultures as perhaps the West’s most important testing grounds of pluralism and assimilation. A lively cultural history, Bringing the Empire Back Home highlights not only the political significance of France’s efforts to synthesize the regional, national, European, ethnic postcolonial, and global but also the chaotic beauty of the endeavor.
In Kennedy, de Gaulle and Western Europe , Mahan revises prevailing interpretations of Franco-American relations during the early 1960s that either chastise de Gaulle for anti-Americanism or Kennedy for imposing U.S. policies on Europe. Summoning a wide range of French and American archival sources, this book demonstrates that the structure and dynamics of the Franco-American relationship during this period were embedded in complex multilateral relationships within the Western alliance.
This book analyses the economic history of the nuclear program in Spain, from its inception in the 1950s to the nuclear moratorium in the early 1980s, and investigates the economic, financial and business origins of atomic energy in Spain. The actual dimension of the Spanish nuclear sector, which exceeded the relative economic and political clout of the country at the time, reflects the combination of domestic and foreign interests. Each contribution inserts the Spanish case within the international development of nuclear energy, but also shows how the Spanish nuclear program came about, how it was financed, and who the main architects and beneficiaries at the industrial, financial, commercial and banking levels were; all without losing sight of the energy policy aspects such as energy mix and energy security. The volume provides useful analysis and sources for a variety of core fields across the social sciences including economic history of post-war Europe, industrial and energy policy, international relations and history of technology.
