In targeting a “reboot” of defence ties with a focus on joint missile development and nuclear co-operation, while also firming up support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, Europe’s two nuclear powers also hope to send a strong signal to Moscow.
Right from its inception, France’s nuclear deterrent was designed to be independent, its potential deployment subject to the French president’s evaluation of any perceived threat to the republic’s strategic interests.
According to the independent Stockholm-based Sipri Institute on global security, France has 290 nuclear warheads, some carried aboard four submarines and some by Rafale fighter jets.
Britain for its part has 225 nuclear warheads. For now, the British nuclear deterrent is purely sea-based, carried by four submarines armed with ballistic missiles.
However, the British government announced last month it would add an airborne component to its operational system with the purchase of 12 American F-35 fighter jets.
Unlike France’s, Britain’s nuclear forces are fully integrated under the NATO defence umbrella to cover the Western military alliance’s 32 member states.
On Thursday during a visit by its President Emmanuel Macron to London, France agreed to the principle of coordination with Britain despite nominal national independence.
Despite the cherished independence of the French deterrent, Macron remarked in 2020 that France’s vital interests have an “authentically European dimension”.
In a 1995 joint declaration Paris and London acknowledged that “the vital interests of one (partner) could not be threatened without the vital interests of the other equally being at risk”.
Whereas that declaration was limited to the definition of the two neighbours’ “vital interests”, the latest cooperation accord goes much further.
The 1995 accord “was a uniquely Franco-British declaration on a very political level”, said Heloise Fayet, a researcher on nuclear issues at the French Institute for International Relations.
In the latest announcement, “the reference to nuclear arms is much more visible and clear,” Fayet told AFP.
“There are two advances: on the operational level with this coordination of the two deterrents. And the second is obviously the expansion of the joint European dimension.”