Before addressing the question of strategies and their doctrines, especially since 1945, certain pre-conditions must be established if one is to understand the subject more clearly. Firstly, it must not be forgotten that a strategic doctrine is primarily an opportunity for public political discussion about a strategy. Naturally, this does not imply that such a discussion is wholly detached from the reality of the government’s operational planning; after all, to ensure a minimum of credibility, the doctrine must—at least for appearances’ sake—be coherent with available resources and the prospects for employing them. A doctrine is therefore at the outset the product of a balancing act between a political plan and military resources.

As far as France is concerned, while some writers had flashes of intuition as far back as the autumn of 1945,⁽¹⁾ it was not until the dawn of the 1960s and the Fifth Republic that the first papers of a theoretical nature emerged. These texts would enable France to endow itself with a doctrinal corpus that was not only credible but which was also born of thought processes whose meticulousness led some to portray, for reasons to which we shall return, as ‘logical frenzy'⁽²⁾ and accuse one of its theoreticians of being ‘world champion dogmatist without the excuse of being a mathematician’.⁽³⁾ All these debates and musings of the 1960s would in fact result in what could be considered as a concept in its most absolute sense. French doctrine effectively drove the deterrent concept to what was doubtless its most perfect state as the weakness—relative to the two superpowers—of the French arsenal compelled the French to espouse a position that was irreproachably rigorous: as France could not field the resources to wage a possible nuclear war, it had to equip itself with all the tools, not just military, that were required to prevent it.

Nuclear deterrence is the product of two constituent components of wars in their most general manifestations. The first reminds us that the concept of deterrence is nothing new in the history of warfare; indeed it could be said to date back to the very roots of armed conflict. The second arises from the belief that technical progress will ultimately lead to mankind building weapons with such destructive power that they are likely to so transform warfare that it becomes impossible. This idea developed mainly in the latter third of the nineteenth century, which was the great period of industrialisation in Europe, and especially in the years that followed the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to 1871. But these thought processes failed to prevent the outbreak of war in 1914! In this sense, and to date, only the atomic bomb has enabled deterrence to succeed. This conclusion might also have derived from the fact that nuclear deterrence strategy developed in a very specific international situation—the bipolar order—to the point where one must perhaps think of it as a footnote to the history of international systems.