Nuclear weapons?

No, you're right. I thought France had some. But let's be honest, they would be too scared to use them, judging by recent wars they were involved in.

Pakistan is a volatile country, and I think India has nukes too...and we all know what those two nations think of each other.

 

Apologies, regarding recent, I did not mean like 5 or 20 years ago.
I meant like the second world war. Apparently, the German army stormed Paris and the French basically surrendered and begged the Germans not to harm the buildings of Paris. They then went on to form the French resistance and fight the Germans in a clandestine way. That's not to say that they did not fight at all, but it seemed more like a semi-passive resistance to me, from what I've been told.

So I think that France would only use them if other countries started using them first. Noryh Korea, Iran, USA, Russia...even Israel and Pakistan, I think they would use their weapons long before the French would.

Its just an opinion, that's all. It's not meant to be inflammatory in any way.

 

By the way, I like Paris, it's beautiful. So I can sympathize with the French for not wanting Paris destroyed.

 

I partly agree with you, but like I said, it's an opinion and one side of an observation of the war, as is yours. You are most likely right that they would have no choice in the matter. But in any event that does not invalidate my opinion of them using, or not using, nuclear weapons.

 

Who really knows how many nuke warheads each really has?

How many missiles to fit them on?

And how many launchers?

 

I wouldn't be entirely sure about France not being aggressive with nukes. They tend to keep it on the more secretive side, but they have some pretty vicious military practices. The French Foreign Legion is a good example... foreigners join it to earn French citizenship, or sometimes native French who just want to prove themselves join it. Despite them being massively tougher people than the rest of the military due to their truly insane training, France treats them like disposable pawns. There is zero regard for their lives, and they've been sent to die in large numbers in Africa and Indonesia just because France didn't care about their lives enough to protect them at all.

France wants to protect France, hence the surrender thing, but they couldn't care less about other countries and the citizens of them.

 

Find it interesting that the poll makes no mention of the UK's nuclear arsenal.

 

That's fair enough and I didn't know you created the poll from scratch. I assumed you copied the poll from elsewhere and the information was omitted from source. Not a big deal, but the UK is known to have a capability and more so than some of the other countries mentioned, that's why I was surprised not to see it. Regardless, one nuke is destructive enough.

 

So, maybe France was very sensible to have surrendered early in WW2 rather than to have resisted for the sake of it only to then be defeated inevitably after experiencing a lot of infrastructure destruction and personnel losses... I'd say France very was sensible back then. And, btw, it is reputed that pre WW2 German espionage had acquired all of the weak points in French defences and attacked those points. If Germany hadn't gotten that info then France was otherwise pretty well defended - reputedly.

And your reasoning for France only using nukes if another country used them first does not compute. France might use them first against certain countries who don't have them, especially if it still had US backing. But realistically most nuclear States wouldn't use nukes first unless... oh, the

In my opinion the USA might use them first. Pakistan might. But, France, I think would use its nukes first if need be. Russia would if it thought nukes were coming it's way or were about to come it's way. The same goes for China, in fact all of them!

 

Darn, I was wrong.

 

But are you actually wrong? Who really knows? I mean Israel isn't supposed to have any...

 

I voted USA 7,200 / Russia 7,500 / Iran 2 / France 125 / Pakistan 50 / Israel est25.

 

I knew Iran had zero nukes so it was down to two. But I got the wrong one.

 

I failed the test, but I didn't really know whether the values referred to the number of active weapons, or the number of possibly serviceable weapons. Both the US and Russian arsenals are aging -- neither country is still manufacturing new nukes.

As for the sheer number of them -- back in the day, it was all about a kind of "who has the larger penis" between the Americans and the Soviets. Even US elections were sometimes defined in terms of the nuclear gap (think 1960.) Plus, the weapons race was very profitable to those (particularly American corporations) which made the delivery systems, such as missiles, bombers, and the like, for the US government; on the Soviet side, the reasons were mostly political, but they were very much alike.

 

Obviously no profit was made in the USSR though. It was a burden on the USSR.