Force de Frappe

President Jacques Chirac has dropped a political bombshell by threatening to retaliate with nuclear strikes against any state found to be responsible for a large-scale terrorist attack on France.

Wow! At first glance, that's kind of scary. But is it, really? During the Cold War the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) kept the powers in a nerve-wracking, but steady, balance. Do we want to return to that? Or do we want to live in fear that a terrorist attack could happen at any time? Can we hold a nation responsible for terrorist actions? We have been doing just that. But you can't always be sure that the nation is responsible. Of course, Chirac stated that the number of warheads on each missile has been reduced, so these are intended for smaller, tactical nuclear strikes. Is this a good thing?

The most interesting part of the article is this:

In the biggest shift in French nuclear doctrine for 40 years, M. Chirac revealed that the force de frappe - the French nuclear deterrent - had already been reconfigured to allow it to destroy the "power centres" of any state which sponsored a terrorist assault.

The French nuclear deterrent is apparently named after a blender setting . . . .