WorldView/Patrick Smyth: There's a whiff of the looming presidential election in the French air.
Time for a little sabre- rattling, and former cavalry officer Jacques Chirac is no mean rattler, even if he's not a candidate this time round.
All this attention on potential successors is not good for a chap's sense of amour propre. And anyway, it's a good five years since he has devoted a speech to France's force de frappe, the nuclear deterrent, of which it is so devilishly proud. So, time to remind the world that France is a global power with no mean punch.
Last Thursday, in typically robust style, Chirac, speaking to military officers at a nuclear submarine base in Brest, redefined France's nuclear strategy to include the possible targeting of rogue states should they consider - NB "consider" - using weapons of mass destruction. Or, should they support strikes against France, the rationale being that although terrorists may not be deterred by a possible nuclear response, states that harbour them may well be.
France has joined the select ranks of nations that not only possess nuclear weapons but have said they are prepared to use them both pre-emptively and against non-nuclear targets. The Pentagon last year revised its nuclear weapons doctrine in terms that are strikingly akin to Mr Chirac's. North Korea has said it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively and Israel has hinted as much, though still officially denying it has such weapons.
Only a matter of months since the US and its allies invaded Iraq under the pretext that it possessed weapons of mass destruction, the French reasoning is likely to strike a cold fear into many hearts. There's just the not-so-small matter of an absence of public trust in the word of leaders in these matters.
Mr Chirac's timing is also particularly insensitive - he is part of the EU3 group that, with the US and Russia, is trying to persuade Iran to abandon all aspirations to nuclear weapons. And, as François Heisbourg of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, put it to the Financial Times: "It is rather difficult to persuade someone to renounce the acquisition of nuclear weapons when you are explaining how wonderful they can be."
Not to mention France's obligations under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty, signed by 187 states including five nuclear weapon states, enjoins those without them to forgo the privilege while the five promise to do their utmost to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control". Iran, among others, complains with considerable justice that the nuclear weapon powers are doing nothing to comply with their side of the bargain, let alone, as Selig Harrison argued in these pages last week, to provide it with security guarantees.
On the contrary. The terrifying logic of nuclear deterrence theory is driving those who own such weapons yearly closer and closer to their use. Or rather, which is the same thing, reducing the threshold at which a launch decision is possible. Increasingly, strategists for the nuclear powers have become convinced that traditionally-held Mad (mutually assured destruction) theory is no longer convincing - because the potential destructive power is so huge, and probably entails mutual annihilation, the threat of a massive indiscriminate nuclear attack is no longer credible. No-one can conceive of a realistic circumstance in which it would be used, and therefore no-one need feel inhibited by the threat.
Nuclear weapons can only become a credible deterrent again, the logic runs, if their destructive power is reduced and they can better be targeted, at, say, command and control centres. Discriminate use of nukes would not invite enormous retaliation and could thus credibly be used. Deterrence consists in believing they may be used and that has been the purpose of a lengthy technical transformation of France's force de frappe over that last few years. Its logical corollary in the age of non-state terrorist threats, it is also argued, is a new formulation of the doctrine of use.
So Mr Chirac's untimely intervention is probably not a clumsy attempt to bully Iran but rather the logical outcome of work undertaken several years ago in parallel to that in the US. And, of course, the need to reassert his centrality to public life.
Not that the rest of us should be any less alarmed. And his comments duly sounded furious alarm bells in Germany, France's closest ally, with chancellor Angela Merkel forced by domestic pressure to express her concern to the Elysée. Her spokesman afterwards sought to reassure with the utterly Orwellian comment that Mr Chirac had impressed on Dr Merkel "that nuclear weapons are not instruments of war". Because they deter aggression they prevent war and should never have to be used (their use is a sign of failure) - never a formulation that persuaded when it came from old Cold Warriors, still not persuasive . . .
Mr Chirac has, as he sees it, sweetened the pill for allies by repeating his insistence that France's nuclear defences are for Europe's defence too - not that he's suggesting the rest of us should share in their control. Pas du tout. France, alone of its members, is not even prepared to participate and share in Nato nuclear weapon planning, let alone submit to the discipline of the EU's still rather too aspirational Common Foreign and Security structures. Big boys' rules still apply.
Not in my name, M Chirac. This escalation of the nuclear threat is not remotely reassuring. Far from it. Not in my name.
Patrick Smyth is Irish Times Foreign Editor