Grim's Hall

French perfidy:

The Polish government is pressuring its military to keep quiet about those missiles, while issuing a statement through its civilian leadership that their military officers were mistaken. Well, that's a relief. Who would believe the French would sell top weapons to our enemies?

The Federation of American Scientists believes it. FAS was founded by scientists who had worked on the Manhattan project, and wanted to make sure their work was not misused or allowed to proliferate wildly. Here's what they have to say on the subject of the Syrian biological weapons program:

France has played the key role in building up Syria's very well developed pharmaceuticals industry. With the active encouragement of the French embassy in Damascus and French government export credits, the biggest names in the French pharmaceuticals industry flocked to Damascus in the 1980s. Many of them opened branch offices and built production facilities in Syria, to make French pharmaceuticals under license. As a result, the French increased their share from 13.11% of Syria's pharmaceuticals imports in 1982 to 23% by 1986. This was all the more unusual since Syria was expanding its domestic production and therefore importing less during this same period.

The French government screens exports to determine whether goods proposed for sale to Syria, Iran, Libya (and other countries) merit review because of proliferation concerns. While France has been applying the guidelines of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime for several years, she only began applying controls on production equipment that could go into a chemical weapons plant in early 1992. "Only in the past six months has there been a universal will to impose this type of controls," a senior French foreign ministry official said in May 1992. "Before then, CW production equipment was freely available."

Like Britain and Italy, France has been unwilling to impose unilateral export controls on CW production equipment without an internationally-accepted control regime, so French companies could not accuse the government of putting them at a disadvantage on lucrative Third World markets. The Australia Group, which oversees the control of CW precursors, only finalized a list of production equipment that should also be subjected to international controls in late 1991. It was only adopted (after stiff opposition from France and Great Britain) in June 1992.

"Every day I sign off on export licenses," another senior French licensing official present at the same forum said, "and I wonder whether I have not just signed my resignation. In the area of chemical weapons manufacturing equipment, it is totally impossible to distinguish between civilian and military end-use," he admitted. "The equipment is strictly identical."

How about the Egyptian ballistic missile program?

Egypt is believed to have produced the Scud-B indigenously - perhaps modifying them to extend their range - with some North Korean assistance. An enhanced Scud-C (called "Project T"), with range/payload of 450 km/985 kg, is reported to have been developed and may be in service. In cooperation with the French Soci�t� Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (SNPE), Egypt has developed, produced, and deployed the Sakr-80 rocket as a replacement for the aging Frog missiles. The Sakr factory is responsible for producing the warheads, launchers and fire control systems for the Sakr-80.

Perhaps you'd like to know who helped to design China's premier attack helicopter?

The new WZ-9 helicopter gunship, the WZ-9 [export model code-named Z-9G] is a gunship converted from the French-designed Z-9 helicopter produced under license in China.

The Chinese military considers its mission the ability to defeat the U.S. military. That implies that they are at least a potential enemy, and certainly there have been high tensions over Taiwan. If the U.S. Navy has to fight for Taiwan, it will do so in the face of a few goodies China bought from France:

China has used French helicopters to reinforce its weak antisubmarine
warfare capabilities. According to open sources, China has imported or built under license between 65 and 105 modern French turbine-powered helicopters, including about 40 after 1989.

According to experts, China's only effective ship-to-air missile is the French Crotale missile system. China has deployed the Crotale on four ships, including its two most modern destroyers. Also, China has reverse-engineered the Crotale--reducing China's dependence on foreign suppliers.

Other French equipment on the Luhu destroyers includes the Sea Tiger naval surveillance radar, the Dauphin-2 (Z-9) helicopter (described later), and the TAVITAC combat data system (which is used to integrate the Luhus' various onboard systems).

Those Chinese helicopters, by the way, were delivered to China after a 1990 embargo on giving the Chinese such technology; and of course the Syrian program is playing fast and loose with import/export controls on biochemical weapons.