On Friday, January 23, Louise Matz, a postdoctoral researcher at CIENS specializing in nuclear and strategic issues, presented her doctoral research in the history of diplomacy, international relations, and European integration, conducted under the supervision of Olivier Fourcade. Her work explores the political and strategic significance of nuclear deterrence for the French Air Force over a period of forty years, from 1956 to 1996.
The study offers an analysis of France’s “nuclear adventure” through three complementary levels of action: the international level, marked by the dynamics of the Cold War, its alliances, and its competitive logic; the national level, characterized by adaptations in French defense policy and the format of its military apparatus; and finally, the institutional level of the Air Force.
The research focuses on the Air Force as one of the first actors to have been shaped by the nuclear age. It examines aviators as indicators of these transformations and brings together the three actors involved in nuclear deterrence: politicians, scientists, and the military.
The methodology is based on archival work drawing on a variety of sources: NATO archives, national archives (papers of heads of state), the Ministry of the Armed Forces collection at the Defense Historical Service, several hundred oral testimonies, private archives, legislative archives, and French diplomatic documents. Her dual status as a contracted officer and university researcher sometimes complicated her work, with administrative obstacles and refusals to grant access to certain data.
At the heart of this research are some fundamental questions: does strategy adapt to technology, or vice versa? What are the consequences for the identity of the Air Force?
Among the perspectives opened up by the results of her thesis, Louise Matz identifies a targeted study of aviators within the state’s nuclear decision-making apparatus to analyze their political role and career logic, the study of inter-service tensions where the nuclear revolution has an impact on the armed forces while complicating their links, the inter-allied dimension of the exercise of deterrence through cooperation, and the extension of the deterrence environment to space.
