strain. Coming after nearly 90 years ofimmobilismeand 10 years in which
the life expectancy of a government was measured in weeks rather than
months, the Fifth Republic has come to be seen by the French as constituting
a radical change in the very nature of French political life. Franc ̧ois Mitterrand,
France’s first socialist president, and himself a past member of Fourth Repub-
lican governments, who had attacked the Fifth Republic’s transfer of power
away from the legislature for years, happily accepted the powers and authority
of the presidency and failed to consider a reform he had previously urged, to
shorten presidential terms from seven to five years, until the end of his own
second presidential term was in sight (a constitutional amendment to this effect
was eventually approved in 2000, and Jacques Chirac began his second term in
the presidency, of five years’ duration, following his re-election to the post in
May 2002). It is, perhaps, the ability of the system to function during a
prolonged period of economic decline and public collapse of confidence, such
as happened at the end of the 20th century, that most underlines the
permanence and stability of the Republic.
First Strike
The use of nuclear weaponry to attack an enemy which has not already
launched such an attack would be known as a first strike, and was eschewed,
officially at least, by NATO forces at the strategic level, though not at the
tactical level. Soviet military doctrine traditionally did not place restrictions on
theescalationprocess, so a nuclear first strike was more likely from this
direction.
One form of attack would be a pre-emptive strike, which can be launched
with either nuclear or conventional weapons, aimed against some specific
feature of another power’s potential or actual military capacity. The intention is
to prevent the other power from using that specific weapon or capacity. It was
sometimes argued in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, that the USA
should launch a pre-emptive strike against Chinese research establishments to
stop them developing nuclear weaponry. Israel carried out what they claimed
to be such a pre-emptive strike against Iraqi nuclear reactors in 1980, but using
conventional forces. Although they are in fact unprovoked first strikes, they are
seen by those who launch them as essentially defensive measures. For most of
the period of nuclear rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union neither
side had the capacity to launch a first strike which could destroy enough of the
other’ssecond strike capacityto make it a rational option, though there was
a period in the early 1980s when some American analysts feared the Soviet
Union might have such a force level.
First Strike