The Price of Pride

France will set off its first atom bomb next year, the Paris business magazine Entreprise reported last week. Crowed Entre prise: "This will permit us to enter the 'atomic club' before membership is closed. Great Britain must resign itself to no longer being the sole nuclear partner of the U.S." From France's Defense Ministry came proud confirmation that work on the French bomb "is quite far along and we may expect tests in the near future."

The French atomic-bomb program will cost close to $1 billion (400 billion francs) in the next seven years. In NATO eyes, France could make many more useful contributions to Western defense than by designing and manufacturing a weapon already made by the U.S. and Britain. It is exactly the kind of wasteful enterprise that the projected summit meeting was designed to eliminate or make unnecessary.

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