The finalization of a completed draft nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which the ENDC transmitted to by the United Nations without endorsement on March 18, 1968, launched a French review of the NPT’s implications for international law. The draft NPT was accompanied by a proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC), whose soft guarantees against nuclear-weapon use or threats had been a compromise workd out between Washington and Moscow. An initial study by Foreign Ministry lawyers identified numerous “juridical reasons… to fight against a project that, in its letter if not its spirit, constitutes a revision of the [UN] Charter." The report elaborated on how the hierarchization of “forms of aggression” would “downgrade” non-nuclear (i.e. conventional) violence. Non-nuclear-weapon states treaty signatories would receive non-binding security guarantees. The “Anglo-Saxons and Soviets” would maintain “freedom of action as far as what measures they choose to adopt.” Although the French government’s foremost legal experts opted not to advise vetoing the UNSC resolution, they warned the NPT package could serve as a warrant for nuclear-armed permanent members of the UN Security Council to wage “preventive war” in the name of worldwide nonproliferation.

Indian objections to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Discussion of drafts prepared by the Soviet Union and the US for the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament.

The memorandum lays out substantive and significant line of thinking about the complex problem raised by the Israeli nuclear program. Kissinger thought it might be possible to persuade the Israelis that with all of the NPT’s loopholes signing it would not prevent them from continuing their weapons research and development. Kissinger also recognized the real possibility that the Israeli development momentum could not be stopped.