Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: aldo_14 on November 23, 2005, 08:29:34 am
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1647744,00.html
Margaret Thatcher forced François Mitterrand to give her the codes to disable Argentina's deadly French-made missiles during the Falklands war by threatening to launch a nuclear warhead against Buenos Aires, according to a book.
Rendez-vous - the psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, by Ali Magoudi, who met the late French president up to twice a week in secrecy at his Paris practice from 1982 to 1984, also reveals that Mr Mitterrand believed he would get his "revenge" by building a tunnel under the Channel which would forever destroy Britain's island status.
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And that's why she'll go down in history as a power hungry nutter.
Conservatives eh?
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She threatened to nuke Beunos Aires? Was she drunk at the time or was she always like that?
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She was always like that. Complete nutcase that woman.
Doesn't sound like Mitterrand's revenge plan was any saner though :lol:
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And to think these kind of people lead entire countries... At least we have a president who looks like a certain talkshow host :D
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Why did she even bother? It's not like Argentina really cared that much about the Falklands. Look at the exlucsion zone, how many wars have you heard off where they ringed off an area for it to take place in?
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The falkland war...
"These are OUR rocks! We will DIE for our rocks!"
lovely.
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Tell that to the people who burned to death on the Sheffield
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@ionia Not quite that simple.
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Clave - I think you mean the Sir Galahad.
The Falklands War was a bit of a double-edged sword, IMO - on the one hand, it basically saved the Royal Navy from being reduced to insignificance, but it also showed up the woeful lack of readiness for a conflict of that nature - the lack of an effective AA screen, for one thing (even ignoring the controversy about the attack on the Sheffield), and the very poor way it was planned (at least on the Navy's part).
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Prophet, Do you happen to live in finland? If so, he doesn't look a damn thing like your president, save for the red hair...
Anyhow, Margie's always seemed to be a bit crazy to me, but I'd not have thought she'd say something like that...
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Let's not assume that only ships that burn to the waterline have casualities.
The Falklands were good for the Royal Navy in the long run. It was their "damage control is very important, you idiots" wakeup call; their damage-control technique was a farce and their shipbuilding defective at best. (It's interesting when you consider the USN had their own particular wakeup call with the loss of the USS Lexington in WWII; but apparently it takes a major shipboard fire, and the RN hadn't had one of those until the Falklands. Also instructive to consider what happened to the USS Stark, which took two hits from the same kind of missiles.) And were the same thing to happen now the results would be much different, as the RN learned its lesson. Their damage-control technique, particularly for fighting fires, is among the best in the world today, and they've stopped building ships out of flammable aluminum and plastic.
On the original topic, this sounds pretty crackpot to me. Here is my best guess on how this happened: My interest in naval history means that I know that the Exocet which hit the Sheffield didn't actually go off. The manufacturer couldn't figure out what went wrong, and didn't for another five years, so they went back to the drawing board on the fuzing mechanism.
Somebody heard the missile didn't go off and that the manufacturer couldn't figure out why, but missed the memo about them doing so five years later, and came up with this crazy theory. However...
The Exocet series of missiles are almost as common as dirt. They can be launched from just about any platform imaginable, from helicopters to ships to off the back of a truck, so there's lots of flexiblity, and they're relatively cheap compared to higher-performance antiship missiles like the US Harpoon or Chinese Silkworm, while offering effective antiship capablities, unlike the even cheaper Russian Styx. They have a huge market share; probably equal to that of Russian-made weapons, perhaps even greater. This is big business, and worth tens if not hundreds of billions. I severely doubt that any such codes existed. I further severely doubt that even if they did exist, the manufacturer would have revealed them to the French government even under duress. Compromising their product in such a manner is nonsensical.
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Well the whole story is "according to a book" so the source is not that reliable...
But that aside, I can see the validity of the demand by Thatcher, but I'm puzzled by the target - surely Paris would have been better if you want to pressure the French leader...?
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To which Mitterand would have responded "Go ahead. We'll nuke you right back." Argentina doesn't have nuclear weapons. So the pressure was from the fact that the millions of deaths would be Mitterand's fault, because he didn't give up the codes, not that he'd get nuked himself.
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Plus sending a nuclear warhead screaming into the heart of a nation that had dared to question the UK's power would go no small way towards upsetting the new world order that was only just seeing the light of day.
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Well the whole story is "according to a book" so the source is not that reliable...
But that aside, I can see the validity of the demand by Thatcher, but I'm puzzled by the target - surely Paris would have been better if you want to pressure the French leader...?
It's more along the lines of this I think.
"The Argentine missiles are dangerous to our troops. We need to disable them. We can do this in two ways - either you can give us the codes, or we can nuke BA and you'll have x million deaths on your conscience."
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Clave - I think you mean the Sir Galahad.
The Falklands War was a bit of a double-edged sword, IMO - on the one hand, it basically saved the Royal Navy from being reduced to insignificance, but it also showed up the woeful lack of readiness for a conflict of that nature - the lack of an effective AA screen, for one thing (even ignoring the controversy about the attack on the Sheffield), and the very poor way it was planned (at least on the Navy's part).
Worth noting the political effect (of eventual defeat) upon the ruling junta in Argentina, too.