On 23 January 1956, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs drafts a memorandum in which it sets out the interest that France would have, along with its European partners, in concentrating on the use of nuclear energy for peaceful and civilian purposes.

On 24 January 1956, General Pierre Gaston Billotte, French Minister for National Defence and the Armed Forces, sends a confidential letter to Edgar Faure, President of the French Council, and to Antoine Pinay, French Foreign Minister, in which he emphasises the need for France to be militarily independent in terms of nuclear weapons, irrespective of its commitments within Euratom.

On 26 April 1956, Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Committee established by the Messina Conference, sends a letter to his German, French, Italian, Luxembourg and Netherlands counterparts in which he proposes the adoption of rules so that a Euratom Member State might depart from the principle according to which European States are committed to the development of nuclear energy and the nuclear industry for peaceful purposes.

On 22 June 1956, a few days before the opening of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, French Minister for National Defence and the Armed Forces, makes Christian Pineau, his counterpart at the French Foreign Ministry, aware of his determination to safeguard France’s freedom to manufacture nuclear weapons independently of its accession to Euratom.

On 25 June 1956, Maurice Faure, French State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Head of the French Delegation to the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom, invites various French civil and military experts to a luncheon held at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs during which he outlines the French diplomatic strategy with regard to the military aspects of nuclear energy in Europe.

On 4 July 1956, the French daily newspaper Le Monde publishes an interview with Maurice Faure, Junior Minister in the French Foreign Ministry and Head of the French Delegation to the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom, who highlights the civilian and military advantages for France of participation in the future European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom).

In August 1956, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, French Minister for National Defence and the Armed Forces, explains why French defence would be nothing but a myth if the country had to abandon the manufacture of nuclear missiles as a result of its Euratom commitments.

On 10 October 1956, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, French Minister for National Defence and the Armed Forces, sends a letter to Guy Mollet, President of the French Council of Ministers, in which he emphasises the need for negotiations with the European partners on a Euratom treaty which would give France the possibility of manufacturing nuclear weapons.

On 9 and 10 December 1956, the French daily newspaper Le Monde publishes the first official figures on the state of the national nuclear fuel reserves, summarises French investment in the nuclear sector and shows the output of national generating sites based on the figures reported by Georges Guille, Junior Minister for Relations with Parliament and for Nuclear Power in the Prime Minister’s Office.

On 1 February 1957, the Secretariat of the Euratom Group at the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom reviews the possible military uses of atomic energy in the framework of the future European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC).

On 2 January 1957, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel expresses its pessimism regarding the operation of the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom), given the continuation of French military programmes.

‘Vote for those in favour of Euratom.’ On 12 January 1957, in the French Communist daily newspaper L’Humanité, referring to the debates in France on Euratom, the cartoonist Louis Mitelberg attacks the threat of the military use of nuclear energy.