Pierre Marie Gallois Biography

Pierre Marie Gallois (29 June 1911 – 24 August 2010) was a French air force brigadier general and geopolitician. He was instrumental in the constitution of the French nuclear arsenal. This earned him the nickname of father of the French atom bomb. However, Bruno Tertrais, a research fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, argued in "Destruction Assurée : The Origins and Development of French Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1981," an essay in Henry Sokolski, ed., Getting Mad: Nuclear mutual assured destruction, its origins and practice, that other contemporaries of Gallois in the community of French defense intellectuals deserve a greater share of the credit.