French Mirage 2000N carrying a live nuclear missile over Libya

[Major Shaitan Singh]

When I first saw the picture of a French Air Force Mirage 2000N carrying an ASMP-A nuclear missile during a test flight at Istres taken by Tucano13800 and published by Rafale News blog on Sept. 6, I didn’t notice an interesting detail. The nuclear missile wears a yellow stripe that is the colour used to identify live armament.

As I’ve already explained in previous articles, live ammunitions are identified with a yellow stripe, while inert/dummy weapons wear a blue stripe and (based also on pictures of Rafale and Mirage planes involved in Operation Unified Protector over Libya), even the French Air Force uses the same colour code.

I didn’t think live nukes were carried by planes during training sorties, at least here in Europe.

Update: I’ve found an article about the first ASMP-A missile fired by the French Air Force (without its nuclear warhead) to test how it performed and if it followed its intended flight trajectory. The picture shown on the same page show the missile with a yellow stripe.

Since color codes identify the explosive hazards contained within the ordnance (with yellow for high explosive), most probably, the ASMP-A wears a yellow stripe during tests (without warhead) because of the explosive used for fueling its ramjet.

Pictures below show the blue stripes applied to inert missiles.

 

[SQ8]

Perhaps it was armed with a makeshift conventional warhead in its place??

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

A very unnecessary and dangerous act by France but we can`t over look French imperial past of trying to dominate others via weapons

 

[jha]

Most probably armed with conventional payload..

 

[Stormweaver]

Most most probably a conventional payload.

-Firstly, you can't really use nuclear weapons in a civil war scenario.

-If the plane gets shot down or suffers mechanical failure and crashes over hostile territory, the nuclear weapon could spew radioactive waste over miles.

- If after a crash or forced landing the weapon falls in the hand of -any- party it would be a nightmare of epic proportions, geopolitically.

- And anyway if the French were to respond to a WMD strike, it would be through a submarine launched missile.

- Lastly, Gaddafi is really "different" from other leaders and wouldn't feel threatened by a nuke. By "different" I mean bat **** crazy.....