Senior MPs have called for an inquiry into claims that France deliberately withheld secrets about missiles that killed 46 British sailors in the 1982 Falklands War.
The Telegraph has been told that French-made Exocet guided missiles contained a “kill switch” that could have disarmed them, but that France denied such a device existed.
Ahead of Wednesday’s 40th anniversary of an Exocet attack on HMS Sheffield – which caused the first British fatalities of the conflict – France has been urged to come clean about what it did and did not share with Margaret Thatcher’s government.
Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of Parliament’s defence select committee, said the matter “warrants further investigation”, while Liam Fox, a former defence secretary, said France – a vital defence partner of the UK – should be “open and honest” about what happened.
Three Royal Navy ships were hit by Exocets during the Falklands conflict, two of which – HMS Sheffield and the merchant vessel Atlantic Conveyor – sank. Sailors died on all three ships.
The missiles were made by the French firm Aerospatiale and, as the Royal Navy task force sailed south to retake the islands from their Argentinian occupiers, Britain appealed to its ally for information about how they worked and whether they could be disabled.
British experts believed the Exocets contained a kill switch, which arms manufacturers sometimes secretly build into weapons so they can be disabled if they fall into the hands of a hostile state.
According to a highly-placed source, France denied that the kill switches existed, but British officials became convinced it was not telling the truth, partly as a result of investigations carried out on an earlier variant of the missile that had been bought by the UK.
On Tuesday night, Admiral Lord West, the former First Sea Lord who commanded the frigate HMS Ardent during the Falklands war, told The Telegraph he had heard of the alleged kill switch in Exocet missiles and had been told Britain was denied the technology.
He said: “I was told that the French were very helpful in terms of letting us see the flying of Mirages and the Super Etendard [French-built fighter aircraft, used by Argentina] so we could get their flight profiles.
“They did give us a certain amount of material about Exocet, but I was also told there was a mechanism within it so that foreign people couldn’t fire an Exocet at a French ship without them being able to do something to mean it wouldn’t be able to hit them.
“They were making a lot of sales of Exocet, and if the people they were selling them to found out that there was a way of defeating it, they would not have been happy.”
Read more: The Telegraph
