This Saturday around 7:20 p.m., a luminous phenomenon tore up the night sky over Gironde for a few moments, and worried the residents who were outside at that time.
On X, formerly Twitter, numerous testimonies from individuals, accompanied by photographs, describe a long orange light line, followed by a whitish explosion. “ I don’t know if anyone saw something weird in the sky around 7 p.m., a light like a plane with a trail of smoke.”thus describes a user of the social network.
Sébastien Lecornu, Minister of the Armed Forces, posted more than an hour later, at 8:48 p.m., a photo of the missile launch, announcing the success of the first launch of an M51.3 strategic ballistic missile by France, and specifying : “this development perpetuates the credibility of our nuclear deterrence and demonstrates the excellence of our launcher sector”. The missile can hold up to ten nuclear charges at the same time, to target different areas, but it was not equipped with a nuclear charge.
The official account of the General Directorate of Armaments (DGA) added a video on X, and gives the exact location of the firing point: “The DGA coordinated and successfully conducted a test firing of an M51 missile without a military charge from its Biscarrosse site”. The fourth version of the M5, renamed M51.3, has been in development since 2014 and increases the strike distance by several hundred kilometers.
The publication by the Minister of the Armed Forces, viewed more than a hundred thousand times in two hours, aroused the ire of certain Internet users, sharing their fear at seeing the missile, in a tense geopolitical context in Europe and the Middle East. “All that for that, I freaked out”says one user of “the whole of Gironde heard the detonation”.
The launch of the M51.3 missile was even visible thousands of kilometers away, in Italy. The webcam at the Monteromano astronomical observatory, about fifty kilometers from Florence, captured the French explosion in the sky.