Underground and Underwater: Oil Security in France and Britain during the Cold War

Abstract

In the years following World War II, global demand for oil increased continually, and Western European governments pursued various political and diplomatic strategies to obtain hydrocarbons as further reserves were revealed across the world. The tensions of the Cold War increased national concerns over energy security yet further, and in this chapter we shall discuss some aspects of the particular strategies employed by two leading Western European administrations to gain at least some control over the sources of their supply. These strategies included maneuvers such as stockpiling, encouraging diversification of supply, and, when the opportunity arose, controlling access to resources on home soil and abroad. This control required the mobilization of state and commercial geological surveying to obtain “geostrategic intelligence,” that is, gathering information on what oil and gas reserves could be found underground; finding out what others (whether enemies or allies, co-producers, or business rivals) already knew about these reserves; and what acquisition strategies they had put in place. Surveillance in terms of both geophysical exploration and intelligence-gathering was therefore an essential element of oil security, an element often neglected in the existing literature on the history of oil exploration.1 Oil surveillance operations also produced conflicts between diplomats, firm managers, government officials, and geoscientists of different countries. As Robert Jervis more generally shows, the bolstering of energy security through surveillance activities by one administration made its neighbors feel less reassured about their own security.2