And here's what Wikipedia says about French involvement.
"French involvement
French president François Mitterrand gave full support to the UK in the Falklands war. As a large part of Argentina's military equipment was French-made, French support was crucial. France provided aircraft identical to the ones it supplied to Argentina for British pilots to train against. France provided intelligence to help sabotage the Exocet missiles it sold to Argentina. Sir John Nott, who was Secretary of State for Defence during the conflict later acknowledged: "In so many ways Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies". [1]
In 2005, the British Guardian newspaper gave a different account of French cooperation, quoting Mitterrand - "I had a difference to settle with the Iron Lady. That Thatcher, what an impossible woman!". "With her four nuclear submarines in the south Atlantic, she's threatening to unleash an atomic weapon against Argentina if I don't provide her with the secret codes that will make the missiles we sold the Argentinians deaf and blind."
The effects of France's actions during the war have contributed to Argentina's shift toward American sources for combat aircraft and upgrades (e.g. the A-4AR Fightinghawk, a refurbished A-4 Skyhawk). The country's national aeronautical manufacturing company FMA (Fábrica Militar de Aviones) is now owned by Lockheed-Martin.
Since the end of the war, Latin America has consistently purchased more American and Russian aircraft than French. The last major French combat aircraft sale in Latin America was Mirage 2000s for Peru in the late 1980s."
And if you read the whole Wikipedia article, you'll note that, if it's accurate, the Argentines were shooting up ships with Exocets throughout the fight, well after the sinking of the Sheffield, although apparently there was a certain amount of success in jamming them.
A woman acquaintance who was an engineer involved in the British war effort at the time, had this to say. She is also skeptical that the last missile was an exocet, but she is also adamant that there were no "codes" involved. These are some of her responses to the Guardian article.
"Pile of horseshit, there were no "codes" for anyone to give and we reverse engineered the missiles ourselves (by "ourselves" I do actually include myself, that was part of my job at the time) and actually demonstrated to some smart-alec French scientists our ability to jam them.
At the time there was a rumour that Thatcher had threatened the use of nukes but that was more likely to get US assistance than to try and scare the French (their response most likely being "Go ahead, they've already paid for the missiles") especially since we were a bigger customer of those missiles than Argentina! (it was British Army held missiles that we used in our tests)
Certainly, the jamming was only provided by airborne equipment (a modified peice of old B-52 kit if you must know) so anywhere out of range of the two carriers was open to exocet attack. In fact a lot of people don't realise that exocets can also be launched from the ground but I'm not sure if the Argentinians had time to set up mobile ground launchers on the Falklands prior to the British landings. One of the biggest blows to our forces was the sinking of the Atlantic Conveyor as it contained much of the equipment that we were expecting to use in anti-exocet role as well as troop deployment (i.e a bunch of Chinook helicopters, all of one of which were lost).
Unlike in the Hollywood universe exocets and similar weapons do not have self destruct or disabling codes and even in the cases (like sunshine weapons) where they are used they are set by the launcher so the only people who would know what they are would be the launch coordinators and their superiors.
The French DID withhold certain technical details of the weapons the Argentinians had as do we (for example we don't even tell the US what our military codes or operating frequences are) but, as I said before, in this case we had those details reverse engineered from our own stocks of exocets within days of the Argentinian invasion."
Eric
James Versluys <mencken.cynic at g...>
wrote:
>
> I know the "codes" thing sounds silly, but it's not. I think you'd be
> interested to learn how just how many advanced weapons systems have
> backdoors. In fact, you'll be interested to know that virtually every
> advanced nation on earth that does major exports (US, Britain, France,
> Russia, and China) put backdoors on EVERY LAST WEAPON SYSTEM that
has either
> comm links or computer systems.
>
> And more than that. Did you know the Soviets got their only major
intrusion
> when they picked up off-the-rack Swiss hardware and software
components for
> their SA-38 missile defense systems? Yep, the US guv was going to
disable
> the whole of their Eastern European air defense systerm (cause the Swiss
> were secretly not exactly neutral). We did the same thing with their
first
> PC generation encryption system (and with the same Swiss). They've been
> putting these things in advanced systems since the late 1960's, and
pretty
> much every one has one.
>
> The chances French had disable codes for their major missile systems is
> right at 100%. The chance that the Socialist Mitterand would hold
back with
> those codes from Thatcher because she was hitting one of his
greatest arms
> purchasers is right at 100%. Not only is it possible, I'm almost certain
> this really happened.
>
> The missile that hit from the truck was an older Rafael. That wasn't the
> Exocet antiship missile that the Brits got the code for. You can't
launch
> Exocet's from trucks.
>
> Jim
-- Michael Pugliese