DEAUVILLE, France--Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard has revealed for the first time a secret clause in the 1947 treaty that created NATO which permitted the British government to take a military response outside the NATO umbrella.

 He said the French learned of the clause only 15 years later. He said this was the reason for the French decision in 1966 to withdraw from the military command of NATO and to establish its own nuclear force.

 Rocard spoke April 1 in Deauville at Forum-21, the inaugural meeting of an annual conference on international affairs organized by two Americans, lawyer Paul Weinstein and journalist Abby Quinn Hirsch, and attend by 250 people from the worlds of business, science, culture and foreign policy, ranging from Louise Arbour, former judge of the international Rwanda-Yugoslavia genocide trials, to former astronaut Rusty Schweickart. Most were Americans and French.

 Rocard said the decision to build French nuclear arms and the years of irritations between France and its Allies had roots in the origins of NATO when Washington would not accord France the same deal it had made with the British. He explained, "After 15 years, we learned of a secret clause that would permit Britain on a phone call from the prime minister to the US president to say, 'The vital interests of Britain are threatened. You don't consider it this way. I shall shoot'."

 He said, "There was no problem for Americans to give the British military secrets needed to carry out this independent military action. France thought it should have the same possibility." But, he said, "France was infested with a terrifically important Communist party [that was] Stalinist."

 He said the U.S. attempt to forbid France from getting these secrets succeeded in creating France as a nuclear power. He explained, "De Gaulle, through the lack of a secret clause, was pushed to make a decision to be able to shoot with no military control of NATO. The strategy was the same. We can't reply exclusively and automatically on an American response."

 Rocard said, "When DeGaulle took the decision to withdraw all French troops from the peacetime military command of the Allies, it was a fantastic shout. In the rest of Europe, it was considered treason." He said that during those years of parliamentary debate in Europe, the doctrine was "Let's cultivate the American friendship and denounce the French dissidents." He noted, "Our British friends spent 40 years denouncing this undisciplined threat." Rocard said this hurt the confidence and the solidarity of alliance, which was the real protection of Europe.

 The Americans later had second thoughts about what they had done. Rocard said, "Henry Kissinger told me one day, six months after I ceased to be prime minister, 'I think we Americans made a great mistake. De Gaulle was right. No American president would shoot nuclear weapons to defend anything else but the population of his own territory. The fact you had to get out of it was understandable.' "

 Kissinger told him that if the Americans had understood that situation, they would have developed structures inside NATO that diminished the misunderstanding and would have organized a more confident alliance.

 The results continue to this day, Rocard said. "When the cold war was finished, after the Soviet empire imploded, we asked for a reorganization in NATO," he said. "President Chirac said we want the southern command of NATO for a European admiral. It would be an Italian. The Italian government was furious at being compromised."

 He said the reason harked back to the old sense that Americans would not want to get involved automatically in European conflicts. He said, "That was neither silly nor illegitimate nor unexplainable."

 The mistake, he said, was that "the admiral who commands the southern sector of NATO commands the Sixth Fleet in the nuclear chain of command. So it was an enormous mistake to do that. It created a terrible mess. All the other governments including the British, the Portuguese, the Italians, said 'You can't do anything with those French; they don't understand the need for our good relations with America.' France was accused of wanting to get rid of the American guarantee."

 France did not return to participation in NATO's military wing until 1995, when it agreed to join peace-keeping operations in Bosnia. It is still the only NATO member that does not belong to the Nuclear Planning Group.

 Rocard declared, "In the last half century, France created a situation where national security is a thing you can't talk about with other Europeans. The condition for creating a foreign policy in Europe is to get over those misunderstandings.