As France became a nuclear power, so its requirements for nuclear strike aircraft (such as the Dassault Minerve V) grew and many projects for advanced strike aircraft, including Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) designs, followed. Turbojet, ramjet and rocket propulsion and supersonic designs were all researched, sometimes taking advantage of captured German wartime technology or using national pre-war research. Some designers even took a diversion into flying saucers and 'anti-gravity' machines, as well as presenting serious proposals for nuclear-powered aircraft.

Even as the British aviation industry was beginning to be constrained by rising costs and economic realities, just across the Channel it was the French aerospace houses which continued to push the boundaries and imagine the improbable.

Companion volume to the acclaimed French Secret Projects 1; period drawings, promotional art, photographs or prototype aircraft, mock-ups, wind tunnel and promotional models are all combined with an authoritative and occasionally wry narrative to present, in French Secret Projects 1, a comprehensive view of French military bomber and strike aircraft designs from the Liberation of France to the late twentieth-century.