AMX-30 Tank: France's Speed-Over-Armor Bet and the Spin-Free Obus G Shell

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The AMX-30 was France's Cold War main battle tank, and it grew out of failure and a diplomatic split. The postwar ARL 44 heavy tank was obsolete after about 60 were built, and the 50-ton AMX-50, with an oscillating two-piece turret, could not be sealed against fallout while the U.S. supplied free M47 Pattons. In 1956 France, West Germany, Italy and others pursued a common 30-ton Europa Panzer. Then Charles de Gaulle refused to share French nuclear technology, moved France out of NATO's integrated command, and West Germany chose the British L7 gun over France's 105 mm. By 1963 the German prototypes became the Leopard 1 and the French ones the AMX-30.

French engineers judged that HEAT rounds, whose copper jets could cut 400 mm of steel, made thick armor dead weight. The production tank weighed 36 tons against 54 for the Chieftain and about 47 for the M60, stood 2.28 meters tall, carried no more than 80 mm of armor, and reached 65 km/h on a 720 hp Hispano-Suiza multi-fuel diesel. Its weak point was a manual-clutch gearbox, fixed only by the 1979 AMX-30B2 with a semi-automatic transmission, laser rangefinder and low-light TV. In 1973 a Greek junta AMX-30 smashed the gates of the Athens Polytechnic. In January 1991 Qatari AMX-30s at Khafji knocked out three Iraqi T-55s and captured four, and 44 French AMX-30B2s of the 4th Dragoons swept the far left flank of the coalition line to As-Salman air base, firing 270 rounds.

• The Obus G round spun its outer shell for accuracy while the shaped charge rode inside on ball bearings, so the jet formed without spin.
• That round carried 780 grams of hexolite and could penetrate 400 mm of steel at 3,000 meters.
• The same chassis carried the Pluton tactical nuclear missile, a 2.4-ton weapon with a 120 km range.
• Variants included a recovery vehicle, a bridge layer for a 22-meter span, twin 30 mm anti-aircraft guns and the Roland missile system.
• In the 1990s a turretless test vehicle wore angled radar-absorbent plates and blew cool air over its hull to cut its thermal signature.