[icegreentea2]

To be specific, the challenge with cryogenic fuels is that you can't really keep the rocket fueled up all the time, so you need to spend a bunch of time fueling up the rocket, reducing the responsiveness of the system.

There were generations of hypergolic liquid fueled ICBMs. Those are typically pretty reasonably responsive (and reliable). Unfortunately the fuel is toxic as hell.

Europe does have native solid booster capability. The Vega-C has solid rocket motors for the first 3 stages for example. Very crudely looking at sizes, the 2nd and 3rd stages of a Vega-C should more or less approximate a typical ICBM.

[iSnow]

The boosters of the Ariane 5 were also developed into the French M51 SLBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)

[panick21_]

With Ariane 6, they switched to Italian soilds. This was basically France buying of Italy so they would side with them to build Ariane 6, rather then Ariane 5 ME that Germany wanted.

[rsynnott]

> Europe does have native solid booster capability.

Also, I mean, Europe has SLBMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)

France never deployed land-based ICBMs, only IRBMs, though the M51 has ICBM-ish range.