Strictly speaking, France has never pulled out of NATO. That whole Twenty-Six Musketeers “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” thing still applies with France. What DeGaulle did was pull France out of NATO’s unified military commands; French forces are no longer under joint NATO command.
True, but that’s not the spin DeGaulle put on it, and he thereby emphasized that the usage of French nukes would be decided in Paris and nowhere else.
But, would you rather go up against a tank called a Renault, or one called Panther, Jagdpanther or Tiger? 
Some pretty strange and uniformed commentary in this thread.
First, to go straight to the heart of this question - France’s nuclear arsenal was chiefly a Cold War deterrent. Hopefully everybody knew that, but there it is.
As an Army Brat living in what was then West Germany, it was explained to me by my father that if the Soviets or Warsaw Pact countries ever did make a military push into Germany, NATO forces had no hope of resisting in the short-term. NATO was outmanned and “outtanked”. As my old man related it, NATO strategy at that time was to evacuate to France, blowing up every key bridge along the way. France’s nuclear arsenal was likely the only tactical nuclear deterrent against the combined Soviet/Warsaw pact forces at that time. Fortunately, the Soviet Union never had a reason to get its war on.
These days, they are just weapons systems in mothballs. You could say the same thing about the U.S. nuclear arsenals - our conventional forces likely would meet and overwhelm any military threat posed to the United States. These days, the Russians rely upon their nuclear arsenal more as a deterrent than the U.S. does, simply due to their relatively small and poorly equipped military (although Russia is finally in a financial position to upgrade their conventional forces and has some good technology).
Secondly, there is quite a bit of nonsense and propaganda here about the former Soviet Union and what they would or would not have done, if this or that had happened. Suffice to say that if you are any sort of student of Russian culture and have visited Russia, there is no conceivable way to imagine that Soviet forces would have over-run France. Pure fantasy. The Soviet Union had no war with France and they stretched their supply lines to the limit just to occupy Germany.
Also, the idea of exporting communism by the barrel of a gun is capitalist propaganda. No doubt, the former Soviet Union exported weapons to those countries willing to buy them, but for that matter, so did the U.S.
However, the Soviet Union typically attached far fewer strings to the sales of their armaments.
History will show that communism was never a real threat and was mostly a blip on the radar. It pretty much shows that now, but time and distance will show this more clearly.
It is hard to explain unless you’ve been to Russia and speak Russian just how deeply opposed most Russians are to war. Their memories are long and they remember much better than Americans do how horrible war can be. They have a completely different and more tragic view of what war means. We, the Americans, are the jingoists in the room.
Really? Might the same have been said about Nazism if it hadn’t pushed itself just a little too far and invade Russia? 
I’m not uniformed. Right now I’m not even clothed. 