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Europe’s ‘nuclear umbrella’ risks catastrophic escalation

political leaders need to get a grip on reality. Bankrupting Britain and Europe in some desperate attempt to replace the US’s $800 billion military spending in Nato will destroy our societies and worsen all these global crises.

 Morning Star 15th March 2025,
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/europes-nuclear-umbrella-risks-catastrophic-escalation

As Macron and Merz propose French nuclear-armed jets be stationed in Poland and Germany, the dangerous implications for peace and the possibility of nuclear confrontation grow, warns SOPHIE BOLT

AS Trump brutally hammers out a settlement for Ukraine and Russia, he’s also been hammering Europe for vast, cold-war levels of military spending. And European leaders seem very keen to oblige.

Along with Keir Starmer’s so-called peace plan for a 30,000-strong European army, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz are pushing for a European “nuclear umbrella” — where France could deploy its nuclear-capable jets outside its borders. Merz also wants Britain to step up and deploy its British nuclear submarines to “defend” Europe against Russian aggression.

So what does this “nuclear umbrella” really mean in practice — and what are the risks?

Currently, France has 290 warheads that can be launched by nuclear-capable fighter jets and nuclear-powered submarines. While France’s nuclear weapons doctrine states the weapons are to “defend” its “vital interests,” in 2020, Macron announced that France’s “vital interests now have a European dimension.”

However, he also stated in 2022 that France’s vital interests “would not be at stake if there was a nuclear ballistic attack in Ukraine or in the region.” So, Macron would have to radically shift French nuclear doctrine if the “defence” of Ukraine was to be incorporated. It would mean France being prepared to launch a nuclear strike on Russia, a country that currently possesses over 5,000 nuclear weapons.

Speculation about how this nuclear umbrella would work includes the possibility of nuclear-armed jets being stationed in Germany or Poland (both countries have expressed interest).

Stationing nuclear weapons in countries that don’t have them — known as nuclear sharing — is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If a nuclear-sharing agreement was secured between France and Poland, nuclear-armed jets could be deployed along Poland’s 130-mile border with Russia.

If a future ceasefire arrangement was breached, could French nuclear jets deployed in Germany and Poland be used against Russia?

Another suggestion is that these French bombers could patrol European borders. Would such borders also include Ukraine’s? In the event of a ceasefire breach, would nuclear-armed French bombers also be deployed in Ukraine?

While Macron’s “nuclear umbrella” idea is getting widespread coverage, these terrifying scenarios — and the human cost of such confrontations — are not.

Behind these wild proposals is the speculation that the US under Trump will withdraw its military and nuclear presence in Europe — and turn off the nuclear tap for its “critical” partner, Britain.

In Britain, figures like former defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind are arguing that Britain has to work more closely with France in case “US reliability ever came into question” in “defending Europe against Russian aggression.”

It has also prompted more challenges to Britain’s so-called special relationship with the US. And shone a welcome spotlight on Britain’s nuclear dependence, with widespread reporting that the ballistic missiles launched from Britain’s nuclear submarines are leased from the US, and that the warheads are a US design.

In fact, the whole nuclear weapons system is under US-led Nato command. So, if Britain wanted its nuclear-armed submarines to be part of a European nuclear umbrella, it would effectively have to get permission from US President Donald Trump.

In response, military analysts like Marion Messmer argue that to end its nuclear dependence on the US, Britain should build an entirely new, air-launching nuclear weapons system. Paid for, no doubt, by British and French taxpayers.

This would be on top of the £205 billion the British government is already wasting on the system’s replacement. A programme the government’s own watchdog has labelled as “unachievable” and unaffordable.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer is silent on the European nuclear umbrella. Having positioned himself against Trump, as champion of Ukraine’s Nato membership, he shifted rapidly to parroting Trump’s “peace through strength” rhetoric.

He now argues that his “peace plan” should be made “in conjunction with the US” because “it’s that ability to work with the US and our European partners that has kept the peace for 80 years now.”

Such an alliance has, of course, totally failed to keep peace, and instead has driven war and poverty globally, causing humanitarian catastrophe, economic crises and environmental devastation.

Instead, political leaders need to get a grip on reality. Bankrupting Britain and Europe in some desperate attempt to replace the US’s $800 billion military spending in Nato will destroy our societies and worsen all these global crises.

Sustainable peace for Europe, Ukraine and Russia cannot be achieved by troops and missiles, backed by the constant, looming threat of nuclear war. That means developing a sustainable security architecture that can ensure long-term peace and prosperity for the entire region.

It means withdrawing US nukes from Europe and Russian ones from Belarus. And it means the US, Russia, Britain and France developing programmes to get rid of their own nuclear weapons. As Trump has said he wants nuclear disarmament, Starmer should be working with him to do so.

Sophie Bolt is general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

March 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Script of Anxiety: Poland’s Nuclear Weapons Fascination

we can only assume that the desire to have massively lethal weapons on one’s own soil that would risk obliterating life, limb and everything else is but a sporting parlour game of misplaced assumptions.  

March 17, 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark , https://theaimn.net/the-script-of-anxiety-polands-nuclear-weapons-fascination/

With the Ukraine War and the retreat of the United States from what has routinely been called Europe’s security architecture, states are galloping to whatever point of presumed sanctuary is on offer. The general presumption is that the galloping is done in the same step and rhythm. But Europe, for all the heavy layers of union driven diplomacy, retains its salty differences.

Poland is particularly striking in this regard, having always positioned itself as a defender against the continent’s enemies, perceived or otherwise. This messianic purpose was well on show with the exploits of King John III Sobieski in his triumphant defence of Vienna against the Ottoman Empire in 1683. The seemingly endless wars against Russia, including the massacres and repressions, have also left their wounding marks on a fragile national psyche.  These marks continue to script the approach of Warsaw’s anxiety to its traditional enemy, one that has become fixated with a nuclear option, in addition to a massive buildup of its armed forces and a defence budget that has reached 4.7% of its national income. While there is some disagreement among government officials on whether Poland should pursue its own arsenal, a general mood towards stationing the nuclear weapons of allies has taken hold. (As a matter of interest, a February 21 poll for Onet found that 52.9 percent of Poles favoured having nuclear weapons, with 27.9 percent opposed.)

This would mirror, albeit from the opposite side, the Cold War history of Poland, when its army was equipped with Soviet nuclear-capable 8K11 and 3R10 missiles. With sweet irony, those weapons were intended to be used against NATO member states.

The flirtatious offer of French President Emmanual Macron to potentially extend his country’s nuclear arsenal as an umbrella of reassurance to other European states did make an impression on Poland’s leadership. Prudence might have dictated a more reticent approach, but Prime Minister Donald Tusk would have none of that before the Polish parliament. In his words, “We must be aware that Poland must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.” According to the PM, “this is a race for security, not for war.”

The Polish President, Andrzej Duda, is also warm to the US option (he has been, over his time in office, profoundly pro-American), despite Tusk’s concerns about a “profound change in American geopolitics.” He was already ruminating over the idea in 2022 when he made the proposal to the Biden administration to host US nuclear weapons, one that was also repeated in June 2023 by then-Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. To have such weapons in Poland was a necessary “defensive tactic […] to Russia’s behaviour, relocating nuclear weapons to the NATO area,” he explained to the BBC. “Poland is ready to host this nuclear weapon.”

Duda then goes on to restate a familiar theme. Were US nuclear weapons stored on Polish soil, Washington would have little choice but to defend such territory against any threat. “Every kind of strategic infrastructure, American and NATO infrastructure, which we have on our soil is strengthening the inclination of the US and the North Atlantic Alliance to defend this territory.” To the Financial Times, Duda further reasoned that, as NATO’s borders had moved east in 1999, “so twenty-six years later there should also be a shift of the NATO infrastructure east.”  

Much of this seems like theatrical, puffy nonsense, given Poland’s membership of the NATO alliance, which has, as its central point, Article 5. Whether it involves its protection by a fellow NATO ally using conventional or nuclear weapons, hosting such nuclear weapons is negated as a value. Poland would receive collective military aid in any case should it be attacked. But, as Jon Wolfsthal of the Federation of American Scientists reasons, an innate concern of being abandoned in the face of aggression continues to cause jitters. Tusk’s remarks were possibly “a signal of concern – maybe to motivate the United States, but clearly designed to play on the French and perhaps the British.”

The crippling paranoia of the current government in the face of any perceived Russian threat becomes even less justifiable given the presence of US troops on its soil. According to the government’s own information, a total of 10,000 troops are present on a rotational basis, with US Land Forces V Corps Forward Command based in Poznań. In February, Duda confirmed to reporters after meeting the US envoy to Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg that there were “no concerns that the US would reduce the level of its presence in our country, that the US would in any way withdraw from its responsibility or co-responsibility for the security of this part of Europe.”  

Duda goes further, offering a sycophantic flourish. “I will say in my personal opinion,America has entered the game very strongly when it comes to ending the war in Ukraine. I know President Donald Trump, I know that he is an extremely decisive man and when he acts, he acts in a very determined and usually effective way.” With those remarks, we can only assume that the desire to have massively lethal weapons on one’s own soil that would risk obliterating life, limb and everything else is but a sporting parlour game of misplaced assumptions.  

March 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Europe going nuclear would be a catastrophic mistake

Proposals for nuclear sharing as a form of deterrence risk bringing more insecurity to Europe.

Olamide Samuel, International security expert, 11 Mar 25 https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/3/11/europe-going-nuclear-would-be-a-catastrophic-mistake

The second administration of US President Donald Trump has brought about tectonic shifts in the European security calculus. Growing anxieties about American retrenchment and the collapse of post-World War II security arrangements have sent European leaders scrambling to put forward alternatives.

Ahead of the German elections last month, Friedrich Merz, the head of the Christian Democratic Union, who was already expected to become the next German chancellor, opined: “We need to have discussions with both the British and the French – the two European nuclear powers – about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, could also apply to us”.

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said that in response to Merz, he has decided to “open the strategic debate on the protection of our allies on the European continent through our [nuclear] deterrence”.

The proposal for some form of European nuclear sharing arrangement with France and the United Kingdom to protect against threats from Moscow is not new. Versions of it have been floated around for decades.

But today, resurfacing this proposal is not just a geopolitical miscalculation; it is a strategic dead end. It reflects a misreading of both the nuclear balance of power and the existential risks of fragmenting Europe’s security architecture further. Rather than bolstering deterrence, this gambit risks accelerating the very instability it seeks to avert.

Amid the growing unpredictability of United States-Russia relations under the second Trump administration, Europe must pivot from nuclear escapism to a bold agenda of diplomatic engagement on nuclear disarmament.

The fantasy of European nuclear sharing

The proposal for European nuclear sharing founders on arithmetic and strategic reality. Russia’s nuclear arsenal boasts 5,580 warheads, including hypersonic Avangard glide vehicles and Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). This dwarfs the combined Anglo-French stockpile of 515 warheads.

This asymmetry isn’t merely quantitative; it is also doctrinal. Moscow’s “escalate to de-escalate” strategy represents a calculated approach to conflict escalation designed to coerce adversaries into concessions. It is a strategy the British and French nuclear arsenals, optimised for minimal deterrence, cannot counter.

Data on defence spending reveals a deeper flaw: Europeans do not have the funds or the technological capabilities to carry it out while executing their ambitious rearmament plans.

Germany’s 90.6-billion euro ($98bn) military budget remains crippled by inefficiencies, with only 50 percent of army equipment meeting NATO readiness standards. Meanwhile, France and the UK lack the conventional force multipliers – global surveillance networks, intelligence capabilities, or even complete nuclear triads – that underpin US extended deterrence. Even if every euro cent of the European Union’s recently announced 800 billion-euro ($867 billion) defence boost were spent on nuclear weapons programmes, cold-starting the sort of production complexes required for a credible deterrent would still take decades.

Attempting to replicate NATO’s nuclear-coalition model at a European level ignores six decades of integrated command structures and fails to address hybrid threats now defining modern conflict.

What is more, replacing one dependency with another solves nothing. Proponents claim nuclear sharing offers protection, but the reality is that it can lead to strategic subjugation.

Neither France nor the UK is likely to give up control over its nuclear arsenals and transfer it to the EU. That means that a nuclear-sharing agreement would reduce Germany and other European countries participating in the arrangement to Franco-British warhead warehouses with no real agency. This Potemkin deterrence—all ceremony, no substance—would only further irritate Washington.

Trump has already shown that he has no qualms about abandoning allies if he sees no benefit for the US strategic interest. His recent moves to stop intelligence sharing and military aid for Ukraine and his conditioning mutual defence on military spending have exposed NATO’s fraying norms – the alliance is witnessing a collapse of shared purpose.

As experts note, Trump’s “MAGA Carta” foreign policy explicitly rejects strategic altruism. A European nuclear caucus would signal panic, validating Trump’s transactional world view while undermining NATO’s cohesion.

A European nuclear club would deepen fragmentation, emboldening revisionist actors like Russia and China while diverting resources from critical gaps in AI advancement, sustainable economic output, and energy resilience that define 21st-century power.

The economic argument compounds the folly. Pouring billions of euros from Europe’s finite resources into redundant warheads while neglecting practical gaps in conventional capability isn’t statecraft—it’s generational malpractice.

Disarmament and fiscal realpolitik

The EU’s opportunity lies not in nuclear posturing, but in revitalising arms control and mediation. The collapse of the US-Russia strategic dialogue since the invasion of Ukraine has left critical arms control frameworks in disarray.

The New START treaty, which limits deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 each for Russia and the US, remains the last pillar of bilateral arms control. Its expiration in 2026 without a successor would mark the first time since 1972 that the world’s nuclear superpowers operate without mutually verified limits—a scenario that could trigger a new nuclear arms race.

Herein lies Europe’s opportunity. Rather than pursuing a European nuclear umbrella, it could lead efforts to revive nuclear disarmament dialogue.

Austria, an EU member, has already played a key role in nuclear talks between the West and Iran as well as the 2020 US-Russia-China trilateral arms control discussions. This positions it as an ideal venue for restarting negotiations on nuclear risk reduction issues, especially at a time when Washington is open to renewed dialogue with Moscow.

Taking a lead on nuclear disarmament would be the sort of leadership that would reflect a more mature interpretation of security policy, as opposed to seeking an impossible nuclear deterrence.

Some critics maintain that negotiating with Russia rewards aggression. Yet history shows even bitter adversaries can cooperate on arms control when interests align. The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated 2,692 missiles, was finalised after years of heightened tensions between the USSR and the US in the early 1980s.

The treaty succeeded not because US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trusted each other, but because dismantling missiles saved both sides a significant amount of funds that would have gone into continuing the arms race and maintaining the destroyed ordinance.

Today, with Russia’s economy faltering amid the war in Ukraine and Trump’s fixation with cost-cutting, there is an opportunity to pursue another deal if disarmament is framed not as idealism, but as fiscal pragmatism. Europe can help broker a deal that serves all parties’ wallets—and humanity’s survival.

The unintended consequences of Trump’s first-term nuclear gambits – escalated arms racing, eroded alliances, and emboldened adversaries – offer cautionary lessons. His second term, however, can offer an opportunity to shift the Doomsday Clock back from its position of 89 seconds to midnight.

Europe now faces a choice: to cling to Cold War relics while the planet burns, or to pioneer a security paradigm prioritising planetary survival over great-power vanity. The decision it makes will define not just Europe’s future—but all of humanity’s.

Olamide Samuel. International security expert

Dr Olamide Samuel is a renowned international security expert and Network Specialist at the Open Nuclear Network. Previously, he served as Special Envoy of the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE), established by the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Pelindaba.

March 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Poland’s president urges U.S. to move nuclear warheads to Polish territory, FT reports

By Reuters, March 13, 2025, Reporting by Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru, Pawel Florkiewicz and Alan Charlish in Warsaw; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Gareth Jones, https://www.reuters.com/world/polands-president-urges-us-move-nuclear-warheads-polish-territory-ft-reports-2025-03-13/

WARSAW, March 13 (Reuters) – Poland’s president has called on the U.S. to transfer nuclear weapons to its territory as a deterrent against future Russian aggression, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

President Andrzej Duda also told the newspaper he had discussed the proposal recently with U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg.

Poland has previously said it would be ready to host U.S. weapons under a nuclear arms sharing programme, and Polish policymakers have also more recently expressed interest in an idea floated by French President Emmanuel Macron that Paris’s nuclear umbrella could be extended to its European allies.

The borders of NATO moved east in 1999, so 26 years later there should also be a shift of the NATO infrastructure east. For me this is obvious,” the FT cited Duda as saying in an interview.

It would be safer if those weapons were already in the country, Duda added.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a political opponent of Duda, said on Thursday he thought it was better to address such issues discreetly rather than in media interviews, although he added that he believed the president had good intentions.

“We should formulate certain expectations… publicly when we are certain, or have reasons to be convinced, that such appeals or calls will be heard and that the addressee, in this case the American administration, President Trump, is prepared for a positive response,” Tusk told reporters.

Galvanised by Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine three years ago, Poland now spends a higher proportion of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence than any other NATO member, including the United States.

Last year Poland’s defence spending reached 4.1% of GDP, according to NATO estimates, and it plans to hit 4.7% this year. Duda has suggested enshrining defence spending of at least 4% of GDP in the Polish constitution.

March 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment