Dear Reader,
I’m not sure that a doyenne of the 1960s hippie movement would appreciate me quoting her lyrics when it comes to support for nuclear weaponry.
But the classic Joni Mitchell line that “Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone” seems to appropriately sum up the German attitude to the US warheads that have been stationed on their soil since the 1950s as part of NATO’s nuclear sharing strategy.
Germans have never been happy about the fact that these weapons of mass destruction are stored in bunkers in the south of the country ready for a potential war with Russia.
During the Cold War, millions took to the streets to call for their removal under the banner “better red than dead.” Since then, public protest has died down, but antipathy to the weapons of mass destruction remained.
As recently as 2009, the man who is now German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, described the nuclear weapons as “militarily obsolete” and said that Washington should take them back home.
For years, polling consistently showed that a large majority of Germans agreed with Steinmeier’s stance.
But then two things happened - Donald Trump started to sow doubt about whether the US would defend Europe in a war with Russia, and Vladimir Putin threw the European security order into chaos by invading Ukraine.
The result: a poll produced by the Munich Security Conference in 2022 found that, for the first time ever, a majority of Germans wanted the US bombs to stay. Some 52 percent agreed that they should be kept in place, while just 39 percent wanted them to be withdrawn.
In a comic irony, support was strongest among voters for the Green party, which grew out of the anti-war and anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s.
Now though, Germans are really starting to panic. With Donald Trump on course to retake the White House later this year, people are starting to sit up and listen to what he has to say again.
And, this being Trump, what he has to say doesn’t bode well for European security. In a recent campaign speech he raged against “delinquents” in Europe who refuse to pay their bills, saying he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell it wants” with them.
Those were comments that prompted Germany’s leading political magazine, Der Spiegel, to ask on its front page “does Germany need the bomb?”
Unusually, Trump’s colourful language also led to a reaction from the German government, with finance minister Christian Lindner describing his comments as “an invitation” for Germany to explore nuclear cooperation with other partners.
The panic isn’t without cause. As part of NATO’s nuclear sharing strategy Germany is in possession of some 20 American nuclear bombs, which are stored at a Luftwaffe airbase in Rhineland-Palatinate.
But Berlin has no sovereignty over those weapons. Not only are they guarded by American soldiers, the man in the White House is the only person who has the codes to activate them.
In other words, the deterrent effect of these bombs and others stationed in countries like Belgium and Italy is based on interpreting what goes on inside the head of the occupant of the Oval Office.
And few people in Germany believe a President Trump would be prepared to activate those codes in the event of an invasion of NATO territory.
That has led to fevered discussion of other options for maintaining a credible nuclear deterrence against Russia.
The only problem is that none of these options are particularly convincing.
According to finance minister Lindner, the time is now ripe to deepen nuclear cooperation with France and the UK, the two smaller nuclear powers in NATO.
“The question is: under what political and financial conditions would Paris and London be prepared to maintain or expand their own strategic capabilities for collective security? And conversely, what contribution are we prepared to make?” Lindner asked in an opinion article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
While the UK has shown little interest in becoming the new godfather of European security, France has dropped repeated hints that it would be willing to start talks on how it could use its 300-odd warheads in the service of the wider continent.
Most recently, Emmanuel Macron said during a speech in Stockholm that there was a “European element” to France’s nuclear deterrence strategy.
So far though, Berlin has ignored these flirts.
There are a whole host of likely reasons for this, some political and some technical.
It is unclear whether Paris would be prepared to deepen nuclear cooperation within the structures of NATO - not doing so would create a conflicting security architecture. Meanwhile, Paris has made clear that it has no intention of giving any weapons or control to European partners.
On the political level - and this goes for many European countries - no one seems to trust the French to offer nuclear protection without attaching it to much more Gallic power inside the EU. In Eastern Europe in particular, people prefer a benign patriarch from across the Atlantic to one with ambitions to become the main player in the continent’s internal affairs.
Then there is the technical level. France, like the UK, has under 300 nuclear warheads, almost all of which are of the “strategic” variety - i.e. they have a massive explosive capacity that would immediately escalate nuclear war to all-out destruction.
While all predictions of how nuclear wars would progress are purely theoretical, such weapons possibly don’t act as a sufficient deterrent against Russia using tactical nuclear weapons in an attack on a country like Lithuania.
Put another way, would Paris really be prepared to trigger an all-out nuclear war just to save Vilnius?
Maybe Macron would be. One potential successor certainly wouldn’t be. Marine Le Pen has described it as “crazy” to use French nuclear bombs in reaction to an invasion on NATO’s eastern flank.
All of these concerns about Paris have led to another idea - the creation of an EU bomb. In December, former foreign minister Joschka Fischer (Greens) was the first to raise this idea, saying that the proposal to rely on France was “not thought through” and that the EU needs to “reinstate deterrence.”
Proponents have suggested that the nuclear codes for the Brussels bomb could be passed around among EU capitals, much like the presidency of the European Council is now.
Where to start with this idea? Are we really supposed to trust Viktor Orban with the codes to a nuclear bomb more than Donald Trump? And would a date this century be realistic for the development of such a weapon given that the EU took ten years to agree on a common policy to combat illegal immigration?
Which leaves just one, apparently absurd, option - that Germany develops its own nuclear weaponry.
There are many reasons to see this as a non-starter.
Not only has Germany has signed up to several international agreements that both prohibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons and seek to end their existence, it has shut down its entire nuclear energy programme. The latter fact seriously complicates the process of acquiring the plutonium and enriched uranium necessary to build nuclear bombs.
Moreover, unlike France with its remote Pacific islands, or the US with its vast deserts, Germany has no obvious place to carry out nuclear testing. Bielefeld, which legend has it doesn’t actually exist, may be one possibility.
Not everyone is prepared to rule out the option of the D-Bombe completely, though.
Markus Kaim, a senior researcher at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a government-linked think tank, has predicted that an independent German nuclear capability may be the only practical solution in the years to come.
If the US decides to officially withdraw its nuclear umbrella from Europe, Berlin will face an unenviable choice, Kaim argued in a recent article for Der Spiegel. Either it will have to cosy up to a revanchist Russia, or develop its own bomb.
While acknowledging the legal and technical hurdles involved, Kaim says that building a bomb and simultaneously offering protection to countries such as Poland and the Baltic states would be the only way to hold the western alliance together. Such a gesture would “impress these countries as least as much” as the recent decision to station a permanent garrison in Lithuania.
“As shocking as this conclusion may seem, it is a consequence of the changing circumstances in which we live. Geopolitical shifts demand new answers from German policymakers,” Kaim writes.
Great article as usual Jörg. Given that the support for such a hypothetical effort is highest among the Greens (!), and that such an effort would therefore require functioning reactors and infrastructure - do you think that they have really thought this through? Because then we need AKWs...