Europe needs a better nuclear deterrent against Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin (File Photo)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has catapulted a European debate long relegated to footnotes right into the headlines. Does ‘Europe’ need its own nuclear arsenal to deter a potential Russian strike, now or in future?

During most of the Cold War and the years since, that question seemed settled. The European NATO members are meant to shelter under United States’ nuclear ‘umbrella’. As part of the transatlantic alliance’s ‘nuclear sharing’, five partner countries — Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey — host an estimated 100 US nukes on their soil. To retaliate against a Russian strike, the allies would be able to drop these US bombs from their own planes.

Aside from those US weapons, France and the UK also have their own arsenals. But France has always kept its nukes outside the joint strategising of the Western alliance — it’s the only nation among NATO’s 30 member states not to participate in the alliance’s Nuclear Planning Group.

Even before Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine this year, some Europeans worried that the US umbrella was becoming less reliable, and thus by definition less of a deterrent. The US has shifted its geopolitical focus from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and specifically toward containing China, which is now adding to its arsenal fast.

Washington, therefore, has to hold up two nuclear umbrellas and plan for two simultaneous wars. Scholars such as Maximilian Terhalle in Germany and Francois Heisbourg in France have been warning that Washington, forced to choose, would probably give priority to its commitments in Asia, and to allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Worse, former US President Donald Trump spooked Europeans when he questioned NATO’s mutual-defence clause, and even contemplated taking the US out of the alliance. Trump is gone for now. But he, or a President like him, could return. In the long run, the US appears less dependable as a protector than it used to be.

Topping all that, Putin has now gone rhetorically ballistic by dropping not-so-veiled threats that he might use nukes against Ukraine or Western countries that interfere in his war. The consensus for now is that he’s bluffing. But from the Baltic to Poland and beyond, Europeans would love to know what the back-up plan is.

In one scenario, France could extend its nuclear umbrella to the whole European Union (of which the UK is no longer a member). French President Emmanuel Macron speaks often about achieving European ‘autonomy’, by which he usually means independence from the US. So he should in theory be amenable.

In practice, the French are neither willing nor able. Since Charles de Gaulle, France has always insisted on total sovereignty over its arsenal, and all decisions pertaining to it. In that sense, visions of a Europeanised ‘force de frappe’, as the French call their nukes, suffer from the same problem as ideas about a ‘European Army’. Without a ‘United States of Europe’, it’s not clear who’d be in command, when and how.

Moreover, the French arsenal isn’t suited for the job. France has a relatively small stash of 290 nukes. In the event of all-out war, an adversary like Russia, with thousands of warheads, might be tempted — and able — to take out those weapons with a pre-emptive first strike. Deterrence only works if retaliation is assured.

France’s nukes are also of the wrong type. They’re ‘strategic’ — that is, bombs capable of causing many Hiroshimas worth of devastation each, and therefore meant to be used only in a total-war scenario to take out entire cities in the enemy’s homeland.

If Russia were to escalate, however, it would do so with ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons — smaller warheads deployed at short ranges to cow an enemy into submission or win specific battles. It’s inconceivable that France (or anybody) would retaliate for an initial and limited tactical strike by going directly to strategic retaliation and thus Armageddon.

The upshot is that all Western nuclear powers — the US, France, and the UK — must add more tactical nukes to their tool kits, to keep up with Russia, and become capable of flexible responses to its aggressions. The EU, led by Germany and France, could collaborate in this effort. Even then, however, the Europeans would still have to resolve the old questions about command structure.

Alternatively, countries like Germany could build their own nuclear bombs. But for that, Germany would have to withdraw from the international treaty against nuclear proliferation and the agreement that allowed its reunification. Besides, Germany would have to turn its entire post-war political culture topsy-turvy. Many of its leaders today grew up protesting against the stationing of US missiles and nukes in general.

For the time being, the realistic answer to Putin is to keep and patch the US umbrella. More US tactical nukes, in more places and deliverable in more ways, is the only language understood in Moscow and Beijing. It’s also probably the only way to slow the pace of other countries, allied or hostile, going nuclear. But the entire US political class, on both sides of the aisle, must underwrite that US commitment to its allies, come Trump or high water.

No conclusion could be more depressing. It amounts to entering a new tactical arms race and therefore goes in the opposite direction of the vision behind the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by 86 non-nuclear countries and meant to ban these diabolical arms altogether. Instead of eliminating nukes, we’d look for new ways of deterring their use.

For all this, blame Putin. He attacked Ukraine — 28 years after Russia guaranteed the country’s security so Kyiv could surrender its own Soviet-era nukes. He broke the taboo against threatening nuclear escalation in conventional warfare. In all these, ways Putin has made naivete and pacifism untenable. The European Union, deservedly called the greatest ‘peace project’ in world history, must gird for its self-defence.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.