This article is the second in a five-part MSNBC Daily series, “The Future of NATO.” With the Trump administration attacking allies, removing troops from European training missions, handing Ukraine’s bargaining chips to Russia and refusing to guarantee European security even as “backstop” — we’re asking five crucial questions about the future of NATO, the U.S. and Europe.
Would America be safer if more countries had nuclear bombs? We are about to find out. For the first time in 60 years, European nations are considering arming themselves with nuclear weapons.
The urgent talks in March among Europe’s leaders were triggered by what Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, termed a “profound change of American geopolitics” under President Donald Trump. “We must brace ourselves for the fact that Donald Trump will no longer unconditionally honor NATO’s mutual defense commitment,” he said.
For the first time in 60 years, European nations are considering arming themselves with nuclear weapons.
Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and his desire to forge an alliance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin are forcing friends and foes to reconsider their options. Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote that should Russia be allowed to prevail, should Ukraine be defeated, then “nuclear weapons will spread around the world, both to those who wish to bluff with them” — the way Putin has done in his war on Ukraine — “and those who will need them to resist these bluffs.”
That is why Merz said his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said that “the free world needs a new leader.” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland said his country must drastically increase the size of its military and even “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” French President Emmanuel Macron has offered to have his nation’s 290 nuclear weapons serve as a Euro deterrent force, and this month he announced plans to modernize France’s air force to carry next-generation cruise missiles tipped with nuclear warheads.
Having the weapons of France or Britain (the only other nuclear-armed nation in Europe besides Russia) pledged in collective defense might not be enough.
Consider the dilemma of Eastern European nations. If Putin prevails in Ukraine, he will certainly pursue his territorial ambitions with Moldova, Romania, the Baltic States and Poland, backed by veiled or direct nuclear threats. These nations might be able to rely on a French nuclear umbrella now, but what if far-right leader Marine Le Pen becomes president? She says that “French defense must remain French defense.”
Could Germany step into the breach? Perhaps, but if the pro-Putin, far-right AfD party, already the second-largest party in Germany, takes control, Germany would certainly not protect other nations from Putin. Worse, if America walks away from NATO while bolstering these anti-American parties, “it will lead to a Germany once again led by fascists and willing to arm itself with nuclear weapons,” warns New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
So far, this is just talk. There are formidable technological, political and economic barriers to building nuclear weapons. It could take even an advanced nation 10 years and tens of billions of dollars to build the facilities to produce the highly enriched uranium or plutonium needed for bombs, then to construct, test and deploy even a small arsenal.
But that is why European leaders feel the urgency to begin discussions now. Should they proceed, the spread of nuclear weapons would not be limited to Europe or our allies. The nuclear reaction chain could quickly spread to Asia, where Japan, South Korea and Taiwan face similar worries about the reliability of their defense agreements with America.
We have seen this dynamic before. In the 1950s and 1960s, all these nations and more explored getting their own nuclear weapons. Two initiatives convinced them not to do so.
There are formidable technological, political and economic barriers to building nuclear weapons.
The first was America’s ironclad commitment to come to their aid if they were attacked. That extended deterrence — enshrined in the NATO treaty signed in Washington on April 4, 1949 — was not, by itself, enough. The United Kingdom got nuclear weapons in 1952 and France in 1960, despite the security assurances.
Another framework was needed: the arms control and disarmament commitments embodied in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), negotiated in 1968 and ratified under President Richard Nixon in 1970.
That treaty and the associated mechanisms provided the diplomatic and legal framework that assured countries that if they choose not to get nuclear weapons, their neighbors would not either, and that the world was moving toward nuclear disarmament.
Sweden, for example, only gave up its nuclear program in 1968 after the NPT was signed. The same year, Japan ended its nuclear flirtation and announced its firm commitment not to manufacture, possess or permit nuclear weapons on its soil.
Trump is now tearing down these two pillars of global security. If any of these nations were to leave the NPT (as is their right) and launch a weapons program, others would soon follow. The nuclear dominoes would topple globally.
We would be thrust back into the nuclear anarchy of decades past, when President John F. Kennedy warned of “nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world.”
This will be the nuclear nightmare Donald Trump has unleashed.