Post by kaima on Apr 16, 2022 17:22:13 GMT -7
A U.S. nuclear test in the Nevada desert in 1953 Foto: National Nuclear Security Administration
A European Bomb
Debate over Nuclear Deterrence Heats Up in the EU
Putin's war has unleashed a debate in Berlin that has been taboo for decades: Does Europe need a share nuclear deterrence of its own?
By René Pfister, Britta Sandberg und Christoph Schult
14.04.2022, 10.59 Uhr
At shortly after 8:30 a.m. on July 12, 2018, Donald Trump asked his National Security Adviser John Bolton: "Do you want to do something historic?" The United States president had just spent the night in the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels and he was now facing a long day of summit meetings. Trump was eager to make waves.
Dinner on the previous evening with heads of state and government from the trans-Atlantic alliance had put him in a bad mood. Once again, most of America’s NATO allies had declined to promise a boost in their defense spending. And on top of that, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was still unwilling to suspend construction on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. "We’re out," Trump announced to his distraught advisers, adding: "We’re not going to fight someone they’re paying." The reference was to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the reliance of many European countries on energy imports from Russia.
DER SPIEGEL 15/2022
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 15/2022 (April 8th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL International
Bolton, as he describes in his memoirs, began wondering if he would have to resign by the end of the day should Trump carry through with his plan. Together with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he was able to keep the president from exiting NATO. But if Trump ends up returning to the White House following the 2024 elections, that could very well drive a stake into the heart of the alliance. "In a second term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO," Bolton told the Washington Post in early March. "And I think Putin was waiting for that."
A Number of Delusions
The war in Eastern Europe has exposed a number of delusions. The idea that Russian natural gas deliveries couldn’t be used as a political weapon, for example. Or that Putin’s megalomania was just the standard Kremlin huffing and puffing. "Those who deploy violence to shift borders will do so again and again," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at the end of March. "And that is why we must together make ourselves strong enough to ensure that that doesn’t happen."
In response to Putin’s aggression, Scholz has said that his government intends to inject 100 billion euros into Germany’s defense, while Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has promised to develop a national security strategy by the end of the year that reflects Germany’s interests. Berlin, astoundingly, has never before had such a strategy.
Already, though, it is becoming apparent just how difficult it might be to come up with a convincing plan for European security. What might happen if the U.S. was to withdraw from NATO and leave Europe alone with a dictator who violates all established norms and doesn’t even stop at slaughtering civilians?
It is a question that American think tanks are currently focusing on more intently than is the government in Berlin. Once again, it would seem, the German government’s penchant for denying reality is on full display. "I found German passivity toward Donald Trump when he was elected president in 2016 shocking," says Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington with ties to the Democratic Party. "I didn't quite understand how, you know, Europeans would sort of pretend as if nothing had changed and if America was completely reliable."
That could be the case as long as Joe Biden is still in the White House. But the 79-year-old Democrat’s approval rating is historically low, and with the November 2024 election rapidly approaching, the party doesn’t seem to have a promising replacement candidate either.
U.S. President Joe Biden together with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz
Bild vergrößern
U.S. President Joe Biden together with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz Foto: Michael Kappeler / AP
Within the Republican Party, meanwhile, there is a powerful group that would prefer to see the U.S. turn its back on NATO. Last Tuesday, 63 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution affirming U.S. support for NATO. One day later, the pollsters at Pew published a survey according to which 82 percent of Democratic voters believe that the U.S. benefits from the Western alliance, but just 55 percent of Republicans agree. It isn’t a completely absurd idea to think that Trump could run an explicitly anti-NATO campaign and that it might even prove successful, says Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. "If all these things play out in a bad way, then I think Europe has some very fundamental and difficult choices, and one of them could include the idea of developing a European-wide nuclear deterrent."
The Difficult Nuclear Debate in Germany
It is an issue that caused turmoil in the German government once before. In the 1950s, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss discussed the idea of building a European bomb with France and Italy. In November 1957, Strauss even signed a secret deal with his counterparts from Paris and Rome. Their goal was to make Europe independent of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The plan, though, was ultimately torpedoed by Charles de Gaulle, who had taken over power in France in mid-1958 and wanted France to have its own nuclear weapons. The idea of a joint European bomb never again gained traction – much to the frustration of Strauss, who for the rest of his life considered it a mistake for the German military to be dependent on the U.S. when it comes to nuclear weapons.
Strauss, though, became increasingly isolated over the years with his fondness for the bomb. The NATO Dual-Track Decision, with which the Western alliance sought to respond to the Warsaw Pact’s nuclear weapons buildup in Europe, drove hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets of Germany and Europe in the 1980s. Resistance within Germany’s center-left Social Democrats to an increase in the number of American Pershing missiles in Europe was so great that it contributed to the collapse of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s government in 1982.
In 2010, then German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle even sought to make Germany a nuclear weapons-free zone and urged the Americans to withdraw their nuclear warheads stationed at the Büchel airbase in western Germany. And until recently, prominent Social Democrats like parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich blocked the German military from acquiring new warplanes capable of deploying those nuclear warheads as part of NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangement. And now, the EU is supposed to consider a path to becoming a nuclear power?
In the face of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the German government has at least decided to place an order for American F-35 fighters. They have the capability of flying American warheads deep into enemy territory. "NATO’s nuclear deterrence must remain credible," Baerbock said in a speech opening the debate over Germany’s national security strategy. Nevertheless, the government’s deliberations continue to assume that NATO and the U.S. will remain dependable – a rather irresponsible position given developments in the U.S. "It is objectively possible that a U.S. president will rise to power who will once again call NATO and the American nuclear umbrella for Europe into question," says Ekkehard Brose, president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy. "That is something we need to worry about."
Dependence on American nukes could ultimately be more dangerous than dependence on Russian gas. Putin has the fourth largest military in the world, with 900,000 soldiers. Germany’s Bundeswehr, meanwhile, has just 180,000 troops.
The reputation of Russia’s fighting force, to be sure, has suffered mightily due to its inability to even take the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. But the Russian military threat isn’t just rooted in its tanks and artillery, but also in its almost 6,000 nuclear warheads, more than enough to annihilate Europe. The Russian arsenal also includes tactical nuclear weapons which, because of their lower explosive power, are intended for use on the battlefield. They could also be detonated in unpopulated areas to force opponents to capitulate.
