France went straight from agreeing European peacekeepers in Ukraine with President Trump to using a British newspaper to float the next stage of the ratchet, a joint Anglo-French deployment of nuclear weapons to Germany.
France could potentially forward deploy its jet-borne nuclear weapons to Germany to deter Russia from breaking a future peace deal, and this would force Britain’s hand into doing the same, diplomats are reported to have claimed in comments that immediately followed French President Emmanuel Macron’s Monday meeting at the White House.
Macron called on President Donald Trump, the two men having G7-hosted talks and discussing the Ukraine war, among other global security topics.
Both men spoke encouragingly about the Ukraine peace process, President Trump saying the signing of a minerals-for-defence deal with Ukraine could come very quickly and an agreement with Russia for peace after that. Macron spoke of a truce “in the coming weeks”.
The French President also congratulated President Trump on his determination to bring peace, telling the press pack: “the agreement you are preparing to sign with Ukraine and with all these discussions we’ve had are very solid guarantees that we have the same wish, peace as soon as possible, lasting solid peace for everyone. And the renewal of an international situation where we are all able to shoulder our responsibilities”.
Importantly, both Trump and Macron spoke on the work of guaranteeing peace after a deal is signed. Macron said European nations would ” step up, to be a stronger partner, to do more in defence and security for this continent, and to be a reliable partner” while President Trump stated: “Europe is going to make sure nothing happens.”
He continued: “I don’t think it’s going to be much of a problem, once we settle there is going to be no more war in Ukraine, it isn’t going to be a very big problem… we’ve got to get this very, very bloody, savage problem solved.
“And I will say this also, it will lead to world war three if it’s not solved… European troops may go into Ukraine as peacemakers, so when the agreement is done they can watch and see everything is followed properly… that will be a very good day when we can go in as peacekeepers, as opposed to what is happening now, which is everyone being killed.”
Britain’s leading conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph reports today, just hours after that meeting between the two Presidents concluded, that France is already floating a considerable step beyond deploying peacekeepers with a mooted informal European nuclear deterrent.
The paper cites a French government source who told them: “Posting a few French nuclear jet fighters in Germany should not be difficult and would send a strong message” and that doing so would prompt the United Kingdom to do the same. It also quotes a German diplomat — also unnamed — who is said to have backed the idea.
They are reported to have said: “If the French move to place a nuclear deterrent in Germany it would indeed increase pressure on the Brits to follow suit”. They allegedly told the paper the presumed government-in-waiting is positive on the idea of a nuclear umbrella and, consequently: “we want to have a say in this, we should be ready to talk about this and we are willing to pay for it.”
It looks likely the next German government will be a re-tread of the Angela Merkel-era ‘grand coalition’ of left and right, and the left-wing SPD have also talked up the idea of a nuclear deterrent for Europe in the past year. The presumed incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz said last week: “…we have to talk to the British and French whether their nuclear protection could also be extended to us is an issue that the French government has repeatedly raised with the German government.”
From a purely practical perspective, forward-deploying nuclear-capable jets and warheads is not technically difficult, and several European nations — including Germany — have already had American nuclear weapons stationed in their countries, and even operated by their own air forces, for decades. France has at least 60 nuclear warheads that are deployed by missile launch from jet fighter aircraft.
It is a slightly different matter for the United Kingdom, also cited in this alleged French plan, which during the post-Cold War defence cuts ended its use of tactical and air-dropped nuclear weapons. The entire British deterrent is now seaborne, carried and launched from a fleet of nuclear submarines armed with nuclear-tipped Trident II missiles.
Assuming a massive shift in defence priorities, increase in defence spending, and perhaps a need generated by a gradual U.S. withdrawal from Europe, it is not beyond the realms of the possible that Britain could field land and air based nuclear weapons again, however. It is one of only a handful of countries capable of making its own nuclear weapons legally and safely, and air-drop or missile-launched warheads are presumably well within its technical capability, at a price.
The greater hurdle is presumably legal. There is a dense body of international law surrounding nuclear proliferation and the forward-deployment of American nuclear weapons to European states is ‘grandfathered in’ to those treaties. France or the United Kingdom moving nuclear weapons into Germany is a new consideration.
As previously reported of this issue:
Extending nuclear weapons to more states is fraught with legal difficulty, not least due to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968 which absolutely forbids this. Indeed, several nations condemned Russia for deploying parts of its nuclear arsenal to allied state Belarus last year, saying this breached the Treaty, making Europe attempting to do the same thing questionable in practice.
Russia argued that by giving Belarus the ability to launch nuclear weapons from its aircraft on its behalf they were merely doing the same thing the U.S. had by integrating its own bombs into the German air force, for instance. Yet the U.S. nuclear sharing programme predates the Non-Proliferation Treaty by years, and consequently was ‘grandfathered in’ at the time of signing.
That is to say nothing of domestic objections. Germany, for instance, is now so anti-nuclear it has shut down its fleet of nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy crisis, as the political imperative of unloading clean atomic energy was greater than ensuring national demand could be met in the face of lost imported gas from the Russian Federation.
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