French Minister Says Ukraine Defeat Could Spark World Atomic Arms Race

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot is warning that if Ukraine “capitulates” to Russian invasion forces, after Kyiv voluntarily gave up its nuclear missiles, nations around the world could begin racing to build their own atomic arsenals to avert a similar fate.

“Should Ukraine capitulate after Ukraine has agreed to let go of its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, this will send the signal that the only ultimate security guarantee is the possession of nuclear weapons,” Minister Barrot said during a roundtable with journalists, diplomats and scholars hosted by the Atlantic Council, one of the leading internationalist think tanks in Washington, DC.

Sounding a global alarm on the immense dangers that would accompany any abandonment of Ukraine by its Western partners, Barrot said the democratic enclave’s fall would spark “a nuclear proliferation crisis, which again raises global instability at levels that we haven’t seen for the past 80 years.”

Speaking right after he met with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on potential peace plans for Ukraine, Barrot said this new nuclear arms race “will increase the cost massively of security in the U.S., security in Europe, and I think this view is shared between the U.S. and France.”

Following his talks with Barrot, Secretary Rubio said in a statement the U.S. would work “closely with France and other European partners to secure a lasting peace” in Ukraine.

Rubio said he “commended France’s leadership in rallying European and Ukrainian support for a sustainable deal,” but added: “Europe must step up with real resources and political will to bring this war to an end.”

Foreign Minister Barrot, a cosmopolitan scholar who once taught at MIT, likewise sketched out the colossal threat to the UN-backed world order that would ensue if Ukraine lost the battle to protect its democracy and independence.

“If Ukraine was to capitulate, this would have long-lasting wide-ranging consequences for the entire world because it would basically replace rule-based international order by the law of the strongest,” Barrot said in a message apparently aimed at leaders stretching from Washington to London to Berlin and Warsaw.

“It would create massive incentives for countries around the world that have border issues with their neighbors to consider that they can invade or they can use military threats or force to obtain territorial concessions.”

“This would be very costly for all of us,” Barrot predicted. “We would see issues exploding all around the world.”

Yet he suggested that a wave of new covert nuclear weapons programs – replays of the Manhattan Project that produced the first American A-bombs – could destabilize the globe.

When Ukraine regained its independence upon the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the liberal, pro-West leaders who took power also inherited nearly 2000 nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles – one of the largest stockpiles in the world.

At the time, Ukraine seemed to have no enemies, and no need for city-destroying thermonuclear bombs.

Boris Yeltsin, the heroic reformist who spearheaded the democratic forces that peacefully overturned decades of communist rule, and who headed the new-born Russian Federation, had no plans to reinvade the ex-Soviet republics, and Ukraine entered talks with the U.S. and the United Kingdom on voluntarily relinquishing its atomic weaponry.

Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. all pledged to protect Ukraine’s borders and independence in a four-nation pact called the Budapest Memorandum: Washington also provided security assurances on safeguarding Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for ridding the world of its doomsday atomic ICBMs.

Since the Kremlin launched its blitzkrieg on Ukraine – deploying missiles, tanks, drones and troops to raze the country and bring it under Moscow’s militarized rule, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly lashed out at his predecessor’s decision to willingly surrender its stash of nuclear warheads.

In a world-watched gathering of the European Council last October, Zelensky declared that Ukraine needed to regain a nuclear arsenal, or be rapidly integrated into NATO, to ensure the besieged nation’s survival.

Russia’s would-be neo-Tsar Vladimir Putin quickly characterized Zelensky’s call to atomic arms a “dangerous provocation,” and added: “Any step in this direction will be met with a corresponding reaction,” reported The Moscow Times.

A leader of the Russian legislature, Mikhail Sheremet, issued a collective warning to the Western nuclear powers that any “transfer of nuclear weapons to the Kiev terrorist regime will lead our world to the apocalypse,” according to Russia’s RIA Novosti.

Steven Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine and one of the top nuclear proliferation experts in the U.S., says Zelensky likely aimed to impel NATO to open membership to Ukraine rather than actually start a clandestine atomic weapons program.

Ambassador Pifer, a widely acclaimed scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, tells me in an interview he thinks NATO should sketch out a concrete action plan and timetable for Ukraine to join the alliance.

Frozen outside of NATO, he suggests, Ukraine will forever remain a tempting target in Putin’s campaigns to recreate the Soviet Russian empire.

Transforming Ukraine into a NATO ally would likewise represent the optimal evolution of the security pledge that Washington extended in exchange for the destruction of the tremendous atomic firepower that Kyiv gave up a generation ago, and preserve it as a worldwide model of nuclear disarmament.

If, on the other hand, the disarmed Ukraine loses territory to the nuclear superpower Russia, that could create an anti-model for the rest of the world to avoid following.

An expanding array of countries – especially former satellites of the Soviet Union that have been placed in Putin’s crosshairs as potential targets in his imperial expeditions – could seek to acquire nuclear warheads to stave off becoming another Kremlin conquest.

“I agree with French Foreign Minister Barrot that Russia’s war on Ukraine may cause countries that border a nuclear weapons state to consider whether they should acquire nuclear weapons,” Ambassador Pifer tells me.

“Much will depend, however, on whether the Trump administration maintains its alliance commitments and continues to extend the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella.”

Yet the White House has blasted out mixed messages on its willingness to protect its NATO allies across Europe from any Russian attack, and on the future of its nuclear forces that long guarded its military partners.

“We have already seen questions raised in Poland and Germany about the reliability of the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent,” Pifer says. “If countries lose confidence in the U.S. deterrent, they may seek alternatives.”

When the United States headed NATO as its resolute leader and atomic superpower, he says, its nuclear shield “reduced incentives in allied states to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.”

If that shield melts away, even as Putin escalates his nuclear brinkmanship, once-protected nations might begin scrambling to construct their own atomic defenses.

“So, yes, Russia’s actions increase proliferation risks,” Ambassador Pifer warns.

Russia’s transborder incursions during Putin’s reign have “significantly altered the threat calculus in Europe and other regions along Russia’s periphery,” says Spenser Warren, an expert on Moscow’s ongoing race to reshape its nuclear arsenal at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

“This includes the threat of nuclear blackmail, something Russia has tried to use in Ukraine,” Warren, who wrote his doctoral thesis on “Russian Strategic Nuclear Modernization Under Vladimir Putin, tells me in an interview.

“The combination of increased Russian threat and greater concerns of American commitment have driven some elements of the security communities in Berlin, Warsaw, and perhaps Ankara to consider possible steps towards [nuclear] proliferation.”

As a result, he says, “the possibility of one or more NATO members proliferating has increased.”

Yet if Ukraine itself launched a secret project to produce nuclear warheads, even as Russian missiles bombard the shellshocked country, Warren predicts, Putin’s network of spies might discover the program and “Russia would likely attack to prevent it.”