Germany is at a crossroads when it comes to its security policy — one of the deepest upheavals of the post-War era.
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afd still exists so no
Hoffentlich bauen die Schwaben nie eine Atombombe, weil irgendein Minischderpräsident würde sagen “Etz ham mer se bezahlt, etz werf mer se au ab”.
They just had an election where the second most popular party was an extreme-right-wing pack of lunatics. What happens when they win the next election?
You cannot afford to have nuclear weapons when you can’t be sure who’s going to have control of them.
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Oh can we not?! Köln / Cologne is actually rather progressive. If you want to bomb a german city for voting the afd into office pick one from east germany / former GDR-territory…
If Putin and the USA already have them, isn’t that hypothetical too far off when assessing risk?
There’s a strong counter movement to the right. I’d rather have a strong deterrent against Putin than not. It’s pretty obvious to me what the more immediate and more realistic risk is.
The article advocates/answers with infrastructure should be prepared so it can be purposed if it should ever be necessary.
There is, however, a third option: nuclear hedging. In this model, a country does not develop nuclear weapons outright but instead builds the technological capacity to produce them if ever deemed necessary.
Most of the comments here seem to discuss the headline instead - whether it should equip.
Germany maintains the uranium enrichment plant and a the ability to turn that into nuclear fuel. That is what is needed to build a simple uranium based nuclear weapon.
That is why Germany set up nuclear power plants, as they were always meant to finance and develop those facilities. Since they are now esteblished there is no reason to keep the power plants around. They are of the wrong type anyway, as they produce very little plutonium, which is the other way of producing nuclear weapons. However Germany still has quite a few institutions being able to built nuclear reactors, if need be.
That is also why Germany was fine with US nuclear weapons. Nobody wanted to see Germany have nukes themself, but Germany. Hence that deal. However Germany always had very detailed plans to built nukes, if need be. We are talking about having nukes within a few months, if really pushed hard.
This is what Germany has been doing for decades with its civil nuclear program, but it turned out to be an prohibitively expensive bondoggle and all the nuclear plants have been shut down now.
The war’s been over for a while and they seem to have turned into decent people, but if you think it’ll help… 🤷♂️
Guys, have a kid, buy a house. Smile on your faces. Everything is going to be good.
You need to feel like you have something for them to be able to rip it away.
please dont
An EU nuclear weapons programme would be by far preferable, but that requires a common EU foreign and defence policy.
Not having any nukes won’t work with the current state of affairs, except for enjoyers of being on the receiving end of nuclear blackmail by an orange muppet, his puppeteer in Moscow, and Winnie the Pooh.
Didn’t they just close down all their nuclear power plants because they’re too dangerous after Fukushima?
Building nuclear bombs doesn’t seem like the next logical step.
You don’t have to cool them. Freeer choice of location. I imagine a static good is much easier to safeguard and check.
Most of all, there’s cheaper alternatives without a lot of surrounding questions. That’s not the case for military deterrent.
Production of a bomb and a nuclear reactor involve different things.
First off. Way to make sure everyone “doesn’t look up” re climate emergency. There’s no amount of nukes we can build that are more powerful and can be secured enough against nature’s planned devastation in the next 30 years. But for some reason all this war talk shit is just a welcome distraction.
Second. This is the same like all these governments asking Apple and Signal to build backdoors. Once you have a backdoor, it doesn’t discriminate who passes through it. Build all the nukes you want, all European governments will slide towards trumpism in the next 10 years anyway, as European politics seems to copy USA and is more and more infiltrated by foreign powers (also just like USA). I’m sure all the mini-me Aldofs, Elons and Donalds will appreciate a freshly build slab of nukes to establish their tyranny.
Boy are we stupid. Just smart enough to know we’re a bunch of clothed idiots.
Tldr use a condom
I don’t love your level of optimism. I all seriousness, I don’t think it’s all quite as predetermined as it may seem at this moment.
My level of optimism is not really lovable, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. The correlation between lack of understanding (not to call it naivety or ignorance) and optimism is growing by the day.
I.e.: for most people in order to survive they will turn more and more towards hopium delivery systems like religions, cults or the deification of powerful people to offset the uncomfortable underlying reality.
That’s why I think I’m an actual optimist. I see a really amazing future of rebuilding in the next half a century once you nothern hemispherians have finished killing each other and reduce the population levels back to a level where we can feed people off the land without needing petrofertilised agriculture.
We’re not that special. We’re just an ant hive that managed to find too much food for a while and we grew out of control. Natural laws exist to deal with these events.
Since the rules of society and safety are always written in blood, I feel they will be pretty good rules after this has all come to pass.
There’s plenty of resources out there that will show you where we’re heading in terms of climate. It’s not going to be pretty (it already is very ugly but wars are generating more clicks) and it will keep accelerating. We’re less than 5 years away from serious impacts on the global food supply, and while the white folks will still have food security, the diaspora from the famines on other continent will drive more of those whites to vote towards the right.
Computer models in the 80’s predicted this. Imagine how accurate my AI predictions have become today.
I do want to say I agree with you that optimism is important. I just think there’s naive optimism and realistic optimism. I’ve picked the latter and that means in my story billions die very quickly. But that’s also best for our environment.
Tldr use a condom
Instructions unclear, nuclear device now stuck inside condom.
Yep. Quick vapid internet comments that are a repeat of the same meme from the last 15 years is pretty much all we have left.
You’ve got one lucky wife.
AND MY AXE m’lady
Too expensive for the little benefit. Turkey for example has none, but one of the bigger armies in the Mediterranean and can still project power.
I’d also recommend to talk to Poland and France about this first, if only for historic reasons.
Drop it ! Wherever it’s dropped is probably fine now
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At this time, the Nazis already have nukes.
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I’d also prefer if Russia and the US didn’t have nukes
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So I say i’d rather have other countries not have nukes, and your rebuttal is calling me a jingoist? A jingoist that calls for disarmament?!
Also, please consider not calling people retarded, that is hurtful towards disabled people and very bigoted, something you claim to oppose.
retarded jingoists
Speak for yourself… Oh wait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing
Germany already has nuclear bombs
Doubtful, given Trump’s displayed reluctance to honour a defence treaty.
Those “German” nukes are a handful of US nukes for use by Germany under NATO’s nuclear sharing policy, when approved by the US. With that orange muppet in the White House, Germany really hasn’t any nukes it can count on, especially not for deterrence against the orange muppet’s puppeteer in Moscow.
As if they even need to use them…
What does that have to do with the claim that they have nukes?
If they can’t use them or only conditionally use them then they don’t really have them.
The point of nuclear weapons is to have them to never have to use them, by scaring the shit out of potential enemies, so they don’t even dare to attack.
But in order for the weapons to be a credible threat, and therefore a deterrent, their use must be possible.
Nukes that need authorisation by Donald Trump won’t deter Vladimir Putin.
Nuclear sharing is the worst of both worlds. You make yourself a certain target, but you cannot exercise control over the weapons. It’s turning MAD into SAD (self assured destruction)
I just want to point out, that we are really talking about building nukes again in 2025.
How else are we gonna get that sweet pu238 for our deep space drones?
Who would have known Kim Jong Il would be vindicated
Only those who don’t understand the topic. Those of us who study them do not support proliferation.
What study would that be?
The thing is that among the people who have the power to make it a reality are many who don’t understand the topic. Politicians and other people in power are well known to not understand the stuff they get to make decisions about.
Well, I’m not a big fan of nuclear proliferation but Ukraine gave up theirs and look what happened…
As long as we have imperialistic authoritarian world leaders, we will need ways to keep them at bay, and nuclear deterrence is probably the best one unfortunately…I wonder if Putin would have bet on them not being used and attacked anyway.
Just like Putin has not used any nuke, there’s a huge deterrent to use them at all.
I could definitely see Putin making calculated decisions like that.
Of course Ukraine would have had a stronger stand with them either way.
There was a sincere risk of Russia using nuclear weapons earlier in the conflict, around the winter of 2022/2023 when the first major Russian mobilization of 600k failed to achieve the desired outcomes and the North Western front started to collapse. The released intelligence info put it at about 50/50.
This is why, at the time, the Biden administration made several clearly coded messages/announcements that nuclear weapons usage in Ukraine would result in an overwhelming conventional retaliation that would remove Russian military capability from the board. It’s also part of the reason nations were so slow to provide advanced support capabilities. There was a fear (justified, imo) that immediately opening the floodgates and giving Ukraine tanks, jets, advanced missiles, and using those missiles to strike deep in Russian territory would result in usage of nuclear weapons. It still is a risk, honestly. If Ukraine started doing heavy damage to Moscow, there’s a real chance Putin might decide to flip the table over rather than lose the game.
I must have missed that back then. Thank you for the context.
For sure, it wasn’t super widely reported at the time. Nuclear weapons and foreign policy just happen to be “special interests” for me so I tend to follow things like that.
I would expect the blowback for using nukes in defense of your sovereign territory to be a lot less than for conquering another country.
But you can also see the hesitance from european leaders due to his nukes
Yep. I’m really hoping we can build on the nuclear arsenals the non-US West has going already, though.
We never stopped.
If you think those ones we have now are leftover from the 60s, you are in for a shock.
Yes. The Budapest memo and the US strategic backflip has proved non nuclear powers are deeply at risk.
Europe has French nukes, which are more than sufficient.
Europe is not a country and historically the internal cooperation we see today is the extreme exception. Any of the countries could flip at any time for a multitude of reasons, and then what? France just dominates?
France just dominates would be preferrable to everything between Lissbon and Warsaw being a burnt out radioactive wasteland.
This wouldn’t change much. Europe is too small to use nuclear weapons in internal conflicts effectively, so it is really only a suitable weapon to deter enemies from outside, like Russia.
Given the disregard Russian leadership displays towards the well-being of its own citizens, and how it likes to overestimate its own capabilities, the relatively limited nuclear deterrent offered by France might not be enough.
Especially if Russia either gets lucky and manages to detect some (or worse, all) of the few French strategic missile submarines on patrol, and puts a little too much trust in its own anti-ballistic missile capabilities.
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At least until the next French election. Not exactly a long-term guarantee. Germany needs its own deterrent.
France has no choice. Europe is so small and densely populated that any nuclear attack would have an immense impact on France as well (due to the channel, that is less clear for the UK).
And on the other hand, Germany’s nukes would be highly dependant on France as well, as Germany shut down their civil nuclear program a while ago, and you can’t have nukes without one. And restarting their civil nuclear program would be complete economic madness for Germany. So the nuclear material and expertise will come from France most likely, and then Germany might as well negotiate a much cheaper sharing arrangement directly.
Germany still has some research reactors running. But for enrichment you don’t need a reactor, gas diffusion and centrifuges are also options. There should be enough fuel left to enrich enough uranium for at least some bombs. So it should be possible without too much reliance on external partners.
You can improvise a few test bombs that way, but that is not a credible nuclear deterrence.
Why not? Plutonium supremacy? ;)
It would take longer and use more energy but the boom is the same in the end. Did Germany ever have a breeder/dual use reactor? If not you’d have to build one first anyway and i bet that takes longer than building a shitton of centrifuges.
And isn’t the issue with a credible nuclear deterrence the delivery and second strike capability anyway? Germany would need submarines and icbms too.
Germany build a fully complete breeder reactor and then decided to never turn it on. It is a theme park now.
I guess the logic is that France might stand by if Germany is attacked conventionally. It’s not just about whether a nuke hitting Germany would affect France.
No sane state would use nuclear arms against another nuclear armed nation unless threatend in its existence. If a conventional army large enough to overrun Germany would exist and attack Germany, France knows full well that they are next and could not defend themselves conventionally either. But that scenario is rather unlikely.
And beyond that there are a bunch of different game theoretical considerations mostly centering around second strike capabilities to protect against the threat of a sudden unprovoked nuclear strike aiming to decapitate an enemy state, and in all those scenarios France IMHO comes out as having no choice but to extend their nuclear shield to nearly all of Europe.
Do we really need that many nuclear power plants for it though? Wouldn’t some experimental nuclear power plants be sufficient? I guess we still have some, right? …right?
Its mainly about the people. You need a lot of trained people to develop and maintain these weapons, and having a larger pool of civil nuclear engineers (and univercity departments to train them) makes this much more realistic.
Macron was recently pretty clear about this: France is maintaining their nuclear reactors because they need them to maintain their nuclear weapons. Economically these reactors are a bottomless pit and Germany was smart to shut them down.
Not only the people, also the supply chains to produce and handle the fissile materials. (which also include a whole lot of people)
And she’s Putin’s
servantpal.damn bitch
I really hope europe can “denazify” now that we have seen what it brings.
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We’re REnazifying. The future is looking dark …
