Why Europe Needs Its Own Nuclear Deterrent 

The Norwegian television series Okkupert (Occupied), also on Netflix, began with a chillingly plausible premise: a near-future Russia, with the tacit approval of the European Union, occupies Norway to seize control of its abundant North Sea oil and gas fields. (Norway, after being devastated by a hurricane attributed to global warming, elects a Green Party-ish prime minister who stops the Scandinavian country’s oil and gas production.) The drama was a meditation on sovereignty, appeasement, and the vulnerability of small nations amid resource-hungry giants. A decade ago, this was compelling fiction. Today, it reads like a prophecy laden with irony. The most explicit threat to Nordic territory comes not from Moscow’s revanchism, but from Washington’s transactionalism, with an American president coveting Greenland’s vast resources and vowing to obtain it.  

Trump’s pressure to wrest this autonomous territory from Denmark underscores a terrifying truth: the foundational premise of the post-war order is dead, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney eloquently made clear.) That the United States would protect the territorial integrity of its allies is no longer guaranteed. As my Hoover Institution colleague, the historian Timothy Garton-Ash, recently diagnosed our era with brutal clarity, “The West is history. Muscle up for a post-Western world of illiberal international disorder.” 

European leaders are addressing this grim reality. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen soberly acknowledged the shift. “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” she declared, “if this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently. It is time to seize this opportunity and build a new, independent Europe.” 

But how? For decades, Europe has been a study in strategic fecklessness. Its institutional design, requiring unanimity for consequential action, produced paralysis during the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia and, in this century, an inadequate response to Russia’s aggression in Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine. For half a century, it has failed to resolve the Cyprus conflict, leaving a permanent fissure between two NATO members, Greece and Turkey. These failures were always lamentable, but they occurred under the forgiving canopy of the American security umbrella. That canopy is now riddled with holes, and the storm is gathering. 

This is not a new fear but the grim culmination of a predictable trend. In the weeks before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the unfolding tragedy would send a devastating message to the world about nuclear disarmament. In 1994, under the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine, which held the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, surrendered it in exchange for security assurances. I warned that Kyiv’s fate would renew a global nuclear arms race, as every nation learned that only a nuclear deterrent is absolute. Tragically, this prediction has been validated. Europe itself must now confront the cautionary tale. 

This leads me to conclude that Europe, to secure its sovereignty, must consider the unthinkable—a continental project to develop and deploy its own tactical nuclear weapons under a unified European command independent of NATO. 

I shudder to write these words. I am a product of a strategic culture that has spent 75 years limiting nuclear proliferation, not encouraging it. The world was safer with fewer atomic actors. Yet Europe is slowly descending into a permanent condominium of great-power influence, its fate dictated by the calculations of Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. 

The contrarian logic of the political scientist Kenneth Waltz, who argued that nuclear proliferation can induce caution and stability, feels dangerously relevant. A European bomb would not be for conquest, but for sheer survival—the ultimate deterrent against not only Russian aggression in the East, but also what I call coercive “Trumpsactionalism” in the West. However, this is not a simple equation. My Stanford colleague Scott Sagan has spent a career exposing the flaws in Waltz’s rational-actor logic. Sagan’s work is a terrifying catalog of how real-world organizations, plagued by fallible routines, bureaucratic competition, and the likelihood of accident, are ill-suited to manage the apocalyptic power of the atom. The risk of miscalculation, unauthorized use, or accidental war does not decrease with new nuclear powers; it increases exponentially. 

To advocate for a new nuclear Europe is to acknowledge this horrifying gamble. It is to believe that strategic vulnerability is a greater threat than the terrifying risks of atomic ownership. 

The likelihood of Europe pulling this off seems slim. What would it mean for NATO? Which nations would be covered? Could the Franco-German engine, which so often sputters over less-than-life-and-death issues like agricultural subsidies and fiscal rules, agree on nuclear command and control? The project would demand a level of trust and a shared destiny that Europe has never managed to achieve. 

Worse still, a unified European command structure would have to contend with internal spoilers who undermine collective security. How could Europe entrust its nuclear codes to a council that includes leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Slovakia’s Robert Fico, whose sympathies often appear more aligned with Moscow than with Brussels? Using existing EU structures for such a grave project is a non-starter. 

The flawed architecture of the present points toward a visionary blueprint for Europe’s past. The original European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was forged in the aftermath of total war to make another European conflict “materially impossible” by pooling the instruments of war. Europe now needs a new, parallel organization to make its subjugation materially impossible, this time by pooling the ultimate instrument of sovereignty. 

A new European Deterrence Community (EDC), operating outside the EU and parallel to NATO, could be established by the ECSC’s original six members. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg together possess the critical mass of industrial capacity, financial might, and political will. Such a structure would quarantine the spoiler problem; there would be no Orbán or Fico to veto progress. France would provide nuclear leadership and technology, its pro-nuclear populace making it the only plausible anchor. This would not be a surrender of its independent, nuclear force de frappe, but a massive amplification of its strategic weight. Germany, for its part, would supply the financial and industrial engine, finally fulfilling its Zeitenwende in a European, not purely national, context. 

This core would not be a fortress but a foundation. New members could join only by meeting criteria for industrial capacity, democratic stability, and an unwavering commitment to collective defense. The Nordic states, with their strategic clarity and technological prowess, would be the obvious next entrants. The United Kingdom could remain aloof, forced to decide whether it wants a real stake in continental security or a future of gilded isolation. Critically, frontline states would not be initial members, a painful but pragmatic step to avoid immediate, catastrophic escalation with Russia. Instead, the EDC’s deterrent umbrella would eventually extend over them from a more stable and defensible core. 

These obstacles are immense, but this model offers a plausible, if arduous, path to protect Europe, deter great powers (including the U.S.), and stabilize a world that’s been thrown off its axis by the raw power grabs of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump. It would answer the Trump question of whether Europe can credibly deter any other nation with designs on Greenland, the Baltics, or any other European overseas territories. Under any post-World War II American president, from Harry S. Truman to Joe Biden (including the relatively restrained first-term Donald Trump), this would not be necessary. It is a horrifying choice, but in the illiberal, post-Western world, it may be the only one.