Pavel Podvig, The Mirage of European Nuclear Weapons, Forsvarets forum, 28 April 2026 (in Norwegian)
The Mirage of European Nuclear Weapons
Pavel Podvig
Russian Nuclear Forces Project
Events of the last several years have raised serious questions about the stability of the existing security order. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 dealt the most serious shock to the system. The scale of this war, its duration, and its enormous human cost sent many states, especially those in Europe, on a search for security arrangements that could protect them from an aggression of this kind. Traditionally, Europeans relied on the protection provided by NATO, with the United States being the pillar of the alliance. The NATO guarantee was backed by the US promise to defend allies with nuclear weapons if necessary. Or so it appeared. The policies of the current US administration, from rhetorical disengagement from Europe to direct threats to take land from an ally, have made this promise look less and less credible.
With the US nuclear umbrella in doubt, Europeans started looking for something to replace it. This is not an easy task. There are two NATO nuclear powers, France and the United Kingdom, but their umbrella is even less reliable than the US one. The French president offered a vision of "forward deterrence," which some experts find attractive. The problem is that France insists that it alone will decide what its vital interests are and whether it will act to protect them. The French proudly insist that they would be ready to sacrifice Paris to save Paris, but it is really doubtful that they would do so to save Oslo or Tallinn.
Some European countries have gone further and turned to the idea of getting nuclear weapons of their own. There is an open discussion of nuclear options across the continent. Ideas range from national nuclear programs to nuclear weapons built by a coalition of states, like a group of Nordic countries. While most of these discussions talk about the symbolic value of nuclear weapons and the complexity of technical and logistical details, they miss most important question: How exactly would nuclear weapons make their owners more secure?
The scenario that the authors of all these proposals have in mind, not entirely without reason, is a Russian aggression against them. The assumption is that as a nuclear weapon state Russia could either use a threat of nuclear use or actually use nuclear weapons to break the will of defenders to resist and secure victory on its terms. This is, no doubt, a worrying prospect.
The problem with this assumption, however, is that the war in Ukraine has proven it wrong. Russia has neither managed to intimidate Ukraine into surrender nor used nuclear weapons to end the war on favorable terms. It did try to ramp up nuclear rhetoric, only to discover that nuclear coercion does not work without a credible threat of attacking cities and killing a large number of civilians. The recognition of this reality created a strong pushback from the entire international community, including from those countries that were reluctant to criticize Russia otherwise. The consolidated message unequivocally said that nuclear threats are inadmissible. In the end, Russia has found that the very high political cost of nuclear threats has made nuclear weapons essentially unusable.
The paradox of the situation is that this political cost would not have been nearly as high had Russia faced a nuclear-armed adversary, such as a coalition of states armed with nuclear weapons. In this case, nuclear weapons would become tools of signaling and escalation management. Nuclear threats would stack against each other in a macabre competition of who can threaten to kill more people than his adversary. This is probably not a competition Europeans would want to find themselves in.
It may appear that the mere possession of nuclear weapons guarantees that an aggression can be reliably deterred. Not necessarily. For one, the aggression may not take the form of a full-scale invasion of the kind that Russia started four years ago. It may look more like the takeover of Crimea and the events in Eastern Ukraine eight years before that. Nuclear weapons can do nothing about that. But even in the case of a full assault, all nuclear weapons can do is to pull the defending side into the competition in death and destruction with the aggressor, which no one could hope to win in any meaningful sense.
The bottom line is that there is no scenario in which nuclear weapons can contribute to the security of the Europeans. What European nuclear capability can do is to legitimize nuclear weapons as an instrument of coercion and terror, which would only make the defense more difficult. This does not mean that the danger of aggression can be ignored. But it can and should be dealt with by a thorough delegitimization of nuclear weapons, which we have seen working against Russia's nuclear threats. Aggressive intentions should be dealt with by investing in building security mechanisms to reduce and then eliminate armaments, whether nuclear or conventional. The ultimate goal should be to eliminate armed confrontation altogether. Nuclear weapons are just a useless distraction on this path.