During the Cold War, Europe kept asking whether Washington would risk an American city to save a European one. It was an impolite question, but a useful one, which is why it never quite left the room. It has now packed its bags and moved east. Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron created quite a stir with an important speech on French nuclear weapons policy. Under what he called a new path of dissuasion avancée, or “forward deterrence,” he declared that just as French strategic submarines “dilute naturally in the oceans, guaranteeing a permanent-strike capability,” so also now will its “strategic air forces … be able to be spread deep into the European continent.” This would offer “a new strategic depth, in line with the challenges of European security.” This new policy has sometimes been compared to the “extended nuclear deterrence” the United States provides to the NATO alliance — or at least a step toward “Europeanizing” nuclear deterrence.
As Frank Kuhn has already pointed out in these pages, however, the superficial resemblance between this new policy and U.S. forward deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe is misleading. Rather, “France’s new doctrine of ‘forward deterrence’ likely serves a different purpose,” namely that simply of “improv[ing] the survivability of France’s airborne nuclear forces during crises, when French bases could be vulnerable to missile attacks.”
Nor is this merely a problem of intentions. In fact, on its own terms, for reasons of nuclear game theory, and due to the physical limitations of France’s nuclear force posture, this dissuasion avancée is incapable of underpinning extended deterrence for the NATO alliance.
But Europe is not necessarily out of options for a European extended deterrence capacity. Developing such a capability — either simply to ensure that NATO can meet current threats more effectively, or (more dramatically) to help address deterrence needs in a “post-American” environment — would not be easy or cheap. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be impossible, and it might actually be considerably easier, quicker, and less expensive than one might think. In this article, I explain why the current French approach is inadequate for NATO’s security but also offer a provocative idea for how a “Europeanized” extended deterrent might actually be made to work anyway.
Nuclear Psychology
The first problem is the current French nuclear doctrine is inherently quite unsuited to the extended deterrence mission. As most readers of War on the Rocks understand, extended deterrence refers to when a country, in order to protect allies, may need to be willing to respond with nuclear threats or, in extreme cases, nuclear weapons. This entails at least two things that France has not shown: first, a genuine commitment to defending the survival and autonomy of other countries in addition to just one’s own, and second, the doctrinal flexibility and improvisational agility needed to engage in what nuclear strategists call “escalation management.”
On the first, there lurks an inherent credibility problem, which France — of all countries — should certainly recognize, because it is the same credibility problem that France keenly felt vis-à-vis American extended nuclear deterrence in the 1950s. The old Cold War idea of the so-called “Hamburg Grab” scenario illustrates this problem: would the Americans really risk a Soviet nuclear attack on Chicago just to save Hamburg from being overrun by the Red Army? Despite U.S. assurances, French President Charles de Gaulle did not believe the United States would use nuclear if Warsaw Pact aggression was limited to the European theater. A threat that is disbelieved, of course, is a threat that cannot deter. Such worries and disbeliefs, in fact, helped incentivize Paris to develop its own independent nuclear force.
As my former government colleague Austin Long has noted, a “hyperfocus on autonomy and independence” is “fundamental … to France’s deterrence,” and this fixation is “unlikely to change.” To be sure, Macron did say that it would be a mistake to assume that the interests France considers vital do not extend at all to protecting its allies. France’s vital interests, he declared, “should not merely [be] considered as what is within our national borders.” Neither, however, did Macron indicate the kind of commitment to the nuclear-armed defense of others that any true “extended deterrent” would require. So, why should it be credible that the French would risk Paris by incinerating St. Petersburg to protect Tallinn or Warsaw from the Russians in 2030?
On the matter of doctrinal flexibility and improvisational agility, stressing what he said was “the complete and deliberate separation between conventional and nuclear forces,” Macron also made clear that France still thinks the distinction between conventional war and nuclear war is wholly binary, and that nuclear weapons use is an all-or-nothing question. Indeed, he emphasized that French doctrine “rejects the idea of flexible nuclear response. French nuclear capabilities are strategic and exclusively strategic because these are weapons of a whole other kind than those that can be used on a battlefield.” So much, then, for flexibility. If anything, this new French policy may, in practice, make existing NATO nuclear policy less flexible, for it will surely make alliance planning much more complex and challenging if French nuclear strike aircraft disperse to NATO bases while France itself still stubbornly refuses to participate in the NATO Nuclear Planning Group.
The Challenge of Flexibility
By virtue of the air-launched systems it retains today, France has more nuclear options available to it than do the British, but Paris still lacks the range of nuclear options necessary to respond credibly to theater-level nuclear crises when extending deterrence protections to others. French deterrence doctrine seems originally to have been “modelled on that of massive retaliation” and to have been “built in opposition to the U.S. extended deterrence,” and indeed Paris initially opposed new American ideas of “flexible response” in the early 1960s.
Though it did for a while possess some tactical nuclear weapons — thus holding out at least the possibility of a more “flexible” strategy — French deterrence doctrine seems clearly to be rooted in the logic of massive retaliation. Paris seems always to have focused upon a fairly draconian idea of “deterrence by punishment,” dedicated to ensuring that aggression would be met by a devastating response, the prospect of which is intended to deter by basically inspiring terror. This leaves it with dangerously little to say in response to theater contingencies and adversary coercive bargaining, especially if these were to occur at some distance from the French frontier.
Today, most of the French nuclear arsenal sits aboard its force of four Le Triomphant-class ballistic missile submarines armed with variants of the M51 submarine-launched ballistic missile. Even if French doctrine did not explicitly preclude using them in “flexible” ways, these systems would not be tremendously useful in responding to limited Russian nuclear use or to NATO setbacks on a conventional battlefield 800 miles from France. Because upon firing, they might not initially appear to be any different than a strategic attack, moreover, submarine-launched ballistic missile shots intended for theater contingencies might be mistaken for something even more dramatic and escalatory. And because they would be fired from highly sensitive submarine patrol areas, such moves would also increase the vulnerability of the retaliatory force Paris would still need to preserve to deter direct nuclear attack on the homeland.
This would leave France’s recently upgraded nuclear-armed land-attack cruise missiles to do the heavy lifting in any kind of extended deterrence commitment to NATO. Yet it is far from clear that this force is really up to the job. That model of missile reportedly carries a thermonuclear warhead capable of yields between 150 and 300 kilotons. This is a pretty large explosion — 10 to 20 times the yield of the weapon used on Hiroshima — and certainly vastly greater than the reportedly merely five-kiloton yield of the new American W76-2 warhead deployed during the first Trump administration to give us more options in the face of Russian or Chinese theater nuclear coercion.
Worse still, very few such French missiles and warheads apparently exist. According to press accounts, France has deployed only about 50 of them, divided between land-based and carrier-based aircraft. Being neither numerous nor particularly flexible in terms of the physical effects it can create, in other words, the aerial leg of the French dyad is better suited to making “countervalue” threats against Russian population centers than it is to responding to the kind of limited adversary use, coercive nuclear bargaining situations, and escalation management problems that extended nuclear deterrence aims to be able to address.
A Modest Proposal?
If one is indeed to “Europeanize” extended nuclear deterrence, something more is clearly needed. But any effort to improve European capabilities by providing more flexible forces and greater numbers of systems would run up against significant constraints.
For one thing, it would be necessary to produce more plutonium “pits” for warheads. France doesn’t lack plutonium, reportedly now having over 100 tons of such material, mostly from spent reactor fuel. Nevertheless, pit production is not easy to expand, and this is something we in the United States struggle with to this day. If Britain and France have both “hard-wired” themselves into an extremely low level of weapons production capability, as we foolishly did in the United States, scaling back up to provide a more credible and flexible force for Europe could be difficult. Moreover, reliance upon a “bespoke,” highly-specialized, nuclear-specific delivery system such as the current French air-launched cruise missile presents challenges for any effort to scale up, especially when the European countries are already struggling to develop and deploy a wide range of conventional munitions in this era of worsening threats.
So, is there any feasible way for Europe to develop new, more flexible, and more numerous nuclear systems to help address the credibility challenges of extended deterrence associated with a “Tallinn Grab”? Perhaps indeed.
Potentially Ubiquitous Modular Aerial Capability
I call this idea “potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability” (those who like acronyms can call it the PUMA-C for short). I envision it being either a French-only exercise, or better yet a joint effort by France and Britain as a further step along the road opened by the nuclear cooperation agreement that was part the Lancaster House Treaties of 2010, their joint Northwood Declaration of July 2025 on deterrence policy coordination, and their EPURE joint nuclear weapons-related research facility at Valduc, as well as by collaborative non-nuclear European efforts such as the European Long-Range Strike Approach for developing advanced cruise missiles.
The capability I propose is based on the idea that Europe doesn’t necessarily need to develop or build a bespoke, nuclear-only delivery system because European countries are already acquiring a range of high-quality precision missile delivery systems for conventional warheads.
Indeed, Europe is presently said to be undergoing a “missile renaissance” under the European Long-Range Strike Approach. While that effort’s various partners have not publicly identified a specific technical objective, it is well known that Europe has in the past dragged its feet in developing stand-off missile programs, and the official announcement of the new effort pledged to “improve the ability of signatory states to develop, produce, and deliver … long-range strike capabilities.” This project is expected to aim at producing “a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of between 1,000 to 2,000 kilometres,” and may indeed help European states finally develop a new conventional counterstrike posture.
Even without new long-range systems, moreover, Europe already has an expanding repertoire of capabilities — from the U.S. Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile to the European Storm Shadow, and from the venerable U.S. Tomahawk to the Turkish Bora. Many of these systems are extremely capable, and they are already an important and growing part of European defense capabilities.
What, then, if it were possible to develop a small nuclear warhead that could be delivered by some or all of the systems already in Europe’s sizeable and expanding arsenal of hitherto conventional-only missiles? Historically, it is not at all unprecedented for the cost of a state-of-the-art delivery system to exceed the cost of developing a nuclear weapon for it. (This was, for instance, the case with the B-29 Superfortress bomber, the development of which cost more than the Manhattan Project itself.) Leveraging existing European missile programs for the optional carriage of a small nuclear weapon could save many billions of euros compared to building new nuclear-only systems and could perhaps also be accomplished more rapidly.
Nor, I suspect, would it be that difficult to build a small nuclear weapon capable of fitting into the existing warhead bays of such missiles. In terms of raw physical dimensions, such nuclear devices were smaller and lighter than the conventional warheads carried by the wide range of missiles already in European and American service. By the standards of the conventional payloads on current missile systems, such dimensions are very small indeed, and certainly smaller than the current payloads of the conventional missiles NATO is already buying. (Indeed, with a small nuclear device likely being considerably lighter than such systems’ existing warheads, such missiles might fly significantly farther when thus armed, extending their potential “strategic” reach and deterrent impact in the context of comparatively confined European geographies.)
To be sure, this concept might require French or British nuclear scientists to sign off on a new weapon design that they had not necessarily subjected to traditional explosive testing. Yet modeling and simulation of nuclear weapons designs has come extraordinarily far in recent decades. Moreover, some small and highly flexible design concepts have been explosively tested — albeit, in the case of the W79 and W82, at least, in the American weapons program — and might thus be adoptable for European extended deterrence with much more confidence than would be associated with an entirely new one.
Nor do I mean to suggest that those old U.S. designs are the only possible concept that might work. (It also might be challenging to transfer them, even to allies, given the provisions of Article I of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.) A new version of the old British WE-177 gravity bomb, for instance — which had variants ranging in yield from 0.5 to 450 kilotons in a package just over 16 inches in diameter — might perhaps provide an alternative answer that would not be institutionally novel in a European context, or the 10- or 25-kiloton French AN-51 device that used to arm the old Pluton tactical missile. I’m not promoting any single design concept here; merely pointing out that there are, in principle, a lot of options.
In fact, the most technically challenging part would probably not be developing a nuclear weapon capable of fitting onboard a diverse range of long-range missiles, but rather developing a sufficiently clever arming, fusing, and firing system for such a warhead that could electronically “speak” to the various guidance computers aboard those systems. Making a drop-in nuclear device truly modular in that sort of “plug-and-play” fashion — and developing transport, security, and command-and-control protocols adequate for managing such a massively dispersible nuclear capability — might be tricky indeed, but this presumably still wouldn’t drive up the developmental cost as much as developing and producing an entirely new aerial delivery system at scale.
Whatever design concept one chose, however, a potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability could give France and perhaps also Britain the option of taking some of the advanced long-range missiles they are already buying and “up-warheading” them at discretion into just the sort of force that would maximize deterrent capacity and flexibility vis-à-vis the Russian scenarios NATO might face in a future theater contingency. This would offer considerable deterrence and escalation management advantages over current Franco-British capacities. (It would also hold open the possibility of expanding this new capability to other missile-operating NATO partners on terms modeled on the alliance’s current “nuclear sharing” concept for American forward-deployed gravity bombs.)
This proposed capability would greatly increase Russian targeting dilemmas in the event of conflict, as well as give Europe a range of crisis-period options it does not possess. These would include not merely a vastly more flexible range of use options, but also the opportunity to engage in strategic signaling by the open “nuclearization” of certain missile assets (or perhaps, alternatively, the ability to accomplish force generation quietly), as well as the ability to maintain an ongoing “shell game” of dispersed redeployments that keep the Kremlin always guessing about which assets are which.
Meeting the Threat
So, what would this new capability actually give NATO? Quite a lot, I’d think.
NATO’s Russian adversary has adopted a strategy of territorial expansion against some of its neighbors, now also accompanied by increasingly direct threats and provocations against Europe as a whole, with which Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaims himself “ready right now” for war. In this strategy, the Kremlin trusts the “offensive umbrella” of its strategic nuclear balance with the United States to deter NATO from intervening to stop its aggression. (And indeed, in Ukraine, NATO has been deterred from direct involvement.)
As work by Dmitry Adamsky and others has detailed, Russia has developed military doctrines that emphasize the use of a wide range of threats and tools to impose costs, frighten and disorient the opponent, and manipulate escalation risks in support of coercive bargaining in peacetime, crisis, and war alike. In support of such thinking, Russian doctrine since 2004 has emphasized “strategic operations to destroy critical infrastructure targets” in the early stages of a conflict, and it has invested not merely in a wide range of long-range conventional strike tools — now being used regularly against Ukraine — but also in what I have called “a ‘Swiss Army knife’ arsenal that provides a nuclear tool for nearly any occasion, large or small.”
In crisis or conflict, therefore, NATO must expect and be prepared for a forward-leaning Russian strategy of provocative risk manipulation involving the threat and use of force at multiple levels and with a great variety of tools, including the possibility of limited nuclear weapons use. Much of the heavy lifting to improve the alliance’s ability to meet this challenge must come through improvements in Europe’s conventional armaments. In the nuclear arena, however, and especially the realm of theater-class systems — the type of nuclear weapon most likely to be used by Russia in coercive bargaining — NATO is even more starkly outmatched, in ways that bode ill both for deterring aggression and for coping with such Russian risk manipulation if deterrence were to fail.
Having no meaningful theater-class nuclear capabilities other than a small number of American gravity bombs deliverable only by aircraft that must undertake the perilous task of overflying heavily-defended targets — and a small number of American low-yield warheads that must ride on the strategic delivery system of a submarine-launched ballistic missile to reach their targets — NATO’s nuclear options in the face of such coercive nuclear bargaining would be disturbingly binary, particularly if U.S. extended nuclear deterrence could no longer be relied upon. The alliance could either be coerced, as Russia would intend it to be, or it could escalate to massive, last-resort strategic salvoes of the sort to which President Macron has recommitted French doctrine.
That latter option, however, might turn a war over the fate of, say, Estonia into one which could be truly existential for every NATO member — and this creates a “Hamburg Grab”-style credibility problem. Europe’s lack of countervailing theater-class capabilities, in other words, makes it both harder to deter Russian aggression and harder to meet such aggression should deterrence fail.
Potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability offers a chance to fix this by giving its possessors a vastly wider range of capabilities with which to respond to Russian provocations and coercive bargaining, including the limited use of Russian nuclear weapons. Flexibility of response is central to escalation management, as understood through the old metaphor of an “escalation ladder” made up of various “rungs,” each corresponding to a different level of risk and severity. In effect, with their diverse arsenal of theater-class nuclear tools — including dual-capable systems that can deliver either a conventional or a nuclear payload — Russia has constructed itself a “ladder” with many rungs, whereas NATO has very few. As intended, this allows the Kremlin the ability to threaten degrees of intermediate escalation to which NATO might have little response other than submission or suicide.
Such nuclear asymmetry is practically an incitement to Russian coercive bargaining, or even war, but the capability I propose could do a great deal to address this problem. With the option of turning some of its growing arsenal of long-range precision strike systems into low-yield nuclear delivery systems — as well as the option to signal the possibility or the actuality of taking such a step — NATO would equip itself to counter nuclear coercive bargaining far more effectively than it can today. A mixture of conventional-to-nuclear posture adjustments and signaling, for example, could be used to meet Russian threats at or just above the level of those threats, at pretty much whatever level they might happen to be made. Ideally, in fact, the very existence of such NATO nuclear flexibility might make Russian threats less likely in the first place.
If deterrence were nonetheless to fail, a potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability would vastly increase NATO’s warfighting options, including by allowing it to respond to Russian limited nuclear use with limited employment of its own, as well as to be able to respond further, if circumstances demand, in increasingly significant ways that do not require immediately escalating to Armageddon. (This means, in effect, that there would be no single use case or operational concept for this capability: the whole point would be to radically expand NATO options in crisis or conflict in ways that allow alliance leaders the flexibility and agility to offer calibrated responses to multiple varieties and levels of Russian aggression and provocation.) In this way, it could strengthen NATO’s deterrence baseline and make nuclear coercion by the Kremlin during a possible conflict much less likely to succeed and hence less attractive as a Russian option.
Entanglement Worries?
Some will doubtless object to this idea on the grounds that “entangling” conventional and nuclear capabilities through the deployment of dual-capable missiles would be destabilizing, raising the risk of inadvertent nuclear escalation. Such arguments have been cogently made by my colleague James Acton, for instance.
This would be the case, this thinking goes, in part because of the danger of misinterpretation. The victim of a detected incoming strike might wrongly assume that a nuclear rather than conventional warhead was onboard, for instance. Or one side’s attack intended to target conventionally-armed systems might be misinterpreted by the other as a strike against the possessor’s nuclear arsenal. It might also be argued that a potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability would create additional pressure for preemptive Russian strikes against European missile assets in times of crisis to eliminate systems that could potentially soon carry nuclear weapons.
While I appreciate the potential dangers of such “entanglement,” entanglement-based criticisms of dual-capable missiles have aged poorly in light of what we’ve seen in the Ukraine war. Russia, after all, has fired a bewildering array of dual-capable missiles at Ukraine – apparently including Kinzhal, Iskander, Kalibr, Zircon, Oreshnik, Kh-101/102, and 9M729 systems, and even old Soviet-era Kh-55 missiles – without anyone there or elsewhere concluding that a nuclear war was getting underway or overreacting with strategically destabilizing ways. (Ukrainian attacks against dual-capable Russian systems, including against strategic bombers and nuclear command-and-control aircraft, have also not led to a nuclear crisis.) If claims about the inevitably destabilizing nature of such systems were correct, how is it that this has been possible? And why would dual-capable missiles be destabilizing only when possessed by Western countries? Even leaving aside the fact that dual-capable manned aircraft have also not been thought peculiarly destabilizing even though possessed in large numbers by both sides since early in the Cold War, it would seem that, empirically speaking, the entanglement critique seems to have fallen on its face.
But even if that were not so, the Western powers do not have the luxury of a conventional battlespace devoid of entanglement worries in any event. Both Russia and China have deployed considerable numbers of just such dual-capable systems for many years — a strategy that they seem to employ not just for reasons of economy but to deter us from strikes against the “kill chains” of their conventional missile systems. Asymmetric entanglement, I fear, could be even more destabilizing than a more reciprocal variety. As a result of longstanding Russian and Chinese deployments, we face a situation in which our adversaries might expect us to be at least somewhat “self-deterred” by fears of attacking their dual-capable systems, while they would feel much freer to attack as many of our own (currently non-dual-capable) systems as they can. It might be better for nobody to have dual-capable systems, but it seems to me even worse — from both a deterrence and an escalation management perspective — for only our adversaries to have them. My proposal could help remedy this asymmetry.
Nor can one forget that advances in conventional precision-strike capabilities may already be creating a sort of creeping entanglement problem of their own anyway. As such systems become increasingly capable of counterforce missions, there are already reasons for Russian planners to worry about their potential strategic impact. With Moscow already probably hoping to target these systems either way, it’s not obvious that having nuclear payload options would make that problem much worse, while it would add considerably to NATO’s range of available responses to Russian provocations.
With respect to such preemptive Russian strikes against European missile assets in time of crisis, it is perhaps the “ubiquitous” aspect of the capability — that is, the factor of ubiquity — that could help us. After all, such Russian preemption incentives assuredly already exist with the forward-deployed American weapons currently allocated for NATO “nuclear sharing.” Such devices are, moreover, few, stored in peacetime only at a small number of widely known (if still officially classified) airbases, and usable only on a modest number of dual-capable aircraft. All this presumably makes these elements of NATO’s existing extended deterrence capability especially juicy targets.
If NATO countries stored their potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability nuclear payloads in a small number of repository hubs as the alliance does with today’s American B61 weapons, that facility would certainly be a tempting target for Russian preemption — at least until NATO moved to disperse such warheads (which would be easier than for B61s). But that’s not a situation notably worse than we already face. As for preemptive strikes against delivery systems, the whole point of the proposed capabilities is that they could be carried by a huge range of missiles that would already be quite thickly scattered across the alliance.
That wouldn’t in itself keep such missiles from being desirable targets for preemption, of course, but it certainly would make the task of preemption vastly more difficult — perhaps quite unmanageably so — because they would already exist, in effect, everywhere. Just as Macron envisions “dispersal across European territory, [into] a sort of archipelago of forces” as giving his nuclear-strike air force a greater degree of survivability, so also would the ubiquity of delivery assets help augment the survivability not just of the new European extended deterrent force but also of Europe’s conventional missilery itself. This might thus also bring about some degree of “deterrence by denial,” for preemption, which cannot feasibly succeed, is preemption presumably less likely to be undertaken.
The Problem of Politics
None of this means that implementing a potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability would be easy. In fact, actual development and deployment of the system might in some sense represent the easy part. Arguably more challenging, I fear, would be the politics.
For one thing, many in the arms control and disarmament community would surely hate it, for a potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability would indeed represent a considerable scaling-up of nuclear weapons deployments in Europe, as well as a NATO shift into the business of theater-level nuclear capabilities and the contemplation of possible limited nuclear use — some possibility of which is inherent in any serious effort at effective escalation management. The plan would surely also face some political headwinds even outside the expert community, for European publics have a long history of anxiety over nuclear weapons and ambivalence about NATO deterrence strategies, whether or not they actually understand them.
That said, NATO security planners would have solid grounds on which to push back against such reflexive opposition. As described, the entanglement challenges would likely be less problematic than some might fear, and at any rate less dangerous than in today’s world, in which entanglement exists only asymmetrically in ways favoring our adversaries.
Nor would this represent a nuclear proliferation problem, for I envision it to involve only French or British nuclear weapons — that is, weapons belonging to countries that are already nuclear-weapon States within the meaning of Article IX of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Even if the plan were expanded to envision the possibility of wartime use by additional NATO partners, this need be no more problematic than the alliance’s longstanding “nuclear sharing” architecture — an approach that NATO has long correctly understood to be entirely legal under Article I of that Treaty, and one that even the Soviets themselves agreed would be permissible when Washington and Moscow jointly drafted it.
More fundamentally, from a nonproliferation perspective, especially in the context of weakening U.S. commitments to NATO, a potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability would likely represent an important way to help prevent nuclear proliferation. Beginning in the 1960s, after all, NATO’s “nuclear sharing” architecture — in which forward-deployed U.S. nuclear weapons are carefully kept under American lock and key in peacetime, though they might be released in time of war for delivery by other NATO partners — has already been one of the world’s most successful nonproliferation tools precisely because it helped obviate the perceived need of other NATO allies for their own nuclear weapons. Far from being a proliferation problem, therefore, it could likewise help reduce the nuclear proliferation pressures felt by NATO members in the face of current threats.
Most importantly, however, the strongest argument for this would simply be the difficulty, or perhaps the impossibility, of meeting current security threats and deterrence needs by any less radical means. I don’t suggest that the politics of implementing this would be easy, but it can scarcely be argued that Russian aggression or limited nuclear use against one or more NATO countries would be preferable to enduring the degree of domestic political blowback to which such a strategy might give rise. I know of no political calculus in which war brought on by weakness is better than peace achieved through deterrence, and what we need in the contemporary security environment is more deterrent capacity, not a cession of the theater-level nuclear domain to our adversaries.
Conclusion
I wish that it were not necessary to think about “Europeanizing” nuclear deterrence in such a fashion. Nevertheless, we must deal with the world in which we actually live, not the one in which we would wish to. In response to Russian threats and growing American ambivalence about Europe, some form of further “Europeanization” seems necessary indeed.
What I have termed the potentially ubiquitous modular aerial capability approach to providing small, nuclear payload options for existing or anticipated long-range precision strike systems would dramatically expand NATO targeting flexibility and hence contribute greatly to escalation management missions in support of extended deterrence. It would also provide a dispersal or concealment architecture for nuclear assets that would massively complicate Russian targeting and preemption opportunities. And it would do this without some of the costs and delays associated with developing new bespoke nuclear-only delivery systems. It would certainly be a major new departure for NATO, but it may be just the bold answer to looming threats that the situation requires.
The Hon. Christopher Ford is the incoming director of Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies and a nonresident senior associate in the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ford served as U.S. assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation in 2018 to 2021 and, during the last 15 months of that period, also exercised the authorities of the undersecretary for arms control and international security. Previously, he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for weapons of mass destruction and counterproliferation at the U.S. National Security Council.
The views expressed in this paper are the author’s personal opinions. Neither Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies nor the Center for Strategic and International Studies take specific policy positions, and all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in the material published herein should be understood to be the author’s.
Image: ChatGPT
