It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the Cold War ended and the main rationale for enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons largely disappeared, it seemed natural that their spread would become a thing of the past.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 upended that Whiggish march of history. Throughout the conflict, President Vladimir Putin and his proxies, including the more-idiot-than-useful Dmitri Medvedev, have threatened the use of nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic. He has hinted at strikes against Ukraine, Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. In 2024, Putin amended Russia’s nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons from facing an ‘existential threat’ to a ‘critical threat to Russia’s sovereignty and territory’.

This rhetoric has, understandably, caused some non-nuclear countries to consider how they might deter Russian aggression. Nato has only three nuclear-armed member states – the US, the UK and France – and the scale of America’s commitment to the alliance is under question. Meanwhile, since Brexit, only one such member, France, has belonged to the EU. Now, however, it appears that Germany thinks it might have found an answer to this problem for itself.

Germany is already under our nuclear ‘umbrella’

Germany is already under our nuclear ‘umbrella’

Acquiring, building and maintaining strategic nuclear weapons is arduous and expensive. The UK’s long-awaited Defence Investment Plan includes £63.6 billion over the next four years for four new Dreadnought-class submarines, development of new warheads for the........

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