Introduction
President Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling while the war in Ukraine has raged, along with lurid nuclear threats by Russian
officials and propagandists, have once again focused attention on NATO’s nuclear mission. As the alliance approaches a
summit in Washington later this summer, it is an appropriate time to review its nuclear posture.
For decades, NATO’s nuclear weapons have played a critical political and military role in underpinning alliance unity and
deterring Russian intimidation and aggression. Today, NATO is also in the process of replacing its 1960’s-era nuclear bombs
with updated weapons, as well as upgrading the 1980’s-era F-16 and Tornado aircraft that carry them with modern F-35A
fighters.
Nevertheless, given Russia’s recent behavior and the prospect that it could become even more reliant on its nuclear forces due
to conventional military losses in Ukraine, now is the time to explore other potential changes to NATO’s nuclear posture, to
include broadening the participation of its members in nuclear sharing and forward-stationing nuclear weapons on the
territory of member states that have joined since 1997—notably Poland, which has suggested its willingness to host.
The Post-Cold War Decline
At the height of the Cold War NATO deployed on the order of 7000 US nuclear weapons in Europe. This included a very wide
variety of naval (anti-submarine, anti-surface, and strike warfare), air (strike), and ground (artillery, short- and medium-range
missiles, anti-aircraft, and land mine) systems. Many of these were assigned to the forces of the European nations, under the
control of SACEUR and supported by US custodial units. Designed as an element of NATO’s military capability against Soviet
aggression, these systems also created an opportunity for a significant number of NATO governments to share the political
burdens and military risks of participating in the Alliance’s nuclear deterrent mission.
This provided not only a deterrent
The authors would like to thank Evan Montgomery of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments for his editorial and substantive
suggestions.
As a matter of official policy neither the United States nor NATO reveals in which Alliance countries US nuclear weapons might be stationed. The
future of NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements, however, have become a matter of public debate. For background on the history of the alliance’s
nuclear sharing arrangements and the current debate see: Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns & Mackenzie Knight, “Nuclear weapons
sharing, 2023,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 79:6, pp. 393-406,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00963402.2023.2266944?needAccess=true; Malcolm Chalmers and Simon Lunn, “NATO’s Tactical
Nuclear Dilemma,” Occasional Paper, Royal United Services Institute, London, 2010,
https://static.rusi.org/201003_op_natos_tactical_nuclear_dilemma.pdf; Emmanuelle Maitre, “NATO, F-35 and NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas, Notes
de la FRS, No. 08/2016, February 22, 2016, https://www.frstrategie.org/en/publications/notes/nato-f35-european-nuclear-dilemmas-2016.
In addition to the military sharing arrangements, by the mid-1960s NATO had created a political consultative body, the Nuclear Planning Group
(NPG), which evolved to include all NATO nations (except France which has refused to participate on national grounds) in discussing and formulating
NATO nuclear deterrence policy. This finessed the question of an independent West German deterrent, which would have been uncomfortable for
RESEARCH BRIEF
An Ongoing and Necessary Renaissance:
NATO’s Nuclear Posture
25 January 2024 l Eric S. Edelman and Franklin C. Miller
