On Thursday, Germany’s top news magazine Spiegel posed the question ‘Does Germany need the atomic bomb now?’. On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron again brought up the idea of a European nuclear shield with bombs forwarded to Germany. The man likely to be the next German chancellor wants to borrow a trillion Euros to boost the German military, and is repeatedly drawn into talking about nuclear weapons. He’s not the only one either.
There is no doubt that European leaders feel extremely threatened by Russia fighting a war on the edge of the EU. Just the pictures of smashed Ukrainian cities, which besides the onion-dome churches could architecturally be practically anywhere in central Europe are enough to make us all nervous.
Understandably: it conjures just too many bad memories.
At the same time, those European leaders also like to sneer at President Trump and present their own plans to re-arm as acts to spite him, as they see it, for throwing NATO into doubt. Never mind Europe spending more on defence being exactly what the President has been demanding for a decade. Giving the impression, at least, of defying Donald is all important.
There’s no way around the fact doing this is going to be extremely painful to Europe, too. The continent has enjoyed decades of very high welfare spending and friend-buying through foreign aid with money freed into the economy by grossly under-spending on defence. In some European states, surrounded by friends and ultimately secured by the American umbrella, the militaries are frankly pre-modern in funding and size.
Just substitute the single squadron of F-16s any small European state generally has for a bodyguard of 10th-century huscarls in your mental picture and you’ll see just what I mean.
Paying for change may mean saying goodbye to those nice-to-have welfare programmes that have kept social problems neatly out of sight for decades. It may mean trying to pass the cost onto the young through massive debt to be paid back when the present generation of politicians are safely retired. It could also mean raising taxes to pay for it today, and that has ballot-box repercussions too.
A really effective military is the one that never has to fight any battles, it successfully deters all challengers. The ultimate deterrent is the nuclear bomb, so potent even a low dose is enough to convert one of the most fearsome empires in history into a nation of cartoon-loving celibates. Allegedly.
The question of the bomb is coming up with increasing frequency. Russia looms large. Can the West survive Moscow’s empire building? Perhaps more to the point, can civilisation survive a nuclear-armed Germany?
Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities recalls terrible memories for Europeans, but so too does a rapidly rearming Berlin. Sorry, Germans. We love you really, but where’s the basis for trust?
Any conservative anywhere will be uneasy with the answers to questions like ‘are the German political elite really truly ready to be the adults in the room’, as liberals are so desperately keen to portray them as, usually as a snide attack on America. We know Germany’s leaders have spent the 21st century so far making disastrously bad judgement calls on really fundamental issues like open borders while mercilessly using their domineering power in Brussels to brutally bully the continent’s southern economies.
Ask any Greek how they feel about Berlin, and then ask them how much more comfortable they’d feel knowing — as put memorably by great American songster Tom Lehrer in the 1960s — “one of the fingers on the button will be German”.
Here’s a seriously questionable German policy decision of the past decade: speed running denuclearisation. As of Spring 2023, Germany doesn’t have a single functional nuclear power plant. They did this, even during an energy crisis, because they didn’t feel they could trust themselves with something so dangerous. The national psyche was one-shotted by Fukushima.
If Germany doesn’t believe it can safely operate civil nuclear, it is hard to seriously believe the present talk from the future Chancellor about the country possibly one day dipping its toe in nuclear deterrence will ever go anywhere.
Spiegel, as it is, acknowledges just this, noting it would take longer than years to rewire Germany politically to accept such a thing, never mind the “horrendous” cost of actually maintaining a nuclear deterrent, even if it is one forward-deployed by Paris. Never mind those little legal difficulties with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, probably a good thing to keep backing for the sake of the world.
A final point on reading the future coverage of this situation as it develops: we’ll be seeing a lot more stories like this in the months to come. It applies as well to the headline of this very article as it does of Der Spiegel asking ‘Does Germany need the atomic bomb now?’. Always remember Betteridge’s law of headlines, which states quite plainly, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”.
As expressed by journalist Betteridge in the mists of time: “The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it”. Quite. Will it ever get so bad there isn’t a better country left to arm with nuclear bombs before Germany? We have to hope not.
Breitbart News
Read the full article .
