Philipp Rombach
A quarter century ago, German political scientist Harald Müller observed that “the very basic question of whether … Germany should rethink its renunciation of nuclear weapons has a very odd circumstance [attached] to it, namely that it tends to be posed mostly outside Germany and almost never within the German debate.”
Germany hasn’t had an indigenous nuclear weapons program since 1945. In Berlin, nobody is asking for a German bomb. Not the government, not the public. Still, the idea of an independent German nuclear weapons program refuses to die in US policy circles. In recent months, scholars and analysts have warned that Germany was “now thinking about acquiring” nuclear weapons and that “states such as Germany and Finland” were discreetly debating the need for their own nuclear weapons. A common feature of this narrative is that countries like Japan, South Korea, and Germany are lumped in with a revisionist Iran. The total plausibility of Germany pursuing a domestic nuclear weapons program—no questions asked!—has made it into closed high-level policy workshops and was even recently advocated for in Foreign Affairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment