The leaders of France and Norway said on Wednesday that Oslo will join a Paris-led nuclear deterrence scheme to bolster security on the continent.
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In March, [ French President Emmanuel] Macron unveiled a programme under which France, the European Union’s only nuclear-armed country, would use its atomic stockpile to boost security on the continent.
Under the so-called “forward” nuclear deterrence scheme, those who join will be able to temporarily host French “strategic air forces”, which will be able to “spread out across the European continent” to “complicate the calculations of our adversaries”, Macron said at the time.
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Prior to Norway, eight countries had joined the programme – Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and fellow nuclear power the United Kingdom.
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“The agreement also provides a framework for closer cooperation on hybrid warfare, maritime security, space cooperation, cybersecurity, support to Ukraine and defence industrial cooperation,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said.
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This is obviously great but I would encourage everyone to ask why France have their own sovereign domestic nuclear program rather than relying on even trustworthy and time tested allies.
The answer is because when someone has to press the big red button that ends the world in order to save you, can you rely on someone who isnt your countryman to do it?
True, but antiproliferation is still the ideal. Just, you don’t disarm during a war or with the threat of fascism. Maybe those of us who survive can see, twenty years after we’ve dealt with putain and bibi and trump, whether the “nuclear umbrella” is still needed or if we can go back to being dipshit peaceniks.
I mean sure it’d be ideal I guess… Disarming just because the fascists have gone into hiding seems short sighted though. Seems like we need to maintain deterrence indefinitely.
If America and Russia had disarmed after the cold war, French disarmament would be more realistic.
Turns out France and a great deal of Europe is quite happy to have the French nuclear umbrella.
If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike
I mean, that’s kind of what I’m saying. See if they’re in hiding or if we finally fucking licked it, and if we did and there are no other existential threats we can put all the boards with nails in them in a box until Kodos the Merciless comes
I guess I don’t see any fundamental difference between mothballed nukes and nukes. But I do see a very big difference between having nukes and not