Fear of Russian action and US inaction is increasingly motivating European states to propose alternative forms of nuclear ‘deterrence’ for the continent. But, argue Ian Davis and Tytti Erästö, European states should first question the outdated and dangerous framings and flawed logics of nuclear weapons that they inherited from the Cold War.
On 02 March President Emmanuel Macron announced a new “forward deterrence” strategy whereby France will increase its nuclear arsenalfor the first time in decades and significantly intensify nuclear weapons cooperation with eight European allies: Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the UK. A joint Franco-German statement issued that same day specified that their cooperation includes “a high-ranking nuclear steering group”, “German conventional participation in French nuclear exercises”, and efforts to increase German ability “to manage escalation beneath the nuclear threshold”.
These policy shifts respond to the perceived need to bolster European nuclear deterrence amid wavering trust in US commitments—an urgency seemingly confirmed at the February 2026 Munich Security Conference. A report by the European Nuclear Study Group launched in connection with the MSC laid out alternatives to continued reliance on the United States, ranging from strengthened French and UK nuclear forces; a common European deterrent; new national nuclear deterrents; and stronger conventional arsenals without a nuclear component—though the report warned that the last option “is unlikely to provide Europe with a credible independent deterrent”.
While coalescing around the French plan may appear preferable to the other alternatives according to this framing, this does not mean it is prudent. Rather, there is a need to scrutinise the framing itself—asking whether the assumption of Russia’s ‘nuclear-backed revisionism’ as a direct threat to NATO matches reality, and weighing the risks of building European security on its own ‘house of dynamite’.
Theories of Russian nuclear-backed revisionism and coercion in Ukraine
Russian nuclear threats in its war of aggression against Ukraine have rightly alarmed Europeans about their vulnerability to nuclear weapons. However, the popular theory that Moscow will recklessly use nuclear intimidation to extend its aggression to NATO Europe and to systematically overturn the international order overlooks key aspects of Russian policy.
Rather than a unique doctrine marked by a lowered threshold for nuclear use, Russia’s frequent nuclear threats are a reflection of its circumstances, revealing the desperation of a state trapped in a war with an adversary backed by militarily superior allies. The purpose of these threats has been to deter NATO from intervening in the war. Instead of strength, such overt nuclear signalling is indicative of Russia’s military inferiority vis-à-vis NATO—which Moscow has not wanted to confront on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Ultimately, the threats rely on ambiguity about the exact threshold and nature of a nuclear response, to instil uncertainty and caution in the adversary. While nuclear-armed states seldom make overt nuclear threats in peacetime, in most cases their doctrines embrace calculated ambiguity that they are prepared to exploit in moments of crisis to deter adversaries.
Russian nuclear threats may have served to dissuade direct NATO intervention, but they have neither prevented Ukraine from fighting back nor halted military assistance to Ukraine. As western states have repeatedly crossed Russian red lines without provoking a nuclear response, those threats have undergone inflation over time. Support has not only been persistent but also increased in sophistication, including with shipments of tanks, F-16s and long-range missiles. This underscores a central dilemma of nuclear deterrence: given the catastrophic and likely suicidal consequences of nuclear weapon use, nuclear threats ultimately lack credibility.
Nuclear threats have also not secured a military victory for Russia, basically because nuclear weapons are not tools of invasion. Even if Russia harboured intentions to attack NATO territory—which there is little evidence of—it lacks the conventional military means for a full-scale invasion. This is why allied threat perceptions have long focused on a fait accompli scenario—whereby Russia would swiftly seize Baltic territory before the mobilization of NATO forces and then use nuclear threats to deter a counteroffensive. However, the military and economic costs of such an operation would clearly outweigh any military gains for Russia, making the scenario highly improbable. While Moscow’s hybrid tactics arguably pose a more tangible challenge, nuclear weapons offer no meaningful response to such asymmetric threats.
The wider problems with nuclear deterrence theory
Despite the prevailing tendency to take its security benefits for granted, nuclear deterrence remains a theory rather than an established fact—with several well-known limitations. One is that it cannot be tested. The idea that nuclear deterrence explains the absence of war between major powers, or the ‘long peace’, is more akin to a quasi-religious belief based on the assumption that states are rational actors guided by careful cost-benefit calculations. In reality, leaders may be driven by ideology, misperception, domestic politics, cognitive biases or emotional states that undermine rational calculation.
That nuclear war has not occurred yet does not mean that the system works. On the contrary, there have been numerous documented near-misses—such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, 1983 Able Archer exercise, and the Soviet false nuclear alarm incident, also in 1983— suggesting that the absence of nuclear war owes more to fortune than to the theory’s soundness. As Martin Hellman has argued, even a small annual probability of failure compounds into near-certainty over long timeframes—with nuclear detonation being the quintessential low-probability high-consequence event.
The theory of nuclear escalation control—which underpins NATO’s nuclear sharing practices—is also built on shaky foundations. Herman Kahn’s ‘escalation ladder’ and similar concepts presume that adversaries will carefully manage escalation once conflict erupts, yet the real world defies such tidy models. Even beyond leaders’ personal judgement, the fog of war, communication breakdowns, organizational pressures and compressed timelines could drive a nuclear war beyond anyone’s control.
European allies have nevertheless been socialized over decades to view US nuclear weapons as indispensable to their security—a conviction that endures despite Europe’s radically altered military balance since the Cold War.
The idea of escalation control below the nuclear threshold
While the military utility of the forward-deployed US non-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe was widely questioned after the Cold War, these weapons—and the associated notion of escalation control—came to be seen as vital to countering limited nuclear threats from Russia after 2022. From this perspective, substituting US extended nuclear deterrence with French arrangements faces a fundamental obstacle: France, whose nuclear arsenal is exclusively strategic, does not subscribe to the concept of nuclear escalation control.
While the French “forward deterrence” plans remain vague, it appears that they seek to overcome this obstacle by redefining escalation control as occurring at the conventional level and assigning that task to allies. Notably, the above-cited Franco-German statement’s reference to Germany’s role in managing escalation beneath the nuclear threshold saw this role as having to do with ‘the fields of Early Warning and Air Defense and Deep Precision Strike’.
This language bears ominous resemblance to certain ideas advocated recently by French experts. As an October 2025 report by Fondation Pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS) argued, Ukraine’s use of deep-strike weapons against Russia’s nuclear early warning radars and strategic bomber bases—which it notes did “not trigger a nuclear response”—“outline some interesting opportunities for European armed forces”. It continued that, “equipped with conventional strategic strike capabilities, they could employ weapons that offer greater flexibility than nuclear delivery systems, particularly for deterring limited offensive scenarios such as the 2014 invasion of Crimea. These conventional strategic weapons could then support the French and British deterrents”.
Allied preparations to hit Russia’s strategic nuclear targets with conventional weapons might seem a clever way to enhance deterrence while simultaneously reducing the role of nuclear weapons. In practice however, they can be seen as a shortcut to nuclear escalation: Russia would likely respond far more aggressively to such strikes by a nuclear-armed alliance—whose conventional deep-strike capabilities it already views as a threat to its nuclear forces. Even if such strikes are framed as means of last resort, the risk is that Russia—potentially misperceiving an imminent threat—might launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike in response. While it is unclear whether the “forward deterrence concept” incorporates conventional targeting of nuclear assets, that possibility warrants concern.
The ultimate inhumane weapon system
Nuclear weapons are inherently indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction, and their use would almost certainly violate the principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law. Abstract, technocratic language of nuclear strategy and the illusory notion of limited nuclear war obscure the fact that nuclear deterrence ultimately rests on threatening millions of civilian lives, enabling policymakers to discuss genocidal scenarios with clinical detachment. Conventional escalation control fares no better morally insofar as it recklessly gambles with nuclear war.
The humanitarian initiatives that underpinned the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) argued that nuclear deterrence is morally and legally untenable because it plans for an act that would be a crime against humanity if executed. Nuclear deterrence also imposes catastrophic existential risk on future generations who have no voice in the potential decision to use nuclear weapons. The environmental consequences of nuclear war (nuclear winter, radiation) would affect the entire biosphere.
Towards an alternative European strategic autonomy debate
Nuclear deterrence in Europe is a dangerous anachronism. It was seen to prevent war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, yet it has also institutionalized existential risk, imposed massive opportunity costs and perpetuated the myth that security ultimately depends on nuclear weapons—a notion fundamentally at odds with European advocacy for non-proliferation elsewhere in the world. Despite widespread belief in its potency in Europe, the credibility of nuclear deterrence as well as its moral and legal foundations are weak. Fundamentally, it responds to the symptoms of conflict while worsening the underlying security dilemma dynamics, risking regional clashes escalating into apocalyptic annihilation.
A more sustainable and inclusive European regional security order needs to address exaggerated threat perceptions on both sides—in Moscow and Munich—through diplomatic engagement. A truly secure Europe requires moving beyond the nuclear shadow: strengthening conventional non-offensive defence and pursuing verifiable nuclear disarmament. Until then, European security rests on a theory that remains fundamentally flawed, ethically untenable and strategically precarious.
Dr Ian Davis is the founder of NATO Watch, a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation that works to promote public awareness and foster debate on the role of NATO in public life. He is also the Executive Editor of the SIPRI Yearbook and an Associate Senior Fellow within Conflict and Peace at SIPRI.
Dr Tytti Erästö is a senior researcher in the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. Previously, she worked at the Ploughshares Fund in Washington D.C. and Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Screenshot from Elysée YouTube channel of President Emmanuel Macron delivering a speech on the future of France’s nuclear deterrent at the Île Longue submarine base, France.
