Germans’ traditional view on nukes: no thanksIT BEGAN in November, soon after the election of Donald Trump as America’s president. The publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative newspaper, opined in an editorial that it was time to contemplate “the altogether unthinkable for a German brain, the question of a nuclear deterrence capability, which could make up for doubts about American guarantees”. Roderich Kiesewetter, a foreign-policy expert in the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, chimed in that there should be no “thought taboos”. He and other politicians then went silent, apparently after a signal that the chancellor did not need this distraction in an election year. But in Germany’s think-tanks the debate kept raging.
Since 1945 West Germany and then the reunited country have relied on the American nuclear shield to deter aggression from Russia. A prominent thesis, outlined in 1984 by Josef Joffe, a journalist, holds that European integration was only possible because this external American power had “pacified” the age-old...Continue reading
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