Poland Considers Deployment of U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons, Directed against Russia |... - 0 views
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Last weekend, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Tomasz Szatkowski said that Poland is considering asking for access to nuclear weapons through a NATO program allowing non-nuclear states “to borrow” the warheads from the US. This is a reverberation from the intensified debates within alliances regarding the nuclear support of NATO’s operations.
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Commenting on the debates that took place during an Oct. 8 meeting in Brussels between the defense ministers of NATO countries, Adam Thomson, the UK Permanent Representative to NATO, publicly bemoaned the fact that the alliance “has done conventional exercising and nuclear exercising” but has not conducted exercises on “the transition from one to the other.” He claimed that such a recommendation is being looked at within the North Atlantic alliance. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also supports strengthening the nuclear component in the military planning of this alliance that has identified Russia as its primary enemy. In their analyses, military-political and academic insiders in the West typically do not distinguish between the strategic and tactical nuclear weapons belonging to the three Western nuclear powers: the UK, US, and France. As they calculate how best to defend “the entire territory of NATO,” they begin with the assumption that all those nuclear weapons can be commanded en masse. And because those weapons must be used “as a means to deter aggression, along with conventional weapons,” their special status should once again be recognized, as it was during the height of the Cold War during the 1960s-1980s.
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In his statement Tomasz Szatkowski emphasized the need for the Polish armed forces to have access to the same American nuclear weapons as those entrusted to five of the member states of the North Atlantic pact: Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Germany, all of which consented to stationing those weapons within their borders: “We want to see an end to the division of NATO members into two categories,” he said, explaining that he was referring to states that have long hosted American nuclear weapons vs. countries that still do not have them, meaning the allies that have only recently joined this military bloc, especially Poland. The Polish Defense Ministry hastened to disavow their own colleague’s words, arguing that “within the defense ministry there is presently no work underway concerning the accession of our country to the NATO Nuclear Sharing program.” But the further clarification that followed this message suggests otherwise, since the Polish defense ministry literally stated the following: “We have to consider various options, including some form of Poland’s participation in this program.” And as we all know, that program allows US nuclear weapons to be deployed within the borders of other states and to be used in military exercises that include the dropping of mock “nuclear bombs” from aircraft. We must also look closely at how the first part of that answer is expressed: “there is presently no work underway …” Today. And perhaps that is true. But in the future?