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Introduction
Introduction
Soon thereafter, Scholz’s statement became known as the Zeitenwende speech, often used by scholars, journalists, and pundits alike to capture both this pivotal turning point in European history and Germany’s reactions to it (Blumenau 2022; Sauerbrey 2022; Raik 2023). The war confronted Europe’s foremost power with a multitude of challenges, putting into question long-held German beliefs and chal-lenging Berlin’s national interests. Germany’s basic orientation before and after the Cold War as a “civilian power” (Zivilmacht), civilizing politics and interna-tional relations in particular (Maull 2007), had to adapt to a new policy of Germany supplying the besieged Ukrainian government with advanced German weaponry while at the same time boosting its own defense with a 100 billion Euro special fund for the Bundeswehr. Berlin’s agenda of economic interdependency incentiv-izing cooperative and peaceful relations (Wandel durch Handel) was disrupted as a result of Western sanctions against Russia and the Kremlin weaponizing its gas and oil deliveries against Western Europe and Germany in particular (Blumenau 2022). Germany’s special relationship with Russia, deeply engrained in the German polit-ical system since the inception of Ostpolitik in the 1960s and 1970s, became the focal point of strong domestic and international criticism (Fröhlich 2023). At the same time, the country’s traditional Westbindung—its alliance with the United States and within the structures of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)—bounced back after four debilitating years under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. It is fair to argue that the war has fundamentally impacted German foreign policy, effectively ending three peaceful decades of post-Cold War German prosperity and security. Whether and how German foreign policy can or should respond with con-tinuity (Harnisch 2001; Mello 2020) is currently an open question.
The war has also left its mark on German nuclear policies. Only a few weeks after Scholz’s speech, the government announced to purchase U.S.-made F-35 air-craft to replace Germany’s aging fleet of nuclear-capable fighter jets, assigned to NATO’s nuclear sharing mission. The decision ended ten years of inconclusive discussions about the merits of Germany contributing to U.S. extended nuclear deterrence. Perhaps even more remarkably, the decision was supported by a major-ity of Germans, who had held strong anti-nuclear views before the war (Kütt 2022).
In August 2022, Scholz announced in a speech in Prague the creation of a European air defense system (The Federal Government 2022b), known as the European Sky Shield Initiative, aimed primarily at countering Russian airborne threats (Federal Ministry of Defense 2022). Meanwhile, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s new Foreign Minister from the Greens—a party with a long pacifist tradition—urged Germans to “understand disarmament and arms control as being complementary to deterrence and defense” (Federal Foreign Office 2022). Finally, in November 2022, the Bundestag decided to extend the life of two of Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants for an additional 3.5 months in order to cope with energy shortages, despite long-held government plans to completely phase out civil nuclear energy by the end of 2022 (Bundestag 2022). Again, a majority of Germans—previously in favor of shutting down Germany’s nuclear power complex completely—was now supportive of continuing to use nuclear energy (World Nuclear News 2022).
One could argue that the Ukraine war has changed the country’s nuclear poli-cies. Zooming out of the current political upheaval, however, one could also con-clude that continuity still reigns in Berlin. Germany continues to play its role in nuclear sharing, as it has done for decades. It continues to see “disarmament and arms control [as] an essential component of [its] security,” as Baerbock confirmed (Federal Foreign Office 2022). And it has not reversed nuclear phase-out, despite mounting domestic and international criticism.
A New Nuclear Age
These competing signs of change and continuity become even more puzzling as they come on the back of a series of German nuclear debates that had started well before the Russian aggression. Following Trump’s election as U.S. President in 2016, a hectic public debate arose among Germans about the continued credibil-ity of U.S. security guarantees and the apparent necessity of creating a so-called “Eurodeterrent,” based on French nuclear capabilities, to hedge for a possible U.S. retreat from Europe (Kühn, Volpe, and Thompson 2020). Three years later, French President Emmanuel Macron invited all interested European states to a “strategic dialogue” on the role of the French nuclear forces in relation to European security, thereby reenergizing the debate in the German media and among policy pundits (Kunz 2020). While one part of the German political spectrum was occupied with debating nuclear deterrence, the other argued for stronger German disarmament commitments. A new agreement banning all nuclear weapons—the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)—had increased public pressure from civil society groups and from left-leaning parliamentarians. Then, in 2020, parts of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) suggested ending the practice of nuclear sharing and withdrawing all U.S. nuclear arms from Germany (Fuhrhop, Kühn, and Meier 2020), thereby drawing harsh criticism from its more powerful coalition partners, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU). For a country that had barely discussed nuclear weapons policies publicly since the end of the Cold War, where a majority of Germans had held strong anti-nuclear views, and where German politicians tradi-tionally shy away from explaining their nuclear policies out in the open, this burst of debates in recent years was already remarkable.
These discussions are not an isolated German phenomenon though. Rather, they should be seen in conjunction with a number of systemic shifts and changes at the international level. In recent years, nuclear scholars have argued that the world has entered a “third” or “new nuclear age” (Naylor 2019; Legvold and Chyba 2020; Cooper 2021; Futter and Zala 2021; Narang and Sagan 2022). While authors differ in their assessment as to the actual or anticipated consequences, they all converge around the point that the world is going through a period of rapid political and military-technological change. Unpacking change, scholars have argued that the emergence of a multipolar nuclear order, as opposed to the previous U.S.–Russian bilateralism (Miller 2020), increased U.S.–Chinese competition (Bin 2020), new military technologies blurring the lines between previously separate military domains (Acton 2018), uncertainties among allies about the long-term policy tra-jectory of the United States (Brewer and Dalton 2023), and a profound crisis in multilateral and bilateral arms control and disarmament (Krepon 2021; Wisotzki and Kühn 2021) all make for a more dangerous, less predictable, and less secure world.
One could argue that the Ukraine war has changed the country’s nuclear poli-cies. Zooming out of the current political upheaval, however, one could also con-clude that continuity still reigns in Berlin. Germany continues to play its role in nuclear sharing, as it has done for decades. It continues to see “disarmament and arms control [as] an essential component of [its] security,” as Baerbock confirmed (Federal Foreign Office 2022). And it has not reversed nuclear phase-out, despite mounting domestic and international criticism.
A New Nuclear Age
These competing signs of change and continuity become even more puzzling as they come on the back of a series of German nuclear debates that had started well before the Russian aggression. Following Trump’s election as U.S. President in 2016, a hectic public debate arose among Germans about the continued credibil-ity of U.S. security guarantees and the apparent necessity of creating a so-called “Eurodeterrent,” based on French nuclear capabilities, to hedge for a possible U.S. retreat from Europe (Kühn, Volpe, and Thompson 2020). Three years later, French President Emmanuel Macron invited all interested European states to a “strategic dialogue” on the role of the French nuclear forces in relation to European security, thereby reenergizing the debate in the German media and among policy pundits (Kunz 2020). While one part of the German political spectrum was occupied with debating nuclear deterrence, the other argued for stronger German disarmament commitments. A new agreement banning all nuclear weapons—the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)—had increased public pressure from civil society groups and from left-leaning parliamentarians. Then, in 2020, parts of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) suggested ending the practice of nuclear sharing and withdrawing all U.S. nuclear arms from Germany (Fuhrhop, Kühn, and Meier 2020), thereby drawing harsh criticism from its more powerful coalition partners, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU). For a country that had barely discussed nuclear weapons policies publicly since the end of the Cold War, where a majority of Germans had held strong anti-nuclear views, and where German politicians tradi-tionally shy away from explaining their nuclear policies out in the open, this burst of debates in recent years was already remarkable.
These discussions are not an isolated German phenomenon though. Rather, they should be seen in conjunction with a number of systemic shifts and changes at the international level. In recent years, nuclear scholars have argued that the world has entered a “third” or “new nuclear age” (Naylor 2019; Legvold and Chyba 2020; Cooper 2021; Futter and Zala 2021; Narang and Sagan 2022). While authors differ in their assessment as to the actual or anticipated consequences, they all converge around the point that the world is going through a period of rapid political and military-technological change. Unpacking change, scholars have argued that the emergence of a multipolar nuclear order, as opposed to the previous U.S.–Russian bilateralism (Miller 2020), increased U.S.–Chinese competition (Bin 2020), new military technologies blurring the lines between previously separate military domains (Acton 2018), uncertainties among allies about the long-term policy tra-jectory of the United States (Brewer and Dalton 2023), and a profound crisis in multilateral and bilateral arms control and disarmament (Krepon 2021; Wisotzki and Kühn 2021) all make for a more dangerous, less predictable, and less secure world.
A growing body of literature has started to document different aspects of these interlinked debates in the German context. The topics under scrutiny are Germany’s stance towards nuclear deterrence (Kühn and Volpe 2017; Volpe and Kühn 2017; Meier 2020; Fuhrhop 2021; Roberts 2021) and the related debate about a “Eurodeterrent” (Thränert 2017; Maitre 2019; Tertrais 2019; Vicente 2019; Kunz 2020; Sauer 2020; Egeland and Pelopidas 2021) as well as Germany’s nuclear arms control and disarmament policies (Fuhrhop, Kühn, and Meier 2020; Meier 2021; Onderco and Smetana 2021; Pifer 2021; Smetana, Onderco, and Etienne 2021; Kütt 2022). Less scholarly attention has been paid to the country’s recent nonproliferation policies (Thränert 2020) and, in particular, its 2011 decision to phase out nuclear energy (Schreurs 2012).
Approach and Proceedings of the Volume
All of these different developments and debates, the slow as well as sudden changes of domestic and international politics, make it necessary to take a fresh and com-prehensive look at the nuclear actor Germany. This volume investigates a central question: how does Germany deal with and adapt to recent changes in the nuclear realm, even more so since war has returned to Europe? Since the end of the global block confrontation, Germany has relied on a combination of nuclear deterrence, arms control and disarmament, as well as nonproliferation policies. In all three domains, German politicians have always striven to incorporate, and therewith also bind, the German 'giant' into multilateral security structures: be it within NATO, the European Union (EU), the United Nations, or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. “Never alone” became one of the hallmarks of German foreign and security policy (Rotter 2023), aimed at cautiously avoiding any reitera-tion of past German policies to go it alone (Sonderweg). This policy is in line with and a direct result of German national identity, which has moved, as Müller (2003, 18) argues, “more and more away from a traditional understanding of power poli-tics and more in the direction of a normative orientation and a multilateral policy style.”
In the nuclear realm, however, this combination of policies makes Germany largely dependent on the United States as the ultimate security guarantor and on a rather benevolent security environment. If either one of those variables changes, German nuclear policies are set in motion. These dynamics explain both the uptick in German nuclear debates in recent years and the sudden policy changes announced by Chancellor Scholz after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Together, they are the result of fundamental changes occurring at the systemic and military-tech-nological levels of international relations since at least the second decade of the 21st century (Nye 2023).
Accordingly, this volume focuses on Germany’s changing nuclear policies since the end of the Cold War, with a particular focus on the period since the beginning of the new millennium. Where necessary to explain change, individual chapters make historical references to West German policies before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The volume has four parts. The first part identifies three major sources of change affecting Germany—systemic, technological, and, most recently, the war in Ukraine. The following three parts analyze how German nuclear weap-ons policies deal with and adapt to changes in the deterrence, arms control and disarmament, and nonproliferation domains. This breakdown along policy lines follows Horsburgh’s (2015) definition of the main elements of the global nuclear order. Each part of the volume contains three chapters, written by internationally renowned nuclear scholars and policy analysts from Germany and abroad. The concluding chapter sums up their findings and attempts to forecast how German nuclear policies may develop in the years ahead.
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