Does Germany Need the Bomb?

[Montmorency]

In case it's not clear, I posted this because the idea of 'Germans consider nuclear weapons program' is amusing to me, for reasons you will intuitively understand I'm sure. It's also less realistic, and therefore not as scary as, 'Japanese consider nuclear weapons program/remilitarization.'


Spmetla, Occupied is a cool enough show (I haven't finished the second season), but the premise doesn't make a lick of sense: the EU invites Russia to occupy Norway to maintain oil production? Wouldn't Russia, you know, prefer not to invest so much in a country for the sake of propping up its competitive industries? NATO or no, the major EU countries (UK, France, Germany) would probably not be comfortable with accepting Russian forces across the Danish straits (let alone Sweden, Finland, Poland...). And the EU votes to follow this this (clearly illegal) course of action? What happened in Ukraine in this universe (first season preceding that real-world crisis)? The show does require significant suspension of disbelief to work.

The Baltic vulnerability can never be resolved with military buildup; even in the Cold War it was the doctrinal consensus to accept the fall of most or all of West Germany in the event of war. A military buildup to the point of correcting this would be socially and economically ruinous, and require stationing hundreds of thousands of troops in place. These troops would also have to be extensively depoted and backed up with similar reserves in Eastern Europe since the Baltics would be instantly isolated by land regardless of their garrison. Meanwhile, Russia itself would be provoked into surging its own military budget, polarizing its politics and causing a more aggressive and risky posture than even now along its border in response to the astonishing and unprecedented new threat from the West. Putting "credible deterrent" merely in terms of linear military function would invariably worsen both the military and political risks. Not to mention its not even possible in the first place; no future government is going to double the military and (presumably) reinstate the draft for the sake of "deterring" Russia.

So how about those mooted "modest" increases in spending and optimizations in logistics and doctrine? Of course these alone can't actually deter Russia too much because they do not represent a significant change in military reality on the Baltic Front. The main cost to Russia will never be in the potential of being defeated outright, but in fighting the war in the first place. This fact has to be the nail of any European strategy. If the perceived costs to Russia fall below the perceived benefits in occupying a Baltic state or any other, NATO can't fix that. So Trump's undermining the principle of collective defense, as a political variable, is probably more damaging than any post-Cold War defense innervation.

All of this instead reflects on how much more serious a military challenge China poses than Russia. China has the clout and the will and the strategic logic to attempt to expand its umbrella over time (which it's already been doing), Russia doesn't.
And their advantages over time are so massive, I can't begin to think how you deal with it short of abandoning Asia as a site of American power (which should be understood to be a credible option in the face of the odds), selling ourselves to India and cultivating them as an aggressive imperial alternative to China (pretty bullshit option), or advancing some kind of NWO (my favorite). But American power following the "America century" is certainly finished, as even that Pentagon report I referenced a year ago acknowledges. That's why the NWO option is the best available, in using America's remaining power to rebalance transnational governance and colligate ourselves to its articulated interest. (It's also the best way to handle the climate change set to dissolve our civilization in spite of all the typical petty jockeying between empires.)