Aaron Harding: Poland’s NATO nuclear sharing aspirations threaten to escalate into the renaissance of nuclear weapons

President Andrzej Duda first revealed his interest in Polish participation in NATO’s nuclear weapon-sharing club last year, his vague idea is however now gathering steam.

Two-thirds of Poles currently approve of the motion of nuclear sharing, albeit the support plummets when confronted with the potential stationing of nuclear weapons near human settlements and guaranteed proximity to critical civilian infrastructure.

NATO’s current nuclear policy is codified in the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept and the 2012 Deterrence and Defence Review, with the supporting role of the consultation of the Nuclear Planning Group. Nuclear deterrence has always been at the core of NATO, despite its insistence that it is committed to nuclear non-proliferation and that it remains a nuclear alliance only insofar so far as nuclear weapons exist — an oxymoron deservedly commonly mocked.

Nuclear sharing forms an integral part of NATO’s nuclear deterrence policy. It seeks to provide Member States without nuclear weapons with an active role in nuclear weapon policy — in NATO’s own words, it seeks to ensure ‘the broadest possible participation by Allies concerned in the agreed nuclear burden-sharing arrangements to demonstrate the Alliance unity and resolve.’

Poland’s wish to participate in the program is not entirely surprising: the country shares a 329-mile border with Ukraine and processed over 8 million Ukrainian refugees since the start of the Russian invasion last February. Its less impacted comparable neighbour, the Czech Republic, shares a potential commitment to NATO nuclear sharing, however over three-quarters of the populace do not support nuclear stationing in the country.

States officially participating in the programme (Germany, Italy, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands) also sought no further expansion of their assigned nuclear capabilities.

In contrast, Duda noted to Gazeta Polska that he contacted the American command: ‘The problem is that we [Poland] do not have nuclear weapons, and nothing indicates that we could obtain them in the near future.’ His symbolic remark about the ‘open topic’ of nuclear sharing now gains more concrete proportions, as NATO seeks to impose a swifter end to the war in a moment of obvious fragility for the Russian authoritative regime.

It is ever so important that NATO officially possesses 4,178 nuclear warheads, each one capable of unimaginable destruction and inevitable escalation of the conflict into truly unimaginable proportions. If NATO insists on remaining a nuclear alliance, its deterrence power can be achieved just as effectively with a minor percentage of its arsenal. In each case, the weapons shall remain stationed in nuclear weapon States, sparing countries that did not consent to nuclear weapons in their arsenals of their leader’s short-term geopolitical claims.

Composed by Aaron Harding for Denuclearise.com