Dr. Bollfrass, head of strategy, technology and arms control at IISS, tells me in an interview that he war-gamed the potential to create a “Eurodeterrent” while drawing on EU states’ real-life access to uranium-235, and their combined expertise in missile technology, and in designing defense aircraft that could be adapted to carry nuclear payloads. A new European defense confederation that stretches from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, he predicts, might produce a stockpile of nuclear warheads within three years—rivaling the speed of the U.S. Manhattan Project—and assemble an atomic cache perhaps one-tenth the size of the current American arsenal. As they progress in the building of an atomic stockpile, allies in this nuclear confederation would also have to agree on a collective nuclear doctrine spelling out the essential preconditions for the use of these weapons, and form a command-and-control center that could issue lightning-speed decisions on launching a retaliatory strike on a first-use attacker.
Author: Kevin Holden Platt, Contributor, Kevin Holden Platt, Contributor https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinholdenplatt/
Published at: 2025-06-30 21:24:51
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