What if Germany feeling it can't rely on the U S starts building a nuclear arsenal to deter Russia?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

NATO was made to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. Trump is killing NATO.

[justiceischeap]

1. Which is what Putin wants. nt

[dalton99a]

2. And France can easily help them kick start a missile program

[DetlefK]

3. IIRC France has nuclear weapons.

There was some loose talk about the EU establishing its own international army, but the big counter-arguments always were that 1. they already have just that in the NATO, 2. it would be dominated by Germans.

Germany won't get nuclear weapons. The anti-war movement is very strong and any politician calling for that would risk his career.

Plus, Germany's army is small and underfunded. The incompetence is downright embarrassing.
- A design-flaw of the precision-strike Tornado-bombers makes them visible to the bare eye by night. The solution? Scotch-tape.
- New helicopters were ordered for the Navy and it turned that this model rusts when exposed to seawater.
- New machine-guns were bought and it turned out that the specification-sheet was badly written: The machine-guns work in shooting-practices but get too hot when used in a realistic rapid-fire situations.
- The german airforce designed a remote-controlled drone, the Eurohawk, for precision-strikes from afar. It was known from the very beginning, that the Eurohawk would never meet the airspace-safety-regulations. Yet, they simply continued the project without changing anything and it was only scrapped at the very end.
- And just this month it turned out that there are a lots of Neonazis in the german army but the commanders are covering it up and prefer to deal with it without the prying eyes of outsiders... such as the german Ministry of Defense.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. That's surprising because I associate Germany with great technical expertise.

Will Germans allow Russia bullying them or trying to "Finlandize" them ?

[Ezior]

5. Many Germans despise anything related to war or intelligence services

Maybe that includes most gifted engineers.

Even today, in comments about Merkels "US has basically abandoned NATO as far as I can tell" statement, some readers just say things like "so what? We should simply leave NATO" or "it's not like Russia is going to invade Germany tomorrow, so why care about this?" or "Great, I'm tired of German soldiers fighting stupid US wars".

Many appear to want 0€ for defense spending and simply assume that war in Europe is a thing of the past. ("Let's improve our relationship to Russia instead!&quot

It's dangerous.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. We all despise war.

But I would hate to live in a world where Russia is hegemon.

[dalton99a]

8. The German military was neutered after WWII

Same with Japan

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. Right

We helped create a pacific and liberal democratic Western Europe and Japan in the aftermath of WW ll. This reduced the risk of war and gave us trading partners. Trump seems to want to blow up these arrangements.

[dalton99a]

7. France has hundreds of nuclear warheads

and several missile-carrying submarines. They have a sophisticated and competitive defense industry.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

10. France has 300 nukes...

That's not 8,000 like us or the Russians but they are force multipliers. Russia would think twice...