Poland Seeks Massive Nuclear Weapons Arsenal for EU

Says EU Should Have Arsenal on Par With Russia's

In what would serve as the launching of the biggest arms race in generations, Polish ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski is urging the European Union to embark on a process of massive-scale nuclear armament, insisting the union needs to be a “superpower” with a nuclear arsenal on par with Russia’s, the largest in the world.

Analysts were presenting the call as a reflection of President Trump’s relative lack of hawkishness toward Russia, though in practice Poland’s right-wing government has been agitating for EU-wide moves against Russia for awhile, and this is just a continuation of that, albeit a really big one.

Two European Union members already have nuclear arms, Britain and France, though Britain is in the process of withdrawing from the union. The arsenal called for by Kaczynski would be 20-fold the size of France’s, and would cost multiple trillions of dollars.

The suggestion will definitely not be taken seriously in and of itself, with anti-nuclear sentiment strong across much of the union, and little appetite for bankrupting the continent building such an arsenal. That Poland has designs on such an arsenal, however, may suggest that there is a risk of further nuclear proliferation on the continent.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.