Wouter Beke, an MEP for the Belgian Christian Democrats (CD&V), has called for France to hand over its nuclear arsenal to the European Union to form a strong common defence.
“Making the Elysée available for a European mini-summit is one thing. But if [French President Emmanuel] Macron really means it, he should make his nuclear arsenal available,” Beke said on X on February 18.
Referring to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, he added: “Does Macron have the courage to realise a ‘Kohl moment’ and thus earn a place in the history books: Putting the French force de frappe in European hands as Helmut Kohl put the Deutsche Mark in European hands?
“Kohl did this in exchange for German reunification. Macron can do this in exchange for a real European army.”
Het Elysée ter beschikking stellen voor een Europese minitop is één zaak. Maar als Macron het echt meent, stelt hij zijn nucleair arsenaal ter beschikking.
Heeft Macron de moed om een Kohlmoment te realiseren en zo een plaats in de geschiedenisboeken te verwerven: dat hij de…
— Wouter Beke (@wbeke) February 18, 2025
Beke noted that Europe had potentially the biggest army, in terms of manpower, after China, yet it did not play a significant role, he said, due to internal divisions.
He did not specify who would lead this hypothetical unified European army.
The current European Commission created a department to manage the EU’s defence and space sector and the Lithuanian Andrius Kubilius became the Commissioner for Defence and Space, heading it up.
He is, among other things, responsible for preparing the “White Paper on the Future of European Defence”.
In a response to Beke, Belgian MEP Tom Vandendriessche, of the Patriots for Europe in the European Parliament, said: “CD&V is nothing more than a puppet of the [German] post-national CDU [Christian Democratic Union].”
Replacing the so-called US nuclear guarantee with a French nuclear umbrella for Europe has been debated for years.
Historically, France has always maintained its right to retain full decision-making power over its nuclear arsenal as it felt sharing nuclear capabilities would complicate decision-making processes and potentially dilute its strategic autonomy.
France’s official doctrine has emphasised that its nuclear weapons strengthen European security by complicating adversaries’ strategic calculations – but any form of sharing this capacity has always been a no-go.
What experts have said makes things more challenging is that, since France’s arsenal is smaller and less varied than that of the the US, it would be difficult to effectively apply deterrence across all of Europe.
Expanding and diversifying France’s nuclear arsenal to provide a credible, extended deterrent for Europe would require significant investment and could lead to new security policy challenges, it has been pointed out.
Transferring nuclear weapons to any recipient would also go against the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits France from doing so.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said Russia, the US, France, India, China, Israel, the UK, Pakistan, and North Korea spent a total of $91 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone.
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