LONDON, March 24. /TASS/. US allies in Europe and Asia are exploring options to develop their own nuclear weapons amid US President Donald Trump’s stance toward Russia, The Financial Times (FT) reported.
According to the newspaper, "the US president’s pivot to Moscow and scathing disregard for NATO" has prompted Washington’s allies to consider how to prepare for a potential withdrawal of the US nuclear umbrella. "The deteriorating great power consensus on non-proliferation is real," the FT quoted Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment as saying. "The Trump phenomenon has provided a powerful accelerant for voices in US-allied states who now see nuclear weapons in their own hands as fundamentally solving the problem posed by American unreliability," he maintained.
German officials are concerned as, privately, they have "reeled from the pace of events since Trump took office," the FT writes. Former German ambassador to Washington Wolfgang Ischinger told the newspaper that any real suggestion of Germany joining the club of nuclear powers would risk undermining global trust. "We would risk losing most of the trust we have been able to build over the last five or six decades after the catastrophe of World War Two," he argued.
While Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk raised the idea of pursuing nuclear weapons, for Poland to develop nukes from scratch is too costly, Marcin Idzik, a board director of Poland’s defense manufacturer PGZ, told the FT, adding that the country does not have enough time to do it.
South Korean experts told the FT that support for Seoul acquiring its own nuclear weapons is growing. "[South] Korea has the basic technology to make nuclear weapons and already has experience of producing a very small volume of plutonium and uranium," Suh Kyun-ryul, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Seoul National University, told the newspaper. Lee Chun-geun, a researcher at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning, claims that Seoul can make nukes in about two years, should it declare a national emergency and mobilize all national resources.
In Japan, there has been a quiet debate about nukes in some circles even as the topic of possessing nuclear weapons has been "the greatest political taboo" in the country’s post-war history. A high-profile Japanese official told the FT that there had always been discussion on the matter among a small number of the most hawkish politicians and that the circle of participants "may now be enlarging."