NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had stated that the alliance is holding talks on the deployment of more nuclear weapons, stating that the bloc needed to show its nuclear arsenal to the world to send a direct message to it adversaries. “I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” he stated, citing China, Russia and North Korea in particular as the primary challenges which the alliance faced. Stoltenberg has in the past made unprecedented references among holders of his office to a NATO mission to counter China, despite the Western military bloc’s traditional Euro-Atlantic focus, citing among other factors Beijing’s refusal to support Western economic warfare efforts against Russia. He specifically highlighted the significant expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, which by the 2030s is expected to reach around 80 percent the size of the arsenals fielded by Russia and the United States.
Regarding modernisation of NATO’s nuclear arsenals, Stoltenberg elaborated: “The U.S. is modernising their gravity bombs for the nuclear warheads they have in Europe and European allies are modernising the planes which are going to be dedicated to NATO nuclear mission.” Alongside three members of NATO which are nuclear weapons states, namely the United States, Britain and France, five other NATO members are to be given access to nuclear weapons by the United States in wartime: namely Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. This arrangement has remained controversial due its de facto creation of new nuclear weapons states, with Western analysts having widely highlighted that it violates Articles I and II of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The nuclear strike capabilities of all these states are set to be modernised with the delivery of new fighter aircraft, with Turkey in mid-June having signed a letter of offer and acceptance to acquire enhanced F-16 Block 70/72 fighters, while the four Western European states will all deploy F-35 stealth fighters. The Royal Netherlands Air Force 313 Squadron’s F-35s fully took over the country’s nuclear attack role from its F-16s as of June 1, making it the first European stealth fighter unit armed to launch nuclear attacks. As European states have placed growing orders for more F-35s, the possibility remains that more B61-12 nuclear warheads will become available for nuclear sharing allowing more of the continent’s fighter units to become de-facto nuclear armed.