Opinionated piece by Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham, UK.
… the EU’s largest and Nato’s second-largest economy, Germany is now also aiming to turn its Bundeswehr (the German army, navy and air force) into the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. Its most senior military officer and chief of defence, Carsten Breuer, has published plans for a rapid and wide-ranging expansion of defence capabilities.
Germany is finally beginning to pull its weight in European defence and security policy. This is absolutely critical to the credibility of the EU in the face of the threat from Russia. Berlin has the financial muscle and the technological and industrial potential to make Europe more of a peer to the US when it comes to defence spending and burden sharing. This will be important to salvage what remains of Nato in light of a highly probable American down-scaling – if not complete abandonment – of its past security commitments to the alliance.
…
Only for ‘peaceful purposes’. You have to run nuclear reactors to create plutonium for the bomb. So all peaceful nuclear electricity creates the material for the bombs.
Not True, that was the case with light water reactors, which were initially, only ever conceived for nuclear submarines. They were never meant to be scaled up. But, the US government canned research into Thorium and Natrium Nuclear reactors. Which can produce 1/1000 the amount of nuclear waste and can be fueled using spent nuclear rods from lightwater reactors. They create longer, more complete and sustained fission and we have had these designs since the 60’s. But the fossil fuel industry spent billions trying to demonise and delegitimise nuclear power because that would be the end of for-profit energy production. Now private companies like Copenhagen Atomics and Bill Gates’s Natrium are producing vastly more efficient and in the Case of CA, modular nuclear reactors. Like, the size of a 40 ft shipping container modular. It is super exciting stuff.