Poland’s outgoing head of state has appealed to President Trump to station American atomic weapons on Polish territory as a close-range deterrent against Russia.
The rift between the US and Europe has opened up a broad debate about how to shore up Nato’s nuclear deterrence. Germany’s probable next chancellor has expressed an interest in sharing France or Britain’s arsenal.
Poland, however, remains one of the most staunchly Atlanticist members of the alliance and is seeking to use its good standing with the Trump administration to keep the US on side.
President Duda said he had told Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine envoy, that Poland stood ready to host American nuclear bombs or missiles.
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They would be the first to be based in what was the Cold War-era eastern bloc and the first to be deployed to a Nato member bordering Russia, as Poland shares a 130-mile border with the Kaliningrad outpost.
At present the US is believed to have “tactical” (low-yield) atomic weapons at six bases in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey, under the Nato “nuclear-sharing” programme.
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Duda said it was time for a “shift of the Nato infrastructure” to the east of the former iron curtain. He noted that President Putin had not asked “anyone’s permission” before moving Russian nuclear weapons to Belarus in 2023.
He told the Financial Times: “The borders of Nato moved east in 1999, so 26 years later there should also be a shift of the Nato infrastructure east: for me this is obvious. I think it’s not only that the time has come, but that it would be safer if those weapons were already here.”
JD Vance, the US vice-president, appeared to dismiss the proposal in a Fox News interview on Thursday night. “I haven’t talked to the president about that particular issue, but I would be shocked if he was supportive of nuclear weapons extending further east into Europe,” he said.
Vance accused President Biden, Trump’s predecessor, of “sleepily walking us into a nuclear conflict” and said the Trump administration was pursuing a “totally different approach”.
The concept is not new. In 2023, after Putin started stationing atomic weapons in Belarus, Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister of the day, publicly requested a share in the US nuclear deterrent. The country’s national security bureau then said it would try to have its new American-made F-35 jets certified to carry nuclear gravity bombs. The Biden administration does not appear to have given the Poles any encouragement.
However, Duda has chosen to resurrect the idea at a delicate moment when his country is trying to use its status as a “model ally” of the US — and Duda’s personal relationship with Trump — to salvage the transatlantic bond.
His appeal came days after Donald Tusk, the prime minister and a political rival of Duda’s, went one step further and told parliament it was time for Poland to start thinking about developing nuclear armaments of its own.
Duda, who will stand down when his second term ends in August, dismissed the idea, saying: “In order to have our own nuclear capability, I think it would take decades.”
With an election to determine Duda’s successor looming in May, it is hard to know how seriously either Polish leader’s proposal is meant to be taken.
Poland hosted Soviet atomic weapons during the Cold War and its communist regime started building a nuclear power plant at the village of Zarnowiec, near the Baltic port city of Gdansk in the 1980s.
Since the Soviet weapons were withdrawn and the Zarnowiec programme was abandoned after the regime fell in 1989, however, the country has not had much of a nuclear technology base beyond the ageing Maria research reactor near Warsaw.
Next year construction work is expected to begin on its first modern nuclear power complex at Lubiatowo-Kopalino, only a few miles from Zarnowiec. The three pressurised light-water reactors, built by the American firms Westinghouse and Bechtel, are supposed to come online at some point between 2032 and 2040.
Fabian Hoffmann, a nuclear strategy expert at Oslo University, said it was theoretically possible that this programme could be adapted for weaponisation but the obstacles would be formidable.
To begin with, Poland is a signatory to the global nuclear non-proliferation treaty and would face international condemnation if it took steps to acquire an arsenal of its own.
Hoffmann said that without help from another country with an existing atomic deterrent, such as the US, or at least a strong civilian nuclear sector, such as Japan or South Korea, Poland would also have difficulty enriching enough fuel to weapons-grade purity on its own.
It would also struggle to replicate Israel’s feat of starting a nuclear weapons programme under the radar, not least because the International Atomic Energy Agency closely monitors reactors for signs that radioactive materials might be illicitly removed.
Hoffmann said: “It would be very difficult for Poland.”
However, the debate is testament to a wider European unease at the prospect of America’s nuclear umbrella being weakened or removed altogether under Trump.
Although the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz would prefer to strike a nuclear-sharing deal with France or the UK, some security analysts in Berlin are so sceptical of its efficacy that they have started discussing the possibility of Germany building a deterrent of its own.
The country shut down its last three reactors in early 2023 but it still has strong nuclear research capabilities and uranium enrichment facilities at Jülich and Gronau. Experts suggest it could amass enough highly enriched uranium for several warheads within five years.
So far, however, the idea has little or no traction among Germany’s political elite and it is profoundly unpopular with the public. A poll published this week by Stern magazine found 65 per cent of voters opposed it and only 31 per cent were in favour.
