“Europe Should Dust Off Multilateral Nuclear Plans,” written by Michael Williams, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in Foreign Policy. Following is an excerpt:

Relying on Washington to provide extended nuclear deterrence for Brussels is an increasingly dubious proposition. And in this nuclear world, the actors with seats at the negotiating table to forge new nuclear arms control agreements will need to be nuclear powers themselves. If Europe wants to promote nuclear arms control, it paradoxically needs to go nuclear first.

The French and British nuclear deterrents can offer a stopgap capability, especially if France joins NATO’s nuclear planning group, which it should, but over the long term, a transnational European solution is necessary as neither Paris nor London have enough nuclear weapons to secure all of Europe and neither has tactical nuclear capability, which is a critical component in escalation management. And while the Franco-British deterrent may provide short-term cover, it won’t overcome the reality that has kept NATO alive for 75 years—that a U.S. security guarantee was better than one from France or Britain.

With the credibility of the U.S. guarantee in tatters, European states may wish to revisit their own nuclear capability: As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in March, “We would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal.” But the pursuit of a new nuclear capability by any one state in Europe is likely to trigger a security dilemma for the others—if Germany were to go nuclear, would this reassure Poland, or would it incentivize Warsaw to develop its own capability? Just as the United States used nuclear sharing to manage proliferation in early Cold War Europe, Brussels would do well to manage this situation proactively via a shared European nuclear project. Moreover, the development of a nuclear arsenal is extremely costly and difficult. Coordinating a pan-European deterrent would be more economical, focusing efforts against external threats rather than internal competition.

The solution to these myriad challenges is a collective European finger on a collective European nuclear launch button. The best way to do this would be to dust off early Cold War plans for the MLF (Multilateral Force).

The MLF was a proposal to create a fleet of surface ships and submarines, crewed by European NATO allies, with the intent of giving those allies multilateral ownership and control in the nuclear defense of Western Europe.