Can France and the UK Replace the U.S. Nuclear Umbrella?

On February 20, 2025, shortly before Germany’s snap elections, Friedrich Merz, chairman of the conservative Christian Democratic Union and Germany’s next chancellor, made a prominent declaration about the future of European nuclear deterrence: “We need to have discussions with both the British and the French—the two European nuclear powers—about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, could also apply to us.”