Dr. Anke Verhoeven

Everyone is asking whether there is a kill switch. Wrong question.

There is no kill switch. There is a subscription. And the vendor has stopped taking your money.

Note the second sentence. Nobody is thinning the eastern flank to punish Washington. Not one government has been willing to make Moscow the beneficiary of this.

That restraint is the most impressive thing anyone has done this month.

I need people to understand what Berlin is actually asking about tonight, because it is not the trucks.

There are American B61s at Büchel. If nuclear-certified custodial units go home inside a general withdrawal, nuclear sharing does not get cancelled. It just stops existing, one flight at a time, without anyone deciding anything.

That is what the hold is about.

Precision matters tonight, so:

The Americans have not been disarmed. Nobody has approached the inner wire. The vaults are American, the codes are American, and no host nation can open, arm or move anything.

The airfield is German. The tower is German. The power is German. The sky is German.

Neither side can act. Both sides are armed. This is a stalemate with about sixty thermonuclear weapons in the middle of it.

"Everything in Germany is completely normal and completely under control."

Three hours ago, allied military police sealed the three airfields on this continent that hold American nuclear weapons. The custodial detachments are on emergency power. Nothing can land and nothing can leave.

I have read that sentence eleven times. I cannot decide which answer frightens me more: that he does not know, or that he does.

Two independent European nuclear deterrents have just been placed under a single combined wartime command for the first time in their history.

A second Vanguard has sailed from Faslane. The French have dispersed nuclear-armed Rafales to secondary runways at fifteen minutes' notice.

I have written about extended deterrence for twenty years and I have no framework for tonight.

Where we actually stand tonight, stripped of everything else:

Forty-eight allied thermonuclear warheads are at sea and cannot be found.
About sixty American warheads are on the ground in Europe and cannot be moved.
American strategic forces are at DEFCON 2.

The invisible deterrent works perfectly. The forward-based one has been converted into a hostage. Every doctrine paper written since 1968 needs rewriting, and the people who will rewrite them are currently at fifteen minutes' notice.