Poland is ready to deploy nuclear weapons on its territory to strengthen the defense of NATO’s eastern flank, the country’s President Andrzej Duda has said.
“If our allies decide to deploy nuclear weapons as part of the joint use of nuclear weapons also on our territory to strengthen the security of NATO’s eastern flank, we are ready for it”, Duda said in an interview with Fakt.
According to him, in this case Warsaw simply implements the general policy of the North Atlantic Alliance, as it is a member and must implement collective decisions.
Duda also noted that the issue of the deployment of American nuclear weapons in the country “has been a topic of Polish-American negotiations for some time now”. In particular, Warsaw is seeking the transfer of nuclear warheads to the country as part of NATO’s Nuclear Sharing nuclear deterrence program.
Justifying the need for such a step, the Polish president drew attention to the fact that Russia is “increasingly militarizing” the Kaliningrad region, which borders the country, and recently transferred tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.
Prior to that, Duda ruled out the possibility of nuclear war after nuclear weapons appeared on Polish territory because it “would mean the end of the world”.
Nuclear sharing is an agreement between the United States and NATO allies on the transfer of nuclear weapons from United States storage bases in case of military necessity. As part of the North Atlantic Alliance’s mission, the US has already placed about 150 of its nuclear bombs on the territory of European states.
At the same time, NATO and the United States have previously publicly stated that they do not plan to deploy nuclear weapons in the countries of the bloc, which before the collapse of the Soviet Union were within Moscow’s sphere of influence, Bloomberg wrote.
Last spring, it became known that Russia had transferred nuclear weapons to the territory of Belarus. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitrii Peskov later explained such actions of Moscow with “security concerns”.
President of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko directly stated that the missiles received from Moscow could be directed against Poland, which he accused of planning an invasion of the republic. He said guarantees given to him in the 1990s had been “trampled” and “violated” and that Belarus had been forced to reclaim its nuclear weapons.
