France and the UK are the obvious candidates, as both are nuclear powers.
Ideally there would be some coordination at the EU level, but really hard to see that short term.
And building a simple nuke is not that complicated - when you have the nuclear material. Europe does.
The last we want, are Nazis with nukes on top of it all.
If they don't hate Jews it isn't nazism, just ordinary facism.
Also russia already beat the us to becoming nuclear armed facists.
It is a disgusting viewpoint and essential to understanding American Zionist support of Israel. My (lifelong far-right conservative jack-Mormon) father shared this with me 25 years ago.
The 2024 French legislative (not Presidential) snap election was Macron calling the electorate's bluff that even though they disliked low growth, carbon taxes, inflation, unemployment, immigration, they still wouldn't vote for a FN govt (in the second round; view the first round as a protest vote where some voters for FN are tactically expressing discontent with the govt).
The 2027 French presidential election is a long way away yet and Polymarket doesn't even have a prediction market open for it yet, but Oddschecker puts Le Pen as frontrunner but not "very likely"; and that's before Bayrou emerges as Macron's successor [0]. Macron stands to gain a lot of influence in Europe if he can forge a good relationship with Germany's Merz.
Anyway, obviously a European nuclear deterrent would have to firewall against any of the large member-states or their leaders going rogue. Rutte and NATO haven't commented publicly yet on Trump's recent stance. See what happens at the next G7 summit in Canada, 6/2025. And of course the Ukraine settlement and who provides security guarantees for it.
[0]: https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/european-politics/frenc...
Drones make nukes obsolete anyway. After you nuke a country its generals no longer have any incentive to surrender; they have nothing to go home to when they leave their bunkers.
The effects on a country of 1000 or 2000 radioactive mushroom clouds seem like they'd be quite a bit larger than the one or two we've seen previously. You could see a billion people dead within an hour.
But they're very unselective weapons. The reason for the trend toward these sub-megatonne warheads is that it makes them more selective so they have more strategic value. But they really can't compete with simple precision weapons there. The US's force of 2800-some warheads costs about US$60 billion per year to maintain, about 20 million dollars per year per warhead. US$200 million will buy you 200 000 commercial drones with which you can kill almost 200 000 individually selected people with grenades. That's enormously more strategically valuable than the million random people you can kill with the warhead.