We’re on the same page here until you get to the part about the 2% of GDP goal. Since the US probably hits 6-8% of its GDP on defense spending, 2% never should’ve seemed so unreasonable. The DoD budget runs 3-4%, but the government hides some of its spending elsewhere. For example, the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs are directly and fully defense expenditures. The Department of Energy covers America’s expenses for nuclear weapons and the Department of the Treasury handles retirement pay for eligible vets. Those are what I can remember off the top of my head. The big one, however, is that around 1/3 of our debt service payment is due to defense. As to your last sentence, yes, but now out of necessity rather than being a choice. And don’t get me wrong, I think it would have been possible and infinitely preferable to come to such an arrangement in a civil manner. Trump wants to sell the idea of geopolitics as a reality show with him as the star, the only star save maybe for Putin in a supporting role.

Agreed.

No? Then the frustration and anger were probably mine. I have a bad habit of coming here and posting on occasions when I’m not fully sober. My mistake. And it’s the proximity of Poland to Russia that causes my concern. Mookie explained this bit well. I don’t want Russian nukes in Cuba or Venezuela or on UAV vehicles on harbor floors. The window of time from launch detection warning to verifying that warning and then deciding how to best proceed is negligible, maybe no more than a few minutes. And then there’s the matter of spy satellites and information sharing. The combined number of spy satellites of all non-US NATO countries is but a fraction of America’s. Quality is a factor as well. It’s not just a matter of plopping a few nukes in silos or on TELS, or whatever the chosen method is to protect or conceal the weapons.

ETA: Come to think of it, I read nothing on the location/basing of the missiles. Is the intention to actually have them on German and Polish soil?

ETA II: Turns out America shares its B61 bomb, basing them in a select number of countries but with America retaining control over them. As to the bombs, they are gravity bombs dropped from jets, jets such as the F35 and some of European manufacture. They’re also tactical nukes with a variable blast yield ability ranging from under 1kt up to 400kt. By way of comparison, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yields of 15kt and 21kt respectively. I’m not sure what, exactly, Germany and Poland would like to have or what France and the UK would be willing to offer.

For this bit I didn’t mean countries I’d support or accept as nuclear powers, rather, the ones that are likely to do so out of security concerns. But agreed on Japan, which already has a massive amount of Plutonium that was purchased from France decades ago, ostensibly for use in the Monju fast breeder reactor. As to the national sentiment, yes, but the resistance is stronger the closer you get to Hiroshima and with the older generations who had loved ones that suffered the bombing. I assume the same is true of Nagasaki but I never went there or talked with anyone from the vicinity on this subject. I will add that Japanese history has a number of instances where the national mood changed pretty much overnight, just like that.

Yeah, I think a world without nukes will return us to the industrialized warfare of yesteryear.

The scary about Pakistan when it comes to WMD is that they use a poor man’s version of submarines to conceal the nukes from India. They’re driven around the country in semi trailers. Balochs and Sindhis have a lot of issues with the Punjabis running the show. So domestic terrorism concerns in addition to international ones — and state-sponsored sometimes.