The German government has firmly rejected a report about talks on possible German financing of British and French nuclear weapons programmes, with deputy government spokesman Steffen Meyer saying on Friday such conversations were not taking place.<\/p>\n
“As it was reported, we can deny this. There are no such talks about financing or plans for financing,” Meyer said in Berlin.<\/p>\n
British newspaper The Telegraph had reported that talks were under way about German financial contributions.<\/p>\n
According to the report, there were also considerations about participating in conventional protection for nuclear weapons sites, something Germany could do with its Patriot air-defence system.<\/p>\n
Meyer pointed to talks such as those on deeper German-French cooperation on deterrence questions. Cooperation within NATO on nuclear deterrence was “of a purely complementary, supplementary nature,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The cornerstone of our collective security is and remains the alliance. We organize nuclear deterrence jointly within the trans-Atlantic alliance,” the deputy government spokesman said, adding that talks on this were also taking place.<\/p>\n
“But I would not speculate here about hypothetical questions as to what might come of it or what might be possible,” he added.<\/p>\n
NATO is working on plans to expand nuclear deterrence in Europe in the face of threats from Russia.<\/p>\n
Berlin does not possess nuclear weapons and has renounced them under international law. Under what is known as the nuclear sharing arrangement, the Bundeswehr – Germany’s military – keeps aircraft on standby that could, if necessary, deliver US nuclear bombs to their targets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The German government has firmly rejected a report about talks on possible German financing of British and French…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,58817,52864,76,58816,58815,478],"class_list":["post-80650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-british","tag-french","tag-german","tag-german-french","tag-meyer","tag-nato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}