Moscow’s “Oreshnik” strike on January 9, 2026 is best understood as strategic signaling designed to shape what NATO will and will not do. Russia’s use of nuclear-capable delivery systems in the Russo-Ukrainian War underscores a returning logic: nuclear weapons as instruments of coercion and risk manipulation, not only city destruction. RAND Europe’s 2025 scenario analysis similarly includes a coercive diplomacy pathway in which Russia might threaten or conduct a limited nuclear strike to compel political concessions or sanctions relief.

The strategic implication for the Nordic countries is uncomfortable. Given Russia’s nuclear posture and the hollow nature of extended deterrence, Nordic countries should consider a cooperative nuclear hedge, operationally integrated with NATO. The aim is a firmly democratically controlled arrangement that still carries a deterrent edge sufficient to discourage any Russian adventurism.

Increased Utility of Nuclear Weapons

In the Western imagination, even a limited nuclear exchange is often treated as synonymous with global ecological catastrophe. Peer-reviewed modeling warns that smoke-driven cooling and cascading food-system shocks could be severe, even for regional scenarios.

But the magnitude hinges on contested parameters such as soot generation, plume rise, and how long smoke persists in the stratosphere. There are major uncertainties and data gaps across the entire causal pathway, from weapon use to environmental and socioeconomic effects. That uncertainty matters for deterrence: It can terrify decision-makers into restraint, but it can also tempt risk-takers who discount worst-case outcomes and look for coercive limited-use options.

Popular culture reinforces a second misconception: that nuclear weapons are only “city killers” and therefore lack operational utility. Many lower-yield nuclear weapons in fact have great military utility on the battlefield, as well as utility for “responsible” demonstration strikes. Russia and China are acting on this knowledge — even diluting the capability gap between conventional and nuclear weapons altogether.

Extended Deterrence Debunked

Nordic citizens have spent the post-Cold War era thinking about nuclear danger mainly in terms of terrorism, not state coercion.

For the Nordic countries, the problem is no longer that the credibility of nuclear extended deterrence is merely weakening. It is arguably already functionally hollow — a conclusion the French government acted on some 60 years ago. Treating it as a planning assumption is a high-risk bet.

It could perhaps be repaired at the margins, but any illusions about an eternal American willingness to sacrifice itself for Europe are gone forever. Political will can swing quickly, both across election cycles and faster still within them, but the forces, posture, and planning that make nuclear deterrence credible cannot.

The clearest indicator to look for is strategic prioritization. The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy elevates homeland defense and the Western hemisphere, pairs that with an Indo-Pacific focus on deterring a Taiwan crisis, and explicitly calls for a readjusted global military presence with Europe assuming primary responsibility for its own defense.

Even if Congress has constrained near-term U.S. troop reductions, Europe should not treat today’s numbers as permanent. A sudden reduction to token-level presence should not come as a surprise to anyone, nor the consequences for Russia’s room for escalation games across the spectrum of coercion.

European Gap

Europe is rearming. The gap it needs to fill is considerable, but it could be done. Willingness to play in the major league is perhaps also on the rise. Admiral G.C. Dragone, chairman of NATO’s military committee, is openly suggesting the alliance should consider preemptive actions, including cyber attacks and sabotage.

It is even possible that European allies will become willing and able to project and  — if pushed —execute a conventional counterstrike strategy against Russia. That is, however, the foreseeable cap of European capability and nerve.

Once the conventional realm is transgressed, Europe has a big problem. Capability gaps are more serious than capacity. Compared with Russia’s large non-strategic arsenal and diverse theatre delivery options, British and French nuclear weapons inventories are severely limited and much less suited for sustained limited-use signaling. This means that Europeans lack the necessary chip denominations for a proper poker game, forcing them to either fold or go all-in early in the game.

Russia’s advantage is not only in numbers of warheads, but in non-strategic delivery options that enable limited nuclear signaling. France has some flexibility through sea– and air-delivered systems. The United Kingdom is more constrained: A sea-based deterrent can retaliate, but it offers little scope for calibrated escalation without exposing scarce second-strike assets.

More concerning are indicators on British nuclear determination offered by the documentary “World War Three: Inside the War Room” (2016) and the five-episode podcast “The Wargame” (2025). In both cases, top British political and military officials put in scenario-based simulations are extremely reluctant to escalate, even when facing severe Russian aggression.

France arguably projects a stronger determination to use nuclear weapons, fueled by the experience of catastrophic loss of territorial control in 1940. Nonetheless, when probing the French government with questions like “Would France trade Paris for Helsinki?”, they suffer the same problem as President John F. Kennedy when asked if he would trade New York for Paris. British and French forces fought bravely alongside Norwegian troops in the Battle of Narvik in 1940. Yet, when vital interests at home were threatened, they both pulled out, handing the struggling Germans the win.

A Nordic Nuclear Deterrent

Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden ought to consider how to provide for their own nuclear protection. A Nordic nuclear deterrent is an imperative necessity, according to former Danish social democrat Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod.

A purely national program might appear most logical: What better guarantee than having your own finger on the button? Yet, nuclear deterrence is not simply a question of building a bomb. It demands an entire ecosystem: command and control, delivery platforms, early warning, secure basing, and above all, economic endurance.

A national deterrent would stretch the fiscal and industrial capacity of any single Nordic state. Nuclear weapons are not a substitute for conventional forces. They are a complement to them. If deterrence succeeds, the conventional capability must still be credible. France has seen its conventional muscle atrophy.

Even petroleum-rich Norway could struggle maintaining both credible nuclear and conventional forces over a century-scale horizon. However, the Nordic countries combined would rank as the world’s 12th largest economy with a GDP of $1.9 trillion. Moreover, the Nordic countries have the technology, industrial base, and fiscal discipline to create a fully independent nuclear value chain on par with France’s.

The immediate reaction to a Nordic nuclear initiative would be turbulent. NATO allies would worry about alliance cohesion and the precedent set for other exposed democracies. E.U. institutions and countries would, just like the Nordic countries themselves, clash with long-held arms control and non-proliferation commitments. Nonetheless, this initiative does not have to undermine NATO. A Nordic deterrent could exist within its framework, much as the integrated Nordic air forces already do. It could thus reinforce European cohesion, even transatlantic cohesion, particularly if future political developments draw the European Union and NATO closer together.

Crucially, a Nordic framework could also bring external legitimacy and internal reassurance. The world already recognizes the Nordic countries as stable democracies with no expansionist ambitions. A Nordic deterrent emerging from this tradition would be quite contentious, yet it could be treated as exceptional rather than revisionist.

Internally, a shared venture could make it easier for citizens to accept the necessity of such a step. The moral gravity of nuclear weapons is immense. No democratic government should embark on this path without deep societal consent. Cooperation among neighbors all committed to peace, legality, and restraint and bound together by geography, history, and to some extent language could soften the psychological and ethical shock. The idea of a Nordic deterrence arrangement would be easier to accept than a unilateral national bomb.

Barriers and Taboos

Logically, the weakening of NATO’s nuclear umbrella warrants a corresponding change in policy. But societies are shaped less by logic than by culture. The Nordic moral compass has long pointed towards nuclear disarmament. Norway’s early decision to prohibit forward nuclear posturing from the very early days of NATO, Denmark’s similar stance since 1957, and Sweden’s abandonment of its own nuclear weapons program in the late 1960s reflected both ethical conviction and trust in the solidity of American guarantees.

The taboo against nuclear weapons was once an expression of moral strength. Today, it risks becoming a form of moral escapism. It is easier to condemn nuclear arms than to confront the consequences of living without their protection.

Across the democratic world, similar awakenings are taking place. Russian brutality has already forced responsible European states to reconsider past restraints, most conspicuously in the exodus from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines and Lithuania’s decision to leave the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Regrettable, yes, but in several cases necessary.

The same legal logic applies to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its architects foresaw that the world might change in ways that threatened a signatory’s supreme interests. Article X of the treaty explicitly allows withdrawal if extraordinary events jeopardize national security. Many Westerners will object to this logic and invoke the deep-seated cultural doctrine of turning the other cheek. The problem is that there is no promise of an afterlife for states.

In practice, a Nordic nuclear move would mobilize the Non-Proliferation Treaty review process and U.N. diplomacy, including the U.N. Security Council notification channel in Article X, and invite intensified verification and supplier pressure through the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards system and the nuclear export-control ecosystem.

Discussions about the need for nuclear weapons are taking place in South Korea. The question is even being aired in Japan. The debate in Australia is more cautious, but it is there. In Poland, the president himself has opened the nuclear door. By the time the Nordic peoples come to terms with the need to develop their own nuclear deterrent, other democracies may already have taken the brunt of breaking with the treaty.

A Nordic Path to Deterrence

Nordic doctrine would explicitly exclude a first strike, because first use is anathema to Nordic values and would thus not be a credible prospect anyway. Nordic nuclear weapons would exist solely for deterrence and, if required, retaliation after a nuclear attack. That clear line would serve as reassurance to Nordic citizens and neighbors alike.

Technically, this means an emphasis on assured second-strike capability. Survivable at-sea forces are a feasible way to guarantee retaliation. A modest fleet of well-hidden nuclear-armed submarines would form the backbone of a Nordic deterrent, augmented by air and land dual-use systems that could offer a complete spectrum of response options.

The Nordic countries could also reserve a contingency for broader collective defense. If nuclear weapons were used against a Nordic ally, proportional strikes against a common adversary should be on the table. This preserves solidarity within the alliance while maintaining a fundamentally defense-minded doctrine.

Command and Control

The Nordic countries could offer something genuinely new in the field of nuclear command and control, tackling both moral and psychological aspects of deterrence.

At the heart of the system could stand the Nordic Command Authority: a collective arrangement through which ultimate launch authority rotates among the heads of state of the Nordic countries. Each leader would carry a secure “nuclear football,” but only one of them would at any given moment possess the active authority to order use. The rotation would be set years in advance by a small and permanent Nordic Security Council according to an uneven and unpredictable schedule.

Sometimes the authority might rest with the Finnish president for two months, at other times with the Norwegian prime minister for five. The irregular rhythm and strict secrecy would deny adversaries any single point of failure or political pressure. Even the leaders themselves would operate under deliberate ambiguity, aware that at any given time one of them holds the live key but none can be sure who. This design is reminiscent of the executioner practice in which no one knows whose bullet or lever kills, thereby reducing the moral burden to a tolerable and actionable level.

This structure would also offset a characteristic Nordic challenge: the predominance of leaders whose instincts run against the exercise of coercive power. The rotation ensures that there will almost always be at least one leader of a sterner cast — a Nordic Iron Lady, if you will — somewhere in the cycle. The system thereby fuses Nordic restraint with unpredictability, denying adversaries the comfort of assuming permanent pacifist dispositions at the top.

Technically, such an arrangement would require tamper-proof authentication, hardened and redundant communications, and a small but permanent staff maintaining continuity, secrecy, and oversight.

Legally, it would have to be treaty-based and implemented in domestic law. Each state would specify who may exercise release authority, under what conditions, and through what authentication steps, thus preserving constitutional civilian supremacy while enabling a pre-defined crisis procedure.

Civilian control could be further preserved by strict authentication (including two-person controls at the operational level) and a standing requirement for immediate consultation with the Nordic Security Council where time permits.

Operationally, it should sit inside NATO’s nuclear consultation and planning architecture (via the Nuclear Planning Group) and connect to the alliance’s existing nuclear-support mission set and exercises, ensuring that the Nordic countries do not build a parallel system, but rather a Nordic-controlled mechanism that can operate within alliance procedures.

Western Fortitude

Peace is a question of power, and power is ultimately physical. And the ultimate physical power is nuclear. Must the Nordic countries wield the ultimate weapon themselves to safeguard their freedom in the future? Can they do so through a truly innovative command and control set-up?

A Nordic nuclear deterrent, if ever realized, will not be a quick fix. In the near term, the Nordic countries should hedge wisely by helping to heal transatlantic animosity, strengthening NATO’s cohesion, investing in augmentation of French and British nuclear capabilities, and welcoming the extended deterrence that Paris now offers.

They should also lead by example in the conventional domain. No amount of nuclear preparation can compensate for hollow armies. A credible European pillar of NATO demands that the rest of the Nordic countries realign with Finland when it comes to the fundamentals of defense. The credibility of any future deterrent will rest on this foundation of conventional strength.

If one day a Nordic deterrent emerges, it should not replace the transatlantic bond but reinforce it. It should be an additional pillar rather than an alternative temple. For the true strategic task of our age is not to consolidate the West into separate fox holes, but to rebuild a proper trench system that can defend our freedom through mutual support.

Johannes Kibsgaard is a Norwegian lieutenant colonel currently serving as a senior strategy instructor at the Norwegian Defense Command and Staff College in Oslo. He is also a Ph.D. student at the University of Bergen. He has operational experience across armor, artillery, and infantry assignments, including service with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

The views in this article are those of the author and not those of the Norwegian military, the Norwegian Ministry of Defense, or the Norwegian government.

Image: Nano Banana