The United States is maintaining its commitment to NATO’s nuclear umbrella, according to the Alliance’s nuclear policy director.
“The United States maintains its nuclear weapons that are forward deployed here within Europe,” Jim Stokes, NATO’s nuclear policy director, said in an interview with Estonia Public Broadcasting. Stokes spoke to the news outlet before the April 2025 meeting of NATO’s Nuclear Policy Symposium.
Held annually since 1992, the two-day symposium brings together NATO and Allied senior officials and outside experts to discuss pressing nuclear challenges facing the Alliance including strategic deterrence, modernization and emerging geopolitical risks. The 2025 meeting was in Helsinki and was the first time Finland has hosted the event.
Stokes also leads the committee that prepares the work of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, the Alliance’s sole forum for nuclear decision-making.
“We have a way of sharing the responsibility for NATO’s nuclear mission across different Allies, and of course, within the nuclear planning group, which is the body within NATO where they make all the decisions about nuclear deterrence,” Stokes said. “The Alliance is facing an increasingly complex and rapidly changing security environment. Raising our collective awareness of nuclear policy issues and having an opportunity to discuss implications is a key outcome from the symposium.”
The meeting focused on High North perspectives on deterrence and the implications of nuclear threats and challenges across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, according to the NATO news release.
Finnish Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen said the Alliance is facing the most complex and rapidly changing security environment in a generation, including nuclear threats.
“Russia maintains and develops its nuclear deterrence, and it has turned up its nuclear rhetoric. It is stepping up its military cooperation with China, which is also increasing the capacity of its nuclear arsenal,” he said, according to a news release. “North Korea has nuclear weapons, and Iran is close to developing one. In today’s world it is self-evident that NATO, too, must have credible nuclear deterrence that alongside conventional capabilities form an integral part of the collective deterrence and defense of the Alliance.”
Russia’s unprovoked war with Ukraine has prompted some NATO nations to increase defense spending. The Alliance expanded its membership by two nations: Finland joined in 2023, followed by Sweden in 2024. At the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, D.C., German and U.S. officials announced plans for the U.S. to begin deploying long-range, conventionally armed missiles to Germany to fill what German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius called “an increasingly serious gap in capability” as European nations work to build their own long-range missiles.
While some European nations have floated developing their own nuclear deterrent, Stokes said there are no firm plans to do so.
“What we do need to do is have an internal discussion within the Alliance about how to continue to strengthen our overall deterrence defense posture and the key thing about that, I think, is looking at where we need to be investing in conventional defense capabilities,” he said. “Our overall deterrence posture has always been a mix of conventional capabilities and nuclear capabilities. We need to have an internal discussion about what that mix is.”