Poland considers building nuclear weapons

 Poland should begin developing nuclear weapons to guard against Russia, the country’s president has said.

Karol Nawrocki, who was elected last year, said he was a “great supporter of Poland joining the nuclear project”, which he said could underpin the country’s security strategy.

“This path, with respect for all international regulations, is the path we should take,” he said in an interview with Polsat television on Sunday.

“We must work towards this goal so that we can begin the work. We are a country right on the border of an armed conflict. The aggressive, imperial attitude of Russia towards Poland is well known.”

European nations have debated developing their own nuclear strategy amid growing threats from Moscow and a deteriorating relationship with the United States, which is Europe’s main nuclear guarantor.

Evika Silina, Latvia’s prime minister, said at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that “nuclear deterrence can give us new opportunities”.

Germany and France have begun talks on developing a European nuclear deterrent that could protect the continent without Washington’s help.

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, confirmed in an address to the conference that high-level discussions had begun. He said on Friday: “I have started the first talks with Emmanuel Macron, the French president, about European nuclear deterrence.

“This will be fully embedded in our nuclear sharing within Nato, and we will not have zones of different security levels in Europe. We’re not doing ‌this by writing Nato off.”

Poland has been critical of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021. It banned developing, testing, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. 

It has consistently voted against a UN General Assembly resolution that welcomes the treaty’s adoption and calls on all states to ratify it. 

There are several options for Poland to become a nuclear-armed state, including attempting to build its own nuclear weapons. 

However, doing so would abandon a norm that has been in place in the West since the Cold War, according to Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian arms-control negotiator. 

He told The Telegraph: “We certainly won’t be seeing Poland building nuclear weapons.

“What Poland has wanted to do for some time is to become a base country for nuclear weapons, particularly the United States. This is an idea that Nato has discussed for some time, it is not just empty talk. 

“But they cannot become a fully fledged nuclear power. They cannot produce their own weapons, they don’t have the material. In any case, no one would allow them to break the non-nuclear cooperation that the West has seen for so long.”

There is recent precedent for countries withdrawing from weapons treaties. In 2025, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland initiated withdrawals from the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which restricts the use of landmines, arguing that such weapons are needed to protect their borders from Russian aggression.

However, it is more likely that Poland will join Nato’s nuclear sharing programme or seek protection under the French or British umbrella. 

Andrzej Duda, Mr Nawrocki’s predecessor, also discussed the possibility of Poland becoming a nuclear-armed state, revealing that he had held discussions with the United States. 

Meanwhile, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said he had helped “serious” talks with Emmanuel Macron about Poland being protected by the French nuclear umbrella.

Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on European free speech and threats to take over Greenland have eroded transatlantic relations since the US president returned to the White House last year.

Mr Sokov said he believed that European nations were increasingly motivated by acquiring nuclear weapons because they feared the United States would not come to their aid if Russia conducted a limited nuclear strike. 

Mr Macron and Mr Merz acknowledged a deepening rift between Europe and the US. “There has been a tendency these days in this place and beyond to overlook Europe and sometimes to criticise it outright. Caricatures have been made,” the French president said at the conference.

“Europe has been vilified as an ageing, slow, fragmented construct sidelined by history. As an overregulated, listless economy that shuns innovation. As a society prey to barbaric migration that would corrupt its precious traditions.

“And most curiously yet in some quarters as a repressive continent where ... speech would not be free and alternative facts could not claim the same right of place as truth itself, that old-fashioned and cumbersome concept.”

European discussions about developing a nuclear umbrella also came after warnings that Vladimir Putin was moving nuclear missiles to the border of the European Union.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Belarus’s exiled opposition leader, said Russian missiles and nuclear weapons would be deployed to Belarus, which borders EU members Poland and Lithuania.