Still a useful myth?: NATO’s theater nuclear weapons as tools of alliance management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is the role of the US theater nuclear weapons (TNW) currently stationed in Europe? Open-source intelligence experts estimate that five European NATO member states host approximately 100 US nuclear bombs under a series of nuclear-sharing arrangements. The presence of these deployments has garnered renewed attention since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While advocates and opponents of NATO’s TNW mission focus primarily on the value of these weapons in terms of deterrence or reassurance, this article takes a different perspective. It argues that US TNW stationed in Europe are primarily tools of alliance management and introduces three distinct mechanisms through which they serve this purpose: nuclear deflection, nuclear legitimation, and nuclear consultation. By focusing on these functions, this article draws attention to the main barriers that produce continuity and complicate changes in NATO’s nuclear posture. The article also advances understanding of the drivers of nuclear posture by emphasizing alliance management as a factor that has received insufficient scholarly attention.<br>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".