The United States plans to station intermediate-range missiles (such as the SM-6, the Tomahawk, and hypersonic weapons such as Dark Eagle) in Germany as of 2026. These systems are to be deployed by the 56th U.S. Artillery Command, which was reactivated in November 2021 in Wiesbaden. The SM-6 has a range of 370 to 500 km; the Tomahawk cruise missile is capable of penetrating enemy territory at low altitude, and taking out command centers, bunkers and radar installations; while Dark Eagle is a hypersonic weapon with a range of up to 2,700 km, that flies at up to 17 times the speed of sound and is maneuverable as it approaches target. These systems are nuclear-capable and can be launched from Germany against strategic targets deep inside Russian territory, to hit Russian command centers, among other targets.
The decision to install these systems in Germany is a “cuckoo’s egg,” foisted upon then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz on July 10, 2024, at the NATO summit in Washington by President Joe Biden, and then put in President Donald Trump’s nest. Now, it threatens, at the very least, to sabotage the diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine and it could, in the worst case, lead to war in Europe.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin warned at the time, in July 2024, that Russia would take “mirror-image” steps and deploy its own intermediate-range weapons. This could create a situation even more dangerous than what existed in the early 1980s during the medium-range missile crisis, when both Pershing II and SS-20 missiles were permanently put on “launch on warning,” and the warning time from launch to target was reduced to only 4-10 minutes. At that time, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Germany, because they recognized the threat that, with such extremely short warning times, a Third World War, this time a nuclear war, could wipe out the entire human race “by accident.”
Today, the situation is even more dangerous because the communication channels that were in place even during the Cuban Missile Crisis have been reduced to a handful of people. The deployment of these systems will make Germany a prime target for a first strike in any escalation. In that case, Germany will be wiped off the map.
The stationing of such U.S. weapons systems would represent a danger all the greater, as the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” (United Kingdom, France, and Germany), as well as the EU Commission, are on a sweeping militarization drive, ostensibly because Russia is preparing an attack on NATO member states. This assertion is in total contradiction with the statement of U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who said that U.S. intelligence assesses that Russia seeks to avoid a larger war with NATO, which would trigger implementation of NATO’s collective defense clause, under Article 5. She further wrote on X that U.S. intelligence also assesses that Russia’s battlefield performance shows that it “does not currently have the capability to conquer and occupy all of Ukraine, let alone Europe.”
Therefore, the stationing the U.S. weapons systems would have the effect of destroying the chances for a successful outcome of the negotiations between the Trump administration and the Russian government on normalization of relations.
Given the current rapid escalation of the disintegration of the international legal order—in which the principle of “might makes right” has replaced international law, where a genocide identified by the International Court of Justice is committed before the eyes of the world, and drone attacks are occurring, while censorship threatens freedom of expression, civil rights are suspended, and a state of overall lawlessness threatens—this deployment could be the last straw of strategic destabilization.
