Welcome to The World In 10.
In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security.
Today with me, Laura Cook and Stuart Willey.
The presence of American nuclear weapons on British soil has long been controversial.
From the 1980s onwards, anti-nuclear protesters targeted bases where the US kept bombs and missiles.
But after the Cold War drew to a close, the protest camps ended.
and the nukes went elsewhere.
But now they're back.
Analysts say for the first time in nearly two decades,
nuclear bombs have been delivered to an air base just 70 miles from London and potentially to others in Belgium and the Netherlands.
To talk us through what it all means and why the US might be basing these weapons in Europe again,
we're joined by Dr. Siddarth Kaushal, a senior defence fellow at the defence think tank RUCI.
Dr Kaushal, is this move 17 years on a big deal?
So i'd say it's significant in two regards firstly of course it represents or it's indicative of the way in which european states including the uk's perceptions of their security environment has changed in the last 20 years where US weapons were withdrawn from Europe almost 20 years ago there was an assumption that the threats of the future would be unconventional non-state threats against which nuclear weapons had limited deterrent value and that assumption has been completely upended by the events of the last decade.
So I suppose the first sort of significant thing about this is what it tells us regarding the way in which the UK's perception of the threats to national security have changed,
which very much aligns with what has been said in the SDR as well.
Secondly,
it's significant in the context of European security
because the issue of a relative gap between Russia and NATO in terms of the numbers of theater-ranged,
non-strategic nuclear weapons has been a long-standing concern,