The new Cold War - More Nuclear Weapons in Europe?
March 2022: Russia is waging a war against Ukraine and President Putin is openly threatening to use nuclear weapons if the West supports Ukraine militarily. The return of nuclear weapons in Europe worries experts.
At the end of the Cold War, thousands of nuclear weapons were withdrawn from Europe. Thirty years later, however, the political situation had escalated again dramatically. New nuclear weapons had returned to Europe and experts agreed in 2018 that the situation had worsened again. At that time, the termination of the INF Treaty under President Trump was the greatest concern – today, in 2022, it’s Moscow’s open threat that nuclear weapons will also be used in the war.
Nuclear weapons return to Europe: film-maker Andreas Orth interviewed renowned international experts on this subject in 2018. He spoke to prominent military experts from France, Germany, Russia and the US, showed test images of the new generation of nuclear weapons and he filmed in once top-secret former nuclear missile sites and bunkers in France and Germany. How did these experts view the risk of a new cold war? Following Putin's attack on Ukraine in February 2022, some of the interviewees comment again on the situation as it now stands: How acute do they consider the danger of nuclear weapons being used in the war against Ukraine?