PARIS — France is working with 10 European allies to strengthen and expand its role as a nuclear-weapons power as European confidence in American security guarantees wavers, The Wall Street Journal reported. President Emmanuel Macron’s “forward deterrence” initiative aims to bolster deterrence against Russian attacks by deploying French nuclear-enabled Rafale fighters across Europe and creating new infrastructure, communications, early-warning and intelligence-sharing links.

The plan’s ultimate aim is to create more strategic uncertainty for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who controls one of the world’s largest atomic arsenals and has repeatedly raised the prospect of nuclear war since his armies invaded Ukraine in 2022. At a recent security conference in Warsaw, Macron’s strategic-affairs adviser Xavier Chatel said: “What it brings is a new complication for the adversary, because it brings another layer that the Russians will have to read.” Chatel said the project also gives France “new options for dissemination of our nuclear forces in case of a nuclear escalation.”

As of The Wall Street Journal’s report, the 10 participants were the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. They have joined with varying degrees of involvement since Macron first announced the plan in March. The three Baltic states, described as the most vulnerable to Russia, are not included, and Italy has declined to join.

France has created 10 separate steering groups with its “forward deterrence” partners and is holding talks in a hub-and-spokes bilateral fashion rather than gathering them all in a nuclear club. In practice, defense officials in European partner nations keep calling one another to compare notes on what France has told them, senior defense officials said.

European officials said the planned secure communications, early-warning and intelligence-sharing architecture could also contribute to conventional defense if the United States failed to protect its NATO allies. Finnish President Alexander Stubb said: “We don’t have any plans to put nuclear weapons on Finnish soil in peacetime. But we do have plans for creating a strategic dilemma for Russia.” He added: “We felt it would be useful for our security to get information, to be involved in it. We don’t know where this is going to end, it’s probably a 10- to 15-years process.”

France developed its own fully sovereign nuclear forces outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization under President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. France does not participate in the NATO nuclear planning group, which brings together the United States, the U.K. — Europe’s other nuclear power — and the remaining alliance members. The United States operates a separate nuclear-sharing program with several European nations, involving the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on allied aircraft; any use requires dual permission from the allied nation and Washington. The British deterrent, unlike the French one, relies on American-made platforms and is under NATO command.

Partners will take part in the new arrangements, but France retains full control over its nuclear decisions. A government minister in another European country involved in the project said: “The French will let us participate in their nuclear deterrence as much as the Americans.”

Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said, “It’s a more geopolitically tense time and France has this strategic capacity.” He said the French plan “doesn’t replace anything. It supplements the nuclear guarantees that were already there” from the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of nuclear security and political science who oversaw nuclear policy in the Pentagon under the Biden administration, said: “Is it better than nothing? Probably. But it is not, and should not be viewed as, a substitute to U.S. extended deterrence. And the French are very clear about that, too.” He added: “The fact that it is necessary pains me as a former American official. But the French have come a long way.”

Doubts about whether the United States would risk nuclear war on behalf of an ally are not new. They were a key reason de Gaulle sought an independent deterrent: in 1961, he asked President John F. Kennedy whether the United States would sacrifice New York to save Paris and received no reply. The Wall Street Journal reported that the doubts have intensified under President Trump, who has struck energy deals with Russia and put pressure on Ukraine.

French officials argue that France’s deterrent is more credible because European allies’ security is of far more direct importance to France than to Washington. “There is one difference between France and the U.S.—we share the same geography, we are part and parcel of the same continent, we have economic and sociological continuity with our neighbors writ large,” Chatel said at the Warsaw Security Conference.

French nuclear doctrine provides for the use of nuclear weapons when the nation’s “vital interests” are at stake. In his March speech announcing the policy, Macron reiterated that those interests do not stop at France’s borders and have a European dimension: “Could we consider that the survival of our closest partners may be put at risk without it affecting our vital interests?” Paris has deliberately left the exact geography of those “vital interests” vague and has never offered an explicit guarantee to allies. France is believed to possess around 290 operational nuclear warheads, a fraction of the U.S. or Russian arsenals. Macron said France would resume making nuclear devices for the first time in decades and would no longer disclose the size of its stockpile.

France’s retention of full control over its nuclear force is part of a deliberate effort to make “forward deterrence” acceptable across the country’s political spectrum, including to the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen, who, according to opinion polls, is ahead in the race for the presidency in elections next spring. Le Pen’s party has implicitly endorsed the initiative. Some analysts warned that a Le Pen presidency would likely undermine its appeal in Europe given her past warm relations with Putin and the party’s overall skepticism of European commitments. French nuclear-policy expert Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said: “The problem is that an RN president would mean a loss of credibility on both branches—deterrence of Russia and reassurance of allies.” A senior European defense official in a partner country agreed that the intent, focus and scope of the partnership with France would come under renewed scrutiny in Paris and among allies should Le Pen come to power.

Although the United States has a much larger strategic nuclear arsenal, the belief in Paris and many other European capitals is that American strategic capabilities are reserved primarily for protecting the American homeland and that the real nuclear umbrella for Europe consists, at best, only of the bombs in the NATO nuclear-sharing program. The United States deliberately retains ambiguity about how it would respond. The B-61 gravity nuclear bombs in that program were designed in the 1960s to stop Soviet tank divisions sprinting from East Germany. They have become increasingly obsolete in a modern war and pose a limited threat to the Russian homeland given advances in Russian air defenses.

By contrast, France’s ASMP-A nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on Rafales are designed to strike Russia’s main cities and have a high chance of reaching their targets, creating an entirely different level of deterrence, military officials and analysts said. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Russia and nuclear affairs at Sciences Po university in Paris, said: “It’s unclear if it is convincing to the Russians that the French would risk retaliation against Paris for Warsaw, for example. But the Russians are definitely paying attention.” Grajewski added that the very nature of French nuclear doctrine and its nuclear arsenal makes it in some ways more threatening to Russia than the NATO extended deterrence led by the U.S. “The B-61 bombs are not instruments for war fighting, they’re pretty much instruments of political assurance,” she said. “The French nuclear arsenal, by contrast, can reach Russia.”

About the author: Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, providing reported analysis of major issues and developments around the world. He won the Overseas Press Club award for best commentary on international affairs in 2026 and the National Press Club award for political analysis in 2024. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his coverage of the war in Ukraine and in 2022 for the coverage of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, among other honors. A native of Ukraine and a graduate of New York University, Trofimov joined the Journal in 1999 and previously served as Rome, Middle East and Singapore-based Asia correspondent, as bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as Dubai-based columnist writing on the greater Middle East. He is the author of a historical novel, No Country for Love, and of three books of narrative nonfiction: Faith at War, The Siege of Mecca and Our Enemies Will Vanish, which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize and won the Peterson Literary Prize.