PARIS: The leaders of France and Norway said on Wednesday that Oslo will join a Paris-led nuclear deterrence scheme to bolster security on the continent.
“We are contending with the most serious security situation since the Second World War,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said as he and French President Emmanuel Macron announced in Paris that the two countries had signed a defense pact.
“In the past six months, we have entered into defense agreements with both Germany and the UK, and I am pleased that we have signed a comprehensive defense agreement with France today,” he said.
In March, Macron unveiled a program under which France, the European Union’s only nuclear-armed country, would use its atomic stockpile to boost security on the continent.
Under the so-called “forward” nuclear deterrence scheme, those who join will be able to temporarily host French “strategic air forces,” which will be able to “spread out across the European continent” to “complicate the calculations of our adversaries,” Macron said at the time.
Prior to Norway, eight countries had joined the program — Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and fellow nuclear power the United Kingdom.
“The agreement reinforces our cooperation through concrete structures, plans, exercises and prepositioning of equipment, and will enable us to mount a swift and coordinated response when it is really needed,” Store said.
“The agreement also provides a framework for closer cooperation on hybrid warfare, maritime security, space cooperation, cybersecurity, support to Ukraine and defense industrial cooperation.”
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