Passing the Bomb: Secrecy and U.S. Nuclear Sharing at the Intersection of International and Constitutional Law

Since the war in Ukraine, Poland and Belarus have made statements and legal changes indicating that they might soon want to host the US' or Russia’s nuclear weapons respectively. Such ‘nuclear sharing’ is not new and has existed in Europe for over 60 years, under extreme secrecy at the start of its existence. Firmly at the intersection of international public law and constitutional law, the legal framework enabling nuclear sharing today consists of the same treaties, executive agreements and laws as some 60 years ago. Yet it has never been extensively studied. At present, a lot of new archival material has been released and many documents are no longer officially secret, but these remain understudied due to a residual aura of secrecy (dubbed ‘postsecrecy’). These secrecy practices themselves trigger a whole set of legal questions that are also at the nexus of international law and constitutional law.

This project proposes archival methods, doctrinal descriptive work and comparative methodology to excavate the legal framework enabling nuclear sharing in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In a second stage, it aims to analyse how secrecy functioned within this framework and how this impacted respect for the Rule of Law and the separation of powers. Finally, this project is embedded into broader legal debates on secrecy as a tool of governance in liberal constitutional democracies and the effectiveness of law.

It seeks to answer the following central research question: How was US nuclear sharing implemented in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and how did this implementation impact the use of secrecy, the separation of powers and respect for the Rule of Law in these constitutional democracies?