How independent are Britain’s nukes?

Keir Starmer has sought to get into Donald Trump’s good books by boosting defence expenditure – and doing it in a very Maga way: slashing the UK aid budget to pay for it. That has no doubt caught the eye of the US president, as has the Prime Minister’s promise to put British boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a European peacekeeping force after a deal is struck.

Mind you, that assumes that Vladimir Putin will keep to any deal to end the war. What if he doesn’t? Who guards the peacekeepers? Trump has made clear that European nations will have to look to their own security in future against an expansionist Russia. It’s not at all clear that America would send troops to stop Putin bullying, for example, the Baltic states, which have substantial Russian-speaking minority populations – or that President Trump would authorise the use of the full arsenal of US nuclear weapons against Russia if Putin delivered on his threat to use tactical nukes on the Ukraine battlefield.