The name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has been a contentious issue for 25 years, polarising those who support the name and those who argue the state should not be called ‘Macedonia’. The Greek government has consistently fallen in the latter category. After many rounds of UN-mediated talks from the 1990s through to 2017 failed to reach a solution, the leaders of the two Balkan countries finally reached one in 2018 after months of negotiations.
During the 2018 political summer break in Berlin, a debate that had already been considered buried in the dustbin of implausible ideas resurfaced. After Christian Hacke, a retired professor of political science, suggested that Germany ought to contemplate acquiring nuclear weapons in light of America’s waning reliability as a security guarantor, a phantom debate returned to Berlin’s strategic community. I will show why this debate about a German national nuclear arsenal is misguided. Acquisition of nuclear weaponry would not enhance Germany’s security – on the contrary, a German atomic bomb would compromise the country’s safety.
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