TODAY’S protest against the deployment of US nuclear-armed bombers at the RAF base in Lakenheath is a welcome intervention by the peace movement.

The stationing of US nuclear weapons in Britain indicates the return to an escalatory policy of nuclear brinksmanship and sharpens the risk of nuclear war. That, it goes without saying, places an unacceptable burden on populations everywhere; the public is right to be outraged.

The RAF Lakenheath stationing would be the first time in well over a decade that Britain would be made to host such US-controlled nuclear weapons. Yet the British public appears to have learned of this consequential decision through an exclusive report in the Telegraph in January when the paper revealed Washington’s plans.

Beyond war and peace, then, such a deployment also raises fundamental questions about the organisation of this society, and corresponds to an appalling contempt for democratic sovereignty now expressed routinely by the US, Britain and other European governments.

Indeed, in my country, Germany, parallel developments are afoot. On the sidelines of the July Nato summit in Washington, Joe Biden announced with German chancellor Olaf Scholz US plans for stationing long-range missiles in Germany.

These are set to include not just Tomahawk and SM-6, but also so-called “hypersonic” missiles whose quick delivery is designed to evade an adversary’s radar detection. By reducing their warning time — and the rapidity with which false alarms can be corrected — such weapons also, therefore, increase the likelihood of misrecognition and accidental retaliation.

As in Britain’s case, neither members of the Bundestag nor the German public broadly had any knowledge of the government’s intentions regarding such existential matters. We also found out about the decision through the press, meaning there was no public or formal legislative debate before the chancellor’s decision on the US missile deployments.

This escalation is, of course, hardly arbitrary. In 2014, during Barack Obama’s second term, the US embarked on a trillion-dollar nuclear modernisation programme and four years later unveiled a new security framework emphasising confrontation and containment of Russia and China, now referred to as “revisionist powers.”

By 2019, under Donald Trump, the US had withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and in 2020, withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty that had allowed for mutual aerial surveillance to aid in arms control.

Washington’s nuclear brinksmanship with Moscow in Ukraine, its reckless provocations in the Taiwan Strait, and its backing of spiralling Israeli belligerence against Lebanon and Iran only compound the heightened dangers entailed by the new technologies and planned deployments in Europe.

Given the new hypersonic missiles, the multiple fronts of US and US-backed warfighting, and the apparent willingness of US officials to pursue military aims to the exclusion of all meaningful diplomacy, some have argued that the threat of nuclear war is graver now than it was even during the acute crises of the cold war, when for instance, Kennedy maintained regular communication with Khrushchev throughout their 1962 face-off in Cuba.

Then, Washington was prepared to make concessions to Moscow; its withdrawal of missiles from Turkey was essential to resolving Moscow’s own deployments in the Caribbean. Today, there is little to suggest a Blinken or a Biden would be capable of or even willing to reach any such diplomatic settlement in the interest of de-escalation.

US-backed escalation remains unpopular in Germany, above all in the East. There, over two-thirds or sometimes around 80 per cent of the population opposes US missile deployments, and large pluralities, if not a majority nationwide, are also opposed.

So far, Europe has not seen the kind of persistent mass anti-war movement that characterised the “second cold war” of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Social Democrats — the rank-and-file membership and elements of its leadership alike — reflected popular revulsion at the prospect of nuclear world war.

Much of the organised left and social movements internationally were at that time devoted to the anti-nuclear cause, with millions protesting across West Germany, Britain and the US by the early 1980s.

It may be that the ambiguity of just how the German missiles are to be armed has blunted some of the alarm for the moment.

But the Social Democrat-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation itself has only recently published a rigorous study by the former colonel Wolfgang Richter, finding that US-planned missiles will “change the strategic balance” between Moscow and Washington, bury what remains of nuclear arms control and imperil the German population should even limited direct war break out between the US and Russia.

For this reason, we in the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) have called for a popular referendum on the missile deployment, to be held before or during the 2025 German elections.

There must be greater popular mobilisation against the US’s nuclear escalation. The protest at Lakenheath, taken in this context, is internationally significant and speaks to the elementary questions of war and peace, and democratic self-determination. It should also signal the renewal of a forceful anti-nuclear opposition in Europe and beyond.

Sevim Dagdelen is a member of the Bundestag for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.