According to various sources, German Defense Minister Pistorius and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed an MOU in Ankara, Türkiye, for Germany to purchase as many as 400 Tomahawk missiles and a compatible Typhon launch system. The number of missiles actually agreed upon remains classified.
The Tomahawk missile can travel up to 2,500 km and is also capable of carrying nuclear warheads, although currently they are armed with conventional warheads. Obviously, this is not a defensive weapon but an offensive one, which, if located in Germany, would be able to strike deep into Russia.
Chancellor of BlackRock, (or is it Germany?), Friedrich Merz, told Parliament: “This will close an important strategic gap in our defense, and at the same time, we will work to develop our own European systems and station them in Europe.”
Supposedly, this deal is for a “transition period” while Germany develops its own capacity to produce long-range weapons. The ELSA joint project (European Long-Range Strike Approach) with the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Poland, and Sweden is already underway; as part of this initiative, the construction of a German-British long-range weapon—presumably a hypersonic glide vehicle—has also been agreed upon. On the sidelines of the NATO summit, the defense ministers of the participating countries discussed how the projects could be accelerated further
Obviously, this kind of escalation will not be acceptable to Russia, and Russia will have to respond in some way. As far as the Germans producing their own, given the sorry state of the German economy and the cost of energy in that country, that probably won’t be possible any time soon.
