Nukes now for the Netherlands?

 Someone asked me this the other day. The context, I'm sure, is the U.S. betrayal under the current administration of NATO's mutual defense obligation. The rest of the background to the question I'll have to determine when I talk to the person, later today. It could simply be about national defense, which would be a bit ignorant, since the Netherlands has not (been able to) provide for it by itself since 1940. The more interesting reason to ask the question is in the context of "Europe's" deterrent capabilities, and specifically with reference to European pledges of fairly unconditional support for Ukraine against the nuclear-armed Russian invader. This is about scenarios, most of which have to assume that Russia will not adjust its aims of ending Ukraine's existence as an independent, democratic society as part of an imperial project that also aims to restore the sphere of dominance of the former Soviet Union as well as (further) divide the West. First Ukraine: if Russia won't stop and the U.S. is now on Russia's side, a peace deal will prove elusive and Ukraine will have a harder time to hold its own. Given Europe's near-unconditional support, if Ukraine then started to lose more territory to the point where its resistance could collapse, "Europe" would have escalate its support. The limits to European military capabilities or its will to fight would become clear very quickly. If it did manage to join the fight, that might make a difference. In the best case, Russia might begin to feel cornered, the regime might begin to feel desperate. It was a British general who during the Cold War said that one cannot make a nuclear power feel desperate (it's too dangerous). The Americans got a taste of this in the first year of the war, when the Pentagon believed that the Kremlin, amid all kinds of set-backs in its invasion of Ukraine, began to look at using nuclear weapons. It took all matter of persuasion from the Secretary of Defense to get them to drop that idea. In a scenario where European forces would join the Ukrainian battlefield without U.S. backing, a desperate Russia would have so-called "escalation dominance." It is true that the French and the British do have nuclear weapons, but these are of the strategic, as opposed to the battlefield, kind. You can hit and destroy a big target with them, but these types of nukes are useless on the battlefield. Russia, on the other hand, does have so-called tactical nuclear weapons which, somewhat more credibly, could be used in battle. You can't deter the use of tactical nuclear weapons only with strategic nukes, because how credible is it to threaten the destruction of, for example, an enemy city (and subsequently surely one or more of your own) in response to the detonation of a small nuclear weapon somewhere in Eastern Ukraine? Perhaps that in the very long term "Europe," aiming for genuine "strategic autonomy," can decide to build tactical nuclear weapons, and maybe the Netherlands could in some way be part of that effort. It seems highly unlikely (though not impossible), and it would certainly not be in time to make a difference in Ukraine's current war for survival. For that war to end in a just peace, Russia will have to back off and accept its war aims, and its imperial project, are unattainable. Thanks to the choice made by the American voter last fall, that has become less, not more likely. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.