The spread of nuclear weapons outside the Western world has become the most important nuclear issue since the end of the Cold War. By contrast, the debate about Europe's nuclear strategy has subsided. Nuclear collaboration in Western Europe now seems an unlikely prospect and so too does proliferation, despite instability in the former Soviet Union, and occasional speculation about Germany's nuclear appetite. A very different atmosphere prevailed during the Cold War, when the need for a European nuclear force was endlessly debated, without any prospect of this political demand being fulfilled, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, several European countries appeared to be at the threshold of obtaining nuclear power.