BERLIN — Just days before Germany is set to celebrate the anniversary of its “liberation” from Nazi rule, leading members of the governing Social Democrats are demanding that the country be freed from what they consider another scourge — American nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear weapons on German territory do not heighten our security, just the opposite,” Rolf Mützenich, the leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) in the German parliament said in an interview with newspaper Tagesspiegel published on Sunday. “The time has come for Germany to rule out a future stationing.”

Though not everyone in the SPD’s top ranks shares his views, Mützenich quickly won backing from co-SPD leader Saskia Esken.

“Whoever thinks that glasnost and perestroika were made possible by the West’s nuclear deterrent missed something,” she tweeted. “Atomic weaponry on German soil, on German airplanes, is neither an end to itself nor desirable, not to mention very expensive.”

The SPD leadership’s demands reopen an old debate in Germany about whether to remain under the protective nuclear umbrella the U.S. has held over the country since the 1950s. On the left, many see the weapons as an unnecessary provocation toward Russia. Those tensions went on the boil in […]