Every now and again I buy an actual paper copy of your newspaper, The Telegraph, usually for the Sudoku. But buried deep inside yesterday’s print edition (on page 14), I found this Orwellian headline: “Russia raises tension as US upgrades nuclear arsenal in Europe”.

Bizarrely unworthy of front page news, although you’d think it might be… after all, your readers would want to know when the Americans pile more weapons into Europe, since those of us living here will be the ones on the receiving end of retaliatory strikes.

And then there’s that nagging cognitive dissonance again between your headline and your content: although it’s the US that’s increasing its nuclear arsenal in Germany, it’s Russia that’s raising the tensions… odd, to say the least. How is Russia raising the tension, a reader might plausibly ask? Ah… Russia’s thinking of counter-measures to restore the strategic balance on its own borders.

We are told – by your journalist Roland Oliphant, and without a hint of irony – that the current deployment of American nuclear weapons “is subject to secrecy” and that a Pentagon source would not reveal “the specifics of which weapons were located where” in Germany. End of story. In other words, no point in your readers expecting Oliphant might for once do his job, ask some probing questions and investigate.

He doesn’t even tell us that maybe, just maybe, this American move is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (Articles 1 & 2), a pillar of international law in nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament efforts and signed by both the US and Russia (USSR) back in the day. It certainly goes against a March 2010 decision by the German Bundestag, by a large majority, to demand that the US remove their offensive tactical nuclear capability from German soil.

Let’s all stop pretending that Germany is actually a sovereign country within the EU. In fact, Washington timed the Volkswagen scandal perfectly this week, right after Merkel publicly suggested the West should probably start talking to Assad and the Russians to help resolve the Syrian crisis. Germany remains an occupied country, a puppet state, 70 years after WW2, with no say over its foreign policy. It’s time the Germans wake up and put on their Lederhosen… they are on the front line again.

And for what exactly?