US nuclear missles in Europe remain poised for a war that will never come
The United States and Russia recently signed a new landmark nuclear non-proliferation treaty called START in March and the US in early May followed up its non-proliferation goals by making the unprecedented step of publicly declaring how many nuclear weapons it had – just over 5,113 in total, though many of them are in storage and would take time to be deployed.
That is a vast reduction compared to the total arsenal the country possessed at the height of the Cold War in 1967, the number at that time was 31,225, according to reports by European news media.
Great progress has been made then, especially as START (The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), saw Russia and the US agreeing to a further 30% reduction in their arsenals. The legacy of Cold War suspicion, paranoia and mass weapons stockpiles lingers on in Europe though.
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once famously wrote of Cold War tension between the US and then USSR that “the superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision… Of course, over time even two blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room”.
This quote from The White House Years seems to capture the reality of the Cold War legacy in Europe, especially with regard to the nuclear stockpiles that remain on six bases across the continent. In these six bases in five countries (there are two sites in Turkey) around 200 US tactical nuclear bombs remain to guard against the worst case scenario that never came.
These weapons are now a US “hot potato” as Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin puts it. Indeed the weapons are no longer needed or wanted by any of the European countries in which they remain. Belgium, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands are the five countries playing host to US WMDs.
It is now unconceivable that there could ever be a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario again in Europe, not between any European countries and certainly not between the US and Russia, old Cold War rivals turned firm, if not warm, allies in common fights against terrorism, recession and the attainment of nuclear technology by ‘dangerous’ countries, such as Iran, which they both perceive as a threat.
Yet these tactical weapons remain in Europe. They are tactical bombs, not nuclear missiles, as they were designed to be attached to the underside of a bomber and then flown into certain target countries, which were marked as possible invasion points if the great Russian bear ever decided to rear its head and come trundling into Europe.
These “invasion routes”, as they were called, were Poland, East Germany and other USSR states along the Iron Curtain border. These countries are now either members of the UN or nuclear free and peaceful states.
“The presence of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, from a military point of view, no longer makes any sense,” a Belgian government official recently told the Associated Press.
The removal of the bombs, however, is made problematic as, like so much in the world, they are stuck fast in the marshlands of politics. Discussion has emerged over the fate of the “nuclear sharing” and the 200 bombs involved, in April the foreign ministers of NATO members got together in Tallinn, Estonia and discussed the bombs among other issues.
At that summit, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that any reductions in the US tactical nuclear weapons stockpiles in Europe must be mirrored by Russia, European news reports have stated that the US contains around 1,100 of these tactical weapons while Russia still has around 2000.
But, Russia had said a month earlier, in the lead up to the signing of START, that they no longer had tactical nuclear weapons deployed abroad as the US did. Russia’s NATO ambassador, Dmitry Rogozin pointed out in Brussels that Russia had withdrawn all their tactical nuclear weapons from the territories of former Soviet countries and allies, while the US had not.
“We are now expecting some steps on the U.S. side,” Rogozin said to the Associated Press.
It’s a rather stale political deadlock then, the staleness of the political standoff is represented in the fact that NATO refers to their response time (the time it would take to get the bombs on a plane and in the air) in hours and even days rather than the mere minutes it would have taken several decades ago. This alone makes the weapons obsolete, let alone their age.
But, at least the tension now is of a political and not a military nature. In the meantime, the weapons remain in Europe and will do for the foreseeable future, attracting attention from activists who have revealed a more sinister side to the presence of the weapons – an apparent lack of security.
Early in 2010 a team of nuclear activists managed to penetrate the outer fence of one of the bomb sites and made it one kilometer inside, all the way to its innermost bunkers, before they were apprehended, which took an hour. What happens when it’s not activists but members of a large terrorist organization scaling the fences?
President Obama has acknowledged that the concept of terrorists getting hold of a nuclear weapon is terrifying, he has said that this is the greatest threat the world now faces from armed terrorist groups. So either way, the US tactical bombs in Europe remain dangerous even if their purpose is now obsolete.
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US nuclear missles in Europe remain poised for a war that will never come
The United States and Russia recently signed a new landmark nuclear non-proliferation treaty called START in March and the US in early May followed up its non-proliferation goals by making the unprecedented step of publicly declaring how many nuclear weapons it had – just over 5,113 in total, though many of them are in storage and would take time to be deployed.
That is a vast reduction compared to the total arsenal the country possessed at the height of the Cold War in 1967, the number at that time was 31,225, according to reports by European news media. Read more
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