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U.S. Cold War Nuclear Bombs
Detailed In Report
by Charles Aldinger, Oct 20 '99
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States stored about
12,000 nuclear weapons in at least 15 other nations, at U.S. Pacific bases and on Navy ships at the height of the
Cold War, according to a report published Wednesday in a scientific journal.
The report in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said U.S. nuclear bombs, missiles or depth charges were in
Canada, Cuba, Iceland, Japan, Morocco, the Philippines, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan and a half dozen NATO states
between 1955 and the late 1970s.
The report by authors William Arkin, Robert Norris and William Burr was based largely on
a tightly-edited official Pentagon history of the custody and deployment of U.S. nuclear
arms between mid-1945 and September 1977.
The weapons were stationed in some countries, including Iceland, without the knowledge
of officials there, the authors said.
Pentagon officials declined to comment on the article, noting the United States traditionally refuses to neither
confirm nor deny U.S. nuclear deployments overseas.
While the names of most nations involved in the storage of such weapons were blacked out in the detailed Pentagon
document -- released through the federal Freedom of Information Act -- Norris said the authors were confident they
were right in reporting a full list based on a knowledge of the issue.
The Pentagon history openly listed Britain, then-West Germany and Cuba along with U.S.
bases in Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, Johnson Island, Midway and Puerto Rico as storage sites
for nuclear arms during the period.
But the scientists' report said it determined that blacked-out sites also included storage of nuclear or nuclear-capable
arms at times at bases in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Japan, Morocco, Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain
and Taiwan.
And while the Defense Department report listed only Britain and West Germany as European sites, the article said
Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey were used to position such weapons.
U.S. NOW HAS NO NUCLEAR ARMS IN ASIA
The report said that the United States now has no nuclear arms in Asia and only about 150 B-61 nuclear bombs stored
at air bases in six NATO countries -- Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. But the United
States is still the only country with nuclear weapons outside its borders, it added.
The United States withdrew nuclear weapons from all surface warships at the end of the Cold War but maintains long-range
nuclear missiles aboard strategic submarines under the world's seas.
Previous reports had confirmed the presence of nuclear cruise missiles and tactical nuclear shells in a number
of NATO countries during the Cold War.
"We do have a pretty extensive knowledge of these deployments from other sources," Norris told Reuters.
"I don't think that there is much question that the countries we have put down are the correct ones."
The study said that nuclear bombs were stored from 1956 to 1959 at a U.S. base in Iceland, which publicly opposed
many of NATO's nuclear policies.
From late 1961 until mid-1963, it added, the United States kept nuclear-capable depth charges at its base on Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. That period included the Cuban missile crisis and the report said that the plutonium hearts for the
weapons were in Florida, where they could be moved to Cuba quickly in case of war with the then-Soviet Union.
TRUMAN AUTHORIZED STORAGE IN MOROCCO
President Harry Truman authorized the storage of nuclear-capable bombs at Strategic Air Command bases in French
Morocco in early 1952 without telling the French government, according to the report. Nuclear bombs were deployed
in Morocco from 1954 to 1963 and the Moroccan government apparently was informed after it gained independence in
1956, the authors said.
Nuclear-capable bombs, without their essential uranium or plutonium charges, were sent to
Japan during the Eisenhower Administration during the U.S.-China crisis over the Taiwan
straits in 1954-55, Wednesday's report said.
Later in the 1950s, such weapons were placed in South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan
but it is not clear whether the countries were informed of those early deployments.
The last U.S. nuclear weapons in the Far East were withdrawn from South Korea in 1991.
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