What to Do About Europe’s Secret Nukes

December 3rd, 2009

Via: Time:

Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike? Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets? And what about Germany — a country where fear of atomkraft is so great that the last government opposed all civilian nuclear power? Germany’s air force couldn’t possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?

It is Europe’s dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those — Britain and France — who have built their own weapons. Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them. The Federation of American Scientists believes that there are some 200 B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs scattered across these four countries. Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are technically owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in times of conflict. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear war.

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One Response to “What to Do About Europe’s Secret Nukes”

  1. LykeX says:
    December 5, 2009 at 11:19 pm

    A Dannish perspective. Due to popular demand our government was forced to reject all nuclear power.

    However, being part of NATO, we still maintained contacts and as a result an agreement was made (only revealed in recent years) where nuclear weapons were store just south of the borer, to be shipped into Denmark and used in case the Russians decided to invade. While technically outside the country, they were ready to be used at short notice.

    This in addition to the Thule case, where it was revealed that the Danish government allowed American troops to store nuclear weapons on Greenland (under Danish authority). This was only discovered after one of the planes carrying the weapons crashed, spreading radioactive material and causing elevated risks of cancer among the clean-up workers.

    There are suspicions that some of the weapons are still present under the ice
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7720049.stm

    Anyway, my point is, it’s no big surprise

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