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The United States secretly stored nuclear weapons and their components across the world during the Cold War, sometimes without telling the countries concerned, according to a declassified report released yesterday.
The weapons were mostly stored in east Asia and western Europe, says an article by three nuclear weapons experts in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , which was based on a secret US study.
The article says that during the Cold War, 18 countries and nine former or current American territories or possessions "hosted" nuclear weapons. The authors worked out all but one of the states involved by filling in the "blanks" in the declassified document. "We can now fill in many gaps in the history of the arms race and the Cold War," said Robert Norris, a Natural Resources Defense Council analyst and a coauthor of the article.
In the early 1970s, America had nearly 10,000 weapons on land overseas and another 3,000 at sea. The nuclear cores were often stored separately to avoid the issue of whether nuclear weapons were being deployed.
Germany was the most heavily nuclearised state in the Cold War, and Britain was one of the first to receive nuclear weapons. But it was not the first: that dubious honour, surprisingly, goes to Morocco, then a French colony. "There isn't a nuclear analyst alive who didn't believe that the first US nuclear weapons deployed overseas were sent to Britain," said a co-author, William M Arkin. The French government was apparently not informed of the Morocco deployment.
Many of the deployments are highly sensitive in the countries concerned and still capable of sparking domestic rows. Some of the most disturbing deployments are to places where Cold War confrontation nearly led to war. From late 1961 until mid-1963, America kept nuclear-capable depth charges at its base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That includes the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis, sparked by American protests at Russian deployments of missiles to the Caribbean island.
Nuclear weapons were only removed from South Korea in 1991, when America concluded that they might provoke a war with North Korea.
There are still hundreds of American weapons overseas, including 150 nuclear B61 bombs at 10 air bases in seven European countries – Britain, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Yesterday, the revelation that 30 US nuclear warheads are still in Italy prompted calls for an official explanation in parliament.