| | 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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