The US Defence Department’s budget request for 2023, including the “NATO Security Investment Program”, has surfaced on its website. It emerged that American nuclear weapons will again be deployed in Europe next year on the territory of Great Britain.
Britain has not been mentioned in the Pentagon’s budgets in recent years. Since 2000, NATO has invested more than $80 million to improve storage site infrastructure in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Today, “forward deployment” weapons are on 15 NATO bases in the Old World. As seen in the Pentagon budget – in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Turkey. Five of these belong to the US Air Force, ten to the armed forces of the countries where they are located.
Nuclear weapons in Britain originated at the US Royal Air Force’s Lakenheath air base in 1952, a hundred kilometres northeast of London. As noted on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website, there were 33 underground storage facilities at the base in the 1990s, containing 110 B61 bombs. (The B61 is a hydrogen bomb, which is the main nuclear weapon of US strategic nuclear forces. It is a modification of a nuclear weapon developed in the 1960s.)
But the US removed its weapons from the base in 2008, marking the end of more than half a century of maintaining the US nuclear arsenal in Britain. At the time of withdrawal, the gravity bombs were considered obsolete and, as Hans Christensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project, writes on the FAS website, there were then high hopes for further disarmament of the nuclear powers. The base’s storage facilities have since been mothballed.
However, as The Guardian of London notes, US and British authorities have changed their attitude after the start of Russia’s military special operation in Ukraine. As part of the US plan, the B61 nuclear bomb project was given new life with a guidance system (after the annexation of Crimea in 2014), turning into a variant of the B61-12 aerial bombs, which are scheduled to go into production in a few weeks. The new model is capable of replacing four obsolete variants of the B61, experts point out. The upgraded “newcomers” are expected to be delivered to Britain next year.
According to The Guardian, the news of the return of US nuclear weapons to the island comes four months after the arrival at Lakenheath airbase of the first US next-generation combat aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the F-35A Lightning II.
Meanwhile, a question arises: How does the placement of US nuclear bombs in Europe tie in with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)? The document was signed by the NATO non-nuclear-weapon states that keep US nuclear weapons on their territories today. Here are their obligations: “…not to receive the transfer…of nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices or control of such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly…” And here are the obligations of the nuclear weapon states: “…Not to transfer to any other recipient nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control of such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly…”
NATO’s answer to this question is well known: the Alliance does not possess nuclear weapons, they are US property. Washington also never tires of repeating: We have not handed over nuclear weapons to anyone, they belong only to us, and the button is in our hands.
As to the NPT, the following nuance is important: nuclear weapons or control over them may be transferred to non-nuclear NATO countries “if a decision is made to enter a war during which the terms of the NPT become null and void. Besides, agreements have long been signed between the US and Belgium, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Italy and the Netherlands to allow the aircraft of these countries to deliver US nuclear bombs to targets in wartime.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the American “Arms Control Association”, told the media that the upgrading of British depots at Lakenheath airbase to accommodate new US nuclear bombs is “an early sign that the US and NATO are preparing for a protracted and possibly intensified confrontation with Russia”. The hands on the “nuclear watch” show almost midnight.
Andrei Bulatov, Antifascist News Agency
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