Washington's unwitting atomic allies

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>From: KDean75206 at aol.com
>Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 20:38:03 EDT
>Subject: Washington's unwitting atomic allies
>To: marxism at lists.panix.com
>
>Originally posted to SocialistsUnmoderated at debs.pinko.net
>Washington's unwitting atomic allies
>
>Pentagon papers reveal extent of US deployment during cold war
>
>Julian Borger, The Guardian
>Thursday October 21, 1999
>
>At the height of the cold war the United States secretly sited thousands
>of nuclear weapons in 15 countries around the world, sometimes without
>the knowledge of the governments concerned, according to a report based
>on declassified Pentagon documents.
>
>The revelation was made yesterday in the US Bulletin of the Atomic
>Scientists.
>
>It generated a political storm in Iceland, where nuclear bombs were
>reportedly stored in a US air base from 1956 to 1959.
>Reykjavik's fiercely anti-nuclear government was never informed, the
>report said. The Icelandic cabinet insisted that it had received renewed
>assurances from the US yesterday that the country had not been exploited
>as an unwitting nuclear depot.
>
>One of the article's three authors, Robert Norris, said that there was
>strong evidence based on the defence papers that atomic weapons were
>stored at the US base at Keflavik in Iceland.
>
>He said that France was also deliberately kept in the dark when nuclear
>weapons were placed in French Morocco in 1954. Mr Norris, a senior
>research analyst at the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington,
>said he had come across a US official document stipulating that Paris
>"should not be informed".
>
>It is unclear whether the governments of the Philippines, South Korea and
>Taiwan were told when nuclear bombs were sited on their territory in the
>1950s in an attempt to confront China in the Pacific.
>
>The chief spokesman for the Pentagon, Kenneth Bacon, said that it was US
>policy neither to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons on
>foreign soil. But he said that at least one of the report's deductions
>based on the government documents was incorrect.
>
>Nevertheless, the newly-released documents reveal the extent to which the
>US was ready to disregard the sensibilities of its supposed allies in its
>anxiety not to be outflanked by its communist nuclear rivals.
>They also show that the cold war was even more perilous than previously
>assumed.
>
>"Even I was surprised by the scale of the thing - that these weapons were
>all over the place," Mr Norris said. "It was pretty serious."
>
>The worldwide dispersal of the US atomic arsenal inevitably increased the
>risk of accidents and misuse. During the Eisenhower administration, for
>example, West German fighter-bomber pilots had virtually complete control
>over the atomic weapons in periods of heightened alert.
>
>Soon after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the US ordered the
>despatch of nuclear bomb components to the Pacific island of Guam, so
>that they would be ready for rapid assembly and arming with a plutonium
>or uranium "core" if the conflict escalated into an atomic exchange.
>On August 5 that year, a B-29 bomber carrying components to Guam crashed
>in California, causing a huge blast that was felt 30 miles away. The US
>air force put out a false cover story claiming that 10 conventional bombs
>had all exploded at the same time.
>
>According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the shells of nuclear
>depth charges were stockpiled at the US base at Guantanamo Bay at the
>eastern tip of Cuba at the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The
>anti-submarine weapons could have been activated at short notice on the
>outbreak of a conflict by flying the nuclear cores from Florida.
>
>The central Pentagon document quoted in the report - the History of the
>Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons (1945-1977) - was released
>under the freedom of information act after a request by the Bulletin.
>
>The document lists a total of 27 locations (15 of them foreign sovereign
>states) where nuclear weapons were stored or deployed.
>
>They include obvious Nato allies such as Britain and West Germany as well
>as American territories abroad, including Puerto Rico, Guam, Johnston
>Island and Midway. But the names of 18 locations had been blacked out by
>the military censor.
>
>But the locations were listed alphabetically, so by a process of
>elimination, and with the help of information from other sources, Mr
>Norris said, it was possible to identify 17 of the missing locations.
>He said that in the case of Iceland: "We knew that between Hawaii and
>Johnston Island, there were two countries in there, and one of them was
>Japan."
>
>US strategic air command bombers were diverted to the Keflavik base at
>the height of the cold war in the 1950s. This provides corroborating
>evidence that Iceland was one of the unnamed locations used for storing
>bombs.
>
>The 18th nuclear deployment site remains a mystery. Alphabetically it
>lies between Canada and Cuba, but Mr Norris said neither he nor his
>co-authors had been able to narrow down the search any further.