October 20, 1999

U.S. Once Deployed 12,000 Atom Arms in 2 Dozen Nations
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  • The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
    By JUDITH MILLER

    The United States stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and 5 American territories during the cold war, according to an article based on a recently declassified document. The sites included Morocco, Japan, Iceland, Puerto Rico and Cuba.

    The document, a secret history by the Defense Department covering nuclear deployment from 1945 to 1977, is described in the latest issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Altogether, the report says, the United States stored 38 types of nuclear weapons systems at American or allied bases abroad.

    While other declassified documents have made clear that the United States deployed nuclear weapons and materials overseas, the document confirms how widespread the deployments were, and highlights America's overriding dependence at the time on a worldwide network of weapons of mass destruction.

    The magazine article emphasizes the extent to which the Pentagon made special weapons in which plutonium or uranium could be removed and stored elsewhere. This was in order to evade the issue of whether nuclear weapons or materials were stored in countries where there was intense antinuclear fervor.

    "The Pentagon document fundamentally revises some aspects of postwar nuclear history," said William M. Arkin, a nuclear weapons analyst and one of the article's three co-authors. It reveals, for instance, that the first American nuclear weapons placed overseas were sent not to Britain, as many historians believed, but to Morocco, the site of several strategic American bases.

    But Arkin and his co-authors concluded that the declassified study and an annex listing the countries where nuclear weapons were placed contains some errors. For instance, the annex does not list Portugal's Azores Islands or Libya, though Arkin says that other declassified documents show that the Strategic Air Command stored nuclear weapons in both places in the 1950's and 1960's.

    The article says that American nuclear weapons or materials were once deployed in such sensitive places as Japan, Iceland, Taiwan and Greenland, a possession of Denmark. All those nations have forsworn nuclear weapons and publicly vowed not to store them on their territory.

    They were also to be kept under tight control of American forces, but the article notes that the initial controls were lax.

    Most diplomats from the countries on the list that are considered sensitive on the subject declined to comment on the article and the document, or on whether their governments were aware of any nuclear deployments.

    But a spokesman at the Icelandic Embassy in Washington said, "There is no reason to suspect that any nuclear weapons had ever been stored in Iceland." Some American officials also questioned whether the United States had deployed nuclear weapons on Icelandic territory.

    How the Pentagon document was declassified is a saga in itself. "It has been a 16-year ordeal," said Arkin, who is co-author of a book he was working on at the time, "Nuclear Battlefield" (1985). He requested the document under the Freedom of Information Act in 1983. The study was partly declassified two years later, but most of its annotated charts and country listings were blacked out.

    Arkin, assisted by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based nonprofit group of scientists, lawyers and environmentalists, appealed the deletions to the Pentagon. In 1992 and earlier this year, the Pentagon declassified much of the censored material, including the names of nine places were bombs had been stored. But it has continued to suppress the names of 18 countries on the list.

    Because the list was alphabetical, however, and they could see where the names fell in the listing, Arkin and his co-authors -- Robert S. Norris, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archives, a Washington-based nonprofit group that collects declassified information -- say they were able to deduce their identities.

    The deployment of nuclear weapons domestically and overseas remains among the most closely held military secrets. Arkin said his research indicated that the United States still keeps such weapons in at least seven places -- Belgium, Greenland, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey and Britain.

    Kenneth H. Bacon, the Defense Department spokesman, said the Clinton Administration, following a policy long embraced by its Republican and Democratic predecessors, would neither confirm nor deny the existence of nuclear weapons on foreign soil. But he said at least one of the authors' deductions about the countries in which nuclear weapons were stored was not correct.

    Leslie H. Gelb, the president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, who was the State Department's director of political and military affairs between 1977 and 1979, defended the policy of what he called "don't ask, don't tell" with respect to nuclear weapons deployments.

    "You make a country a target by admitting that you've put nuclear weapons there," said Gelb, who wrote about strategic and foreign affairs for The New York Times after he left the Carter Administration.

    Historians, nuclear weapons experts and former Government officials are divided about the likely impact of the document's declassification. Arkin predicted that the disclosures could ignite intense political controversy in countries that are "allergic" to the presence of nuclear weapons and whose governments have forsworn their storage.

    The document and its annex, coupled with other declassified information obtained by the article's authors, show that during the 1970's, the United States had more than 7,000 nuclear weapons in NATO countries, and more than 2,000 on land in the Pacific region.

    Graham T. Allison, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School and a co-author of "Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis," said he had not known until he read the version of the declassified document's annex on the web that the United States had stored depth charges -- with the nuclear materials removed -- at its base in Guantánamo, Cuba.

    The article and the authors' version of the annex are available online, at http://www.bullatomsci.org.

    Donald P. Gregg, president and chairman of the Asia Society, who was the American Ambassador to South Korea between 1989 and 1993, confirmed the article's assertion that America had once sent nuclear weapons there. He had raised the issue of their removal with Korean leaders more than a year before President Bush announced in 1991 that he was withdrawing all tactical nuclear weapons sent overseas.

    Gregg said he had concluded, and the American military had agreed, that the weapons did not enhance American national security and could have become a provocation to North Korea.

    "My residence had just been broken into by six students angry about beef quotas," he recalled. "They tried to burn my house down. And I thought, 'God Almighty, if they get this mad about beef, what will they do when they learn we have nuclear weapons here?' "

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