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jpsartre12 · #**110** (**permalink**) 11-12-2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by enigma2

Gort, it was also my understanding that they were also there as a deterrent against a US invasion. Now I can't remember the exact time-line re Bay of Pigs, but it makes more sense than JP's statement did.

Yeah! yeah! But if JP can state that the nukes in Turkey were the only thing 'protecting' western Europe from the Evil Empire then please give my assertion some 'screen time'! LOL

My bad, I was thinking of the short-range nukes that NATO had deployed throughout Western Europe.... which also included Turkey, not the Jupiters. West Germany had the most and they were there to prevent an attack by USSR overwhelming NATO's much smaller conventional forces.
If you think that Western Europe's protection against a Soviet invasion was conventional weaponry, then you are sadly misinformed. NATO maintained a nuclear deterrence to a Soviet invasion, not a conventional one. The USSR would have rolled through West Germany like a hot knife through butter.

Quote:

Given the enormous attention paid to nuclear weapons, it may come as a surprise to most people that until now we have had only fragmentary information about where, when, and under what circumstances the United States deployed nuclear bombs overseas.

But now, an important historical document has been provided to the authors in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The document, titled History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977, is a lengthy narrative complete with charts and appendices that documents the growth of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. [1] It also includes what were--until now--some of the U.S. government's most closely guarded secrets: the deployment of nuclear weapons in such sensitive places as Japan, Greenland, Iceland, and Taiwan.

The entire document will be a valuable source of information for historians of the Cold War. Due to space constraints, however, we have limited the focus of this article to only one section, Appendix B, titled "Chronology Deployment by Country 1951-1977." Appendix B includes an alphabetical list of the localities where U.S. nuclear weapons were deployed, including the types of weapons systems deployed and their entry and withdrawal dates. After an extensive declassification review, the Pentagon provided the names of nine places where bombs were located--Alaska, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, Johnston Island, Midway, Puerto Rico, Britain, and West Germany. The names of 18 other locations were blacked out, but because the list is alphabetical it is not terribly difficult to identify them--with the exception of one mystery country listed between Canada and Cuba.
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.p...nd99norris_024