probably printed in either arizona republic, arizona daily star, tucson citizen
Cold War nukes chronicled
Article says U.S. had weapons in dozens of nations around world
New York Times
The United States stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in Morocco, Japan, Iceland, Puerto -Rico, Cuba and at least 23 other countries and five US. territories during the Cold War, according to a new article based on a recently declassified document.
I The document, a secret study written by the Defense Department and titled "History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons," is described in the cover story of the November/December issue of -the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Altogether, the article says, the United States stored 38 types of nuclear weapons systems at U.S. or allied bases abroad from 1945 to
While other declassified documents have made it 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 manufactured special nuclear weapons in which the plutonium or uranium could be removed and stored elsewhere in order to evade the issue of whether nuclear weapons or materials were stored in countries where there was intense anti-nuclear 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 example,
that the first US. nuclear weapons placed overseas were sent not to Britain, as many historians had believed, but to Morocco.
However, Arkin and his coauthors caution that the declassified study and an annex listing the countries where nuclear weapons were placed or stored contain some errors. For instance, the annex fails to list Portugal's Azores Islands or Libya, places where Arkin says other declassified documents show that the Strategic Air Command stored nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s.
The study does confirm that U.S. nuclear weapons or materials were sent to such sensitive areas as Japan, Greenland, Iceland and Taiwan, which have all forsworn nuclear weapons and publicly vowed not to store them on their territory.