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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 05/05
Tactical nuclear weapons: Europe's redundant weapons of mass destruction
General Sir Hugh Beach
April 2004
Executive Summary
This paper examines the case for the withdrawal of US tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) from European soil on the following grounds:
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The new strategic context makes redundant the original purpose of these weapons' deployment.
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There is a concern that these weapons will play a part in the new US doctrine of preemptive use of nuclear weapons to achieve military objectives.
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There is a need to buttress the non-proliferation regime through reducing the circumstances in which nuclear weapons might be used rather than undermining that regime by devising new purposes for nuclear weapons.
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The removal of all TNW from nuclear arsenals (especially those in the former Soviet Union) would constitute an important act of disarmament that would increase international and regional security.
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Their removal would also avoid the enormous (opportunity) cost of sustaining these deployments through planned modernisation of storage facilities.
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Their removal would be another step towards fulfilling the political commitments made by the US and the other established nuclear powers under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
The paper recommends:
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NATO should revise its doctrine of flexible response making it plain that nuclear weapons would be used only in conditions of extreme national self-defence.
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America should withdraw all TNW now on European soil to the Continental US, and accept a binding obligation not to deploy them in any foreign country.
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All five recognised nuclear weapon states should stand strictly by their undertaking not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states, unless such a state attacked them in alliance with a nuclear weapon state. Deliberate ambiguity regarding possible use in response to an attack with chemical or biological weapons should be jettisoned.
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The US, Britain and France should enter into an undertaking not to develop any new design of nuclear weapons. Russia and China should be invited to join them as soon as they are ready to do so.
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Further reductions in holdings of TNW should be negotiated between Russia and the US.
Until such time as countries remain unwilling to act in these ways, as a minimum:
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Russia and the US should reaffirm their 1991 declarations, adopt mutually agreed guidelines on their implementation, agree transparency measures on remaining stocks by type, location, future plans etc. and in due course adopt measures of mutual verification.
