This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
The M388 Davy Crockett, a jeep-mounted recoilless gun in service with the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1971, carried a W54 nuclear warhead that had a variable explosive yield of up to 0.25 kilotons. Operated by a crew of three, it had a range of 2.4 miles, but lacked a guidance system. Introduced into U.S. Army units in Europe in 1962, it would have been available to West German military forces if war broke out. The weapon was too small to be equipped with a Permissive Action Link and U.S. policymakers worried about the risk of "unauthorized firing" during a crisis. The deployment in West Germany ended in 1967. (Photo from Reddit Web site)
[1]. For the PALs in U.S. nuclear weapons in NATO, see Hans Kristensen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe A Review of Post-Cold War Policy, Force Levels, and War Planning (Washington, D.C.: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2005), 20 and 26. A helpful early study on the development of PALs can be found in Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons (Ithaca: Cornell University press, 1992).
[2]. A 1958 RAND Corporation study by Fred Charles Ikle', Gerald J. Aronson, and Albert Madansky, On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation, was one of the first to raise these problems.
[3]. 4,000 can be gleaned from table XVIb (page 193 of the PDF) included in a 1978 Department of Defense report, History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977. The left side of the table indicating the number of weapons deployed is excised but it can be determined that the line markings represent one thousand each when one considers that as of early 1961 the numbers of weapons assigned to NATO countries was 500 [See Document 24]. See also Robert S. Norris, United States Nuclear Weapons Deployments Abroad, 1950-1977, Natural Resources Defense Council, 30 November 1999.
[4]. For U.S. nuclear relations with Italy, including a full account of the stockpile negotiations, see Leopoldo Nuti, La sfida nucleare. La politica estera italiana e le armi atomiche, 1945-1991. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008).
[5]. A 1989 oral history interview with Ernest Siracusa includes his observations about the negotiations with Italy.
[6]. See chapters 5 and 6 of John Murray Clearwater , U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Canada (Toronto, Dundurn Press, 1999).
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
