The United States military has moved nuclear weapons to British soil for the first time in close to two decades, new analysis indicates.
Open-source analysts identified an aircraft taking off from the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, bound for the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force (RAF) base at Lakenheath, in the east of England. Kirtland Air Force Base is the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Nuclear Weapons Center, a main storage site for nuclear weapons.
A U.S. defense official told Newsweek the U.S. did not comment on the "status or location of strategic weapons." A spokesperson for the British Defense Ministry said: "It remains a long-standing UK and NATO policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at a given location."
Speculation has long surrounded whether the East England RAF base could once again host U.S. nuclear weapons. RAF Lakenheath hosted American nuclear weapons for several decades until 2008.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said in 2023 that U.S. military budget documents "strongly" implied the Air Force intended to re-establish its nuclear weapons mission in the U.K. RAF Lakenheath—the home of the 48th Fighter Wing, dubbed "Liberty Wing"—has been upgraded in recent years.
If Washington moves nuclear weapons back into the U.K., "it would break with decades of policy and planning and reverse the southern focus of the European nuclear deployment that emerged after the end of the Cold War," the FAS said in updated analysis earlier this year.
A USAF C-17 Globemaster III from the 97th Air Mobility Wing participates in the Miami Beach Air and Sea Show on May 25, 2024. AP/NewsBase
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