The United States is moving to station nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom for the first time in 15 years due to extremely heightened tensions between the Biden administration and Russia, according to Pentagon documents recently seen by The Telegraph.
The U.S. military nuclear warheads — which are three times more explosive than the one dropped on Hiroshima in World War II — will be stationed at the Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, according to a report by The Telegraph, which obtained the procurement contracts for a new facility at RAF Lakenheath.
A line item for a new “surety dormitory” turned up in defense budget documents last year. The Pentagon uses the term “surety” to refer to the safe-keeping of nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense has so far refused to comment on analyst speculations that the DOD intended the surety dormitory for Lakenheath to allow the U.S. to house tactical nuclear weapons there.
In 2008, the U.S. had pulled back its nuclear weapons from the U.K. with the understanding that Cold War-era threats from Moscow had diminished significantly since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The gravely serious policy change comes amid warnings from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that NATO member nations should prepare for an all-out war with Russia.
'That must worry that madman Putin and all those other people who have declared war against the West'
Mike Parry argues that stationing US nuclear weapons at RAF Lakenheath would deter Vladimir Putin from aggression towards the West. pic.twitter.com/KSqTPhd0p5
— GB News (@GBNEWS) January 27, 2024
Senior NATO military official Admiral Rob Bauer announced last week that private citizens should be ready for a war with Russia in the next 20 years that could completely change the world as we know it.
Russia has previously said that Moscow would consider any move to redeploy the U.S. nuclear arsenal to Great Britain to be an “escalation” and that Russia would respond with “compensating counter-measures.”
Meanwhile, Sir Patrick Sanders, the retiring head of the British army, said the U.K. needs to recruit 45,000 new reservists and citizens to increase the size of its 74,000-soldier army for better military readiness in case of a possible conflict.
A recent assessment by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. found that the U.S. military is currently so “weak” that it may not be able to successfully conduct a major regional war while keeping up its other global commitments.
