‘Those silly things are still there’: US nukes stored in Netherlands
Around 22 US nuclear weapons are still being stored in the Netherlands, former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers told Dutch TV. WikiLeaks had previously leaked information that US missiles were being kept there as late as 2009.
Lubbers, who was President of the Netherlands from 1982 to 1994,
said the nuclear weapons were kept underground in purpose-built
strongrooms at the Volkel airbase in Brabant.
“I would never have thought those silly things would still be
there in 2013,” he said in an interview for a documentary on
National Geographic. He added that to his understanding of
“military thinking,” keeping the missiles there was
“absolutely pointless.”
The Dutch military has so far refrained from commenting on the
former Prime Minister’s remarks, though the presence of nuclear
weapons on Dutch soil had long been suspected. WikiLeaks
confirmed their existence in 2009 when it published thousands of
US diplomatic cables on its whistleblowing site. A 2007 report
included in the leak said US nuclear weapons had been stored in a
vault underneath the Volkel airbase since the 1960s, the era of
the Cuban missile crisis.
The leaks suggested that some 200 bombs were being stored across
Europe in Belgium, Germany Turkey and the Netherlands.
The publication of this classified data was condemned by European
and US politicians alike as "illegal and dangerous.
