Nuclear Threats Are Back

Washington responds to Russia with escalation

C-17 Globemaster III

The United States has quietly deployed nuclear weapons to the United Kingdom for the first time since 2008, or 17 years ago.

The move has taken place literally without comment by Congress and very little from the American press, both of which seem more interested in Jeffrey Epstein than the threat of thermonuclear war. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, apparently busy with more important things — like fussing with military grooming standards and doing pushups with the troops — has said nothing about deployment of new nuclear bombs to Britain. President Donald Trump hasn’t said anything either, most likely because he doesn’t even know it’s happened.

Defense Secretary doing pushups

The past three years has seen consistent nuclear brinksmanship over Ukraine, with Putin and company making constant threats (and Washington under the Biden administration counter-threatening). Moscow  has threatened to alter its own nuclear posture to “counter” NATO, including making its first deployment of nuclear arms to Eastern Europe (in Belarus) since the end of the Cold War.

“Our relevant departments are monitoring developments in this area and formulating tasks to ensure our security against the backdrop of what is happening,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says.

Moscow has been actively preparing nuclear storage facilities in Belarus, though experts like Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists believe that the warheads have not yet been deployed. The U.S. sent new B61 nuclear bombs to its base at RAF Lakenheath, where F-15E Strike Eagles are deployed, earlier this month.

The world’s two largest nuclear powers beefing up their nuclear warfighting capabilities in Europe might seem like something Congress would want to weigh in on; but the two officials in charge of the Armed Services Committee, Senators Roger Wicker and Jack Reed, haven’t said a word about it. Neither even responded to my request for comment about the new deployment.

In fact, no one in Congress has. And it’s not like they’ve got anything better to do, having knocked off for an over month-long recess that ends on September 1. But who wants to do homework during summer break? Certainly not Congressman Eric Swalwell, who posted a video of himself lifting weights on X with the caption:

“I should be working right now. But Republicans shut down Congress. So instead, I’m pumping iron at the gym.”

From Hegseth to Swalwell, our leaders are working out while Rome smolders.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Tom Unterrainer called the new American deployment “a major escalation in nuclear dangers” and is demanding that Prime Minister Keir Starmer publicly acknowledge it so there can at least be a debate.

Per Unterrainer’s statement:

"It is completely inappropriate for the public to be finding out about such a major escalation in nuclear dangers via reports in British newspapers and the assessments of security experts.”

He makes a good point: it really is a disgrace that we often only learn about national security matters of immense public interest like this when the details tumble out into the open source record, as happened here. In this instance, aviation enthusiasts earlier this month noticed a C-17A Globemaster III depart from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, home to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, before landing at the British air base Lakenheath, which is also known to have contracted for new nuclear storage sites to be built (thanks to another unintentional disclosure). 

We know everything about Hegseth’s interest in things like false eyelashes, but knowing about the Pentagon’s change in nuclear posture shouldn’t have to happen by accident.

The UK Defence Ministry responded to inquiries by local experts by saying that it can “neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at a given location,” a statement echoed by the Pentagon as a matter of course. They could confirm it — if sufficient pressure was put on the military by their civilian leaders (or by members of the supposed coequal branch of government). But there isn’t pressure, so the deployment of nuclear weapons will be known by the Russians, and by the experts, but not by the people.

Better put pressure on the civilian leaders, then. Not just in the Defense Department, but Congress as well, which seems to think it can get away without exercising oversight of the national security state on even the most obvious matters of public interest, as this case shows. 

If pressed, apologists for congressional laziness might argue that American nuclear weapons are already currently deployed to Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and (very precariously) to Turkey. But unlike the UK, all of these countries are vulnerable to local politics and European anxiety about nuclear war, so the prospects of their being thrown out is somewhat possible. 

But now that Europe and NATO has adopted an all-for-one-and-one-for-all policy in response to the Ukraine war, where “solidarity” is more important than sanity, throwing the UK into the mix all but ensures that the controversial nuclear bombs will likely remain forever. In the case of the UK the United States has a partner that embraces nuclear weapons (having its own arsenal), but one who will stand against others who agitate to remove theirs. 

The other possibility for the future is that the UK deployment is to allow nuclear bombs to be removed from the other countries, NATO then being able that the UK-based nuclear bombs makes sufficient linkage between what happens in Europe and Washington.

In either case, nuclear war in Europe is back on the table, launched in London, so one-for-all the Europeans are working against their own security.

Correction: the nuclear deployment represents the first since 2008, not the Cold War, as an earlier version of this article said.

— Edited by William M. Arkin