U.S. Discloses Cold War Sites for A-Weapons

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon for the first time is acknowledging Cold War locations of nuclear weapons outside the United States, including naval depth bombs, ready for arming, in Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

The names of nine places where bombs or bomb components minus their nuclear charges were located from 1951 to 1977 are revealed in a 332-page official Pentagon history. The names of 18 other locations were blacked out by government censors before the document was released to Robert S. Norris, a private specialist on nuclear weapons and author of numerous books on the topic.

Using other documents, Norris and his co-authors said they could identify 17 of those other locations, ringing the globe from Canada to Iceland to South Korea and Japan.

The nine nuclear weapon locations named in the Pentagon document are Cuba, Puerto Rico, Britain, West Germany, the U.S. territories of Guam, Johnston Island and Midway, and Alaska and Hawaii, which were U.S. territories in the early years of the Cold War.

Even with material blacked out, the “History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons,” published in February 1978 as a top secret document, reveals new information about the location, timing and types of U.S. nuclear weapon deployments.

“It shows a huge expanse of nuclear weapons around the globe,” Norris said Tuesday.

Today the only remaining full-time U.S. nuclear deployments outside the United States are in Europe.