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USA in Germany

Germany has no nuclear weapons of its own, but it stores 20 or fewer U.S. B-61 nuclear gravity bombs at Büchel air base, and maintains a fleet of aging Tornado fighter bombers to deliver them.

Russia in Belarus

Shoigu said the documents he was signing in Minsk concerned the process for storing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus

Naive question, but what are the concrete military and custody differences between both cases?

  • who has physical custody of the bombs? Host? US/Russia? mixed?

  • which chain of command do the custodians report to?

  • who has the launch codes and authority?

  • as far as is known, how many weapons of what type in both cases?

This is only for comparison of two very similar-looking phenomenon. How would a dispassionate third party compare them, by looking at the deployments themselves, rather than the larger political and military context around them (especially events since 2022)?

What it is not is asking for are claims like:

  • "Russia/US is very nice and wouldn't attack anyone".

  • "US/Russia is a warmongering threat and Russia/US needs those nukes for protection".

  • "Germany/Belarus is a US/Russian lackey"

  • Not all that interested in communicated generic nuclear doctrine either (unless it concerns specifically those hosted nukes). For now nukes are very much taboo and countries' pronouncements about their use tend to be heavily influenced by PR considerations.

What do we know about the similarities and differences in both cases of the conditions of those deployments? I realize that Russian move is recent and not much may be known yet. But they must have communicated something about what their intentions are, if only for internal/external PR reasons.

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    The renowned Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg has tried to sum up what they know about NATO nuclear sharing policy, and it is almost nothing. A recent radio interview of its fellow Götz Neuneck about the stationing of Russian weapons in Belarus is rich in political analysis, but very short on facts. You are asking about military secrets.
    – ccprog
    Commented May 31, 2023 at 0:51
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    @ccprog I honestly did not know that. I assumed that NATO's command had at least somewhat indicated, to the public, the general context of their deployment, including who controlled them. I mean, in most cases, launch codes authority within a nation are somewhat known: for example, many people "know" about the the POTUS nuclear football, although they may know less about how SLBMs get managed (there are articles about UK sub captains getting sealed letters from the PM). The Pershing deployment in the 80s was much talked about. So the idea that no one knows anything here is... surprising
    – Italian Philosopher
    Commented May 31, 2023 at 1:16
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    Usual story - you are trying to be impartial/neutral and people think you are pro-Russian and downvote. Never mind that your impartiality concerns accepting verifiable facts and not morally evaluating actions/decisions of the Russian government.
    – Wag the mainstream media dog
    Commented May 31, 2023 at 7:58
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    I don't d/v because I think the OP is pro-Russian, I d/v because they didn't do basic research. I did a Google Search of bullet point 1, "who has physical custody of nuclear weapons in Germany" and the top link answers it succinctly.
    – CGCampbell
    Commented May 31, 2023 at 11:08
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    I think the key difference between NATO nuclear sharing and the new Russian deployment is that NATO nuclear sharing was in place during several rounds of arms reduction talks between the US and the Soviet Union and then Russia, and hence formed part of the status quo, even if it was not part of strategic or intermediate forces. The removal of Soviet weapons from Belarus also was the subject of international agreements, and now Russia wants to change it back.
    – o.m.
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 4:35

1 Answer 1

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Here is a map of currently (publicly known) nuclear weapon deployments by NATO and Russia in Europe:

Nuclear weapons in Europe

Source: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/nuclear-weapons-europe-mapping-us-and-russian-deployments

As you can see here, so far nobody stationed nuclear weapons directly at the border between NATO and the Russian influence zone. The weapons in Germany still have Poland and the Baltics as a buffer zone. There is technically not a buffer state between Turkey and Russia, but there is the black sea. NATO started having a land-border with the nuclear-armed parts of the Russian sphere of influence when Estonia, Latvia and now Finland joined (while there are speculations that there might be Russian nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad, those were never officially confirmed). While the NATO eastwards expansion could and usually is seen as a non-nuclear escalation from the Russian perspective, it can hardly be considered a nuclear escalation because none of these states have nuclear weapons and permission to use the airspaces of these countries would not really be required for launching a nuclear attacks on most relevant targets in Russia.

So stationing nuclear weapons in Belarus can be seen as a nuclear escalation, because it puts nuclear weapons directly at the border to the NATO-countries Poland and Lithuania.

Questions about custody of nuclear weapons, or who can fire which weapons with whose permission (legally and practically), is hard to answer with definite certainty. Countries don't like to be too open about this, because uncertainty increases the efficiency of nuclear deterrent. For example, the official narrative about the nuclear weapons in Germany is that they are owned by the United States but can only be launched using German fighter jets, so the cooperation of both would be required to use them. But would it be theoretically possible for the Luftwaffe to just seize those missiles and use them without US permission? Or would it theoretically be possible for the US Air Force to smuggle those missiles out of the bunkers and to their own airbases in Europe to use them with their own fighters? We don't know, and as long as Putin doesn't know either, that's just an advantage for Germany and the United States.

But the official policy of NATO is and always has been that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all of them, so in case of nuclear war, any such bureaucratic safeguards would be a mere formality.

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  • Quite informative, on a subject I realize now is less well-documented than I thought. 2 remarks: #1 the immediate proximity bit is historically not that important, since there were border-on-border deployments during the Cold War, when the Warsaw Pact was "the adversary". #2 If as indicated elsewhere US nukes are mostly B61 "standard aircraft bombs", then one needs to consider that is a weapon system of dubious efficacy in the opening stages of a nuclear war, as they rely on planes penetrating enemy air defenses. So perhaps more political than military significance, perhaps so by design
    – Italian Philosopher
    Commented May 31, 2023 at 17:09
  • I'm firmly convinced that both of these deployments are purely for political reasons, not operational ones. If either side were to use small numbers of tactical nuclear weapons, they would come from their homelands. If either side were to use large numbers of tactical nuclear weapons, a strategic exchange would follow to rearrange the rubble.
    – o.m.
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 4:38
  • "NATO started having a land-border with Russia when Estonia, Latvia and now Finland joined." It started when Poland joined, with Kaliningrad Oblast.
    – Tadeusz Kopec
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 10:08
  • @TadeuszKopec I excluded Kaliningrad because there are no nuclear weapons there (officially). I edited the answer to make that more explicit by pointing out that there was no land-border with exclaves of Russia that didn't had nuclear weapons.
    – Philipp ♦
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 10:20
  • @Philipp why don't we know whether Germany can use the missiles if it seizes them? According to Wikipedia the weapons cannot be armed without the US codes. Presumably that means the weapons cannot be armed without the warheads being re-engineered by the Germans.
    – wrod
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 19:15

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