Yankee Bombs Go Home: Foreign Minister Wants US Nukes out of Germany
Reacting to Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world, German Foreign Minister Steinmeier has called for American nuclear weapons to be removed from Germany. His stance is in opposition to Chancellor Merkel, who wants to keep the bombs to secure Germany's say in NATO.
US President Barack Obama's recent calls for "a world without nuclear weapons" may have been slammed by some critics as dangerously naive. But it has prompted German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to come up with his own, more achievable goal: a Germany without American nuclear weapons.
The German air force base at Büchel: American nuclear weapons are still stored in Germany.
Sources in the Defense Ministry, which is under the control of Merkel's center-right Christian Democrats, also said that only countries which host US nuclear bombs could "have a serious say" within NATO.
However opponents of nuclear sharing currently have a majority in the Bundestag. The far-left Left Party and the Greens want nuclear weapons out of Germany, as do the Social Democrats' defense experts. After Obama's speech, Guido Westerwelle, the leader of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, also called for the warheads to be "removed."
After German reunification in 1990, however, the US withdrew almost all its warheads from Europe. Nowadays US bombs are still stored in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey, as well as Germany, where they are kept in a Bundeswehr air base in Büchel in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Altogether around 100 American nukes are stored in Europe. However a commission of experts told US Defense Secretary Robert Gates last December that the warheads have "no military value" and that storing them safely consumes "enormous sums of money."
NATO's Nuclear Planning Group, which in the past only included countries with nuclear weapons, now includes all the alliance's member states except France. States such as Greece and Canada which abandoned nuclear sharing years ago, still participate in the group on equal terms.
dgs -- spiegel
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