US nuclear arms in Europe should now be removed: Senior expert
Press TV – April 19, 2012
A prominent international affairs expert says it is time for the United States to remove its tactical nuclear arsenal in Europe as the dangerous stockpiles “serve no legitimate strategic purpose.”
“[T]here is no good reason to keep them (the US tactical nuclear arsenal) there (Europe) and plenty of good reasons to remove them,” Stephen M. Walt wrote on the Foreign Policy website.
“It’s hard to imagine that these weapons are helping Dutch, German, or Turkish elites sleep soundly at night, or helping reassure their respective populations. If anything, local populations should worry about having these devices on their soil,” he added.
The senior international relations author described the situation as “rather ludicrous,” saying the theories that justified these weapons during the Cold War “never made sense” to him in the first place either.
“There is no threat of a conventional invasion of Western Europe, and thus no need to ‘link’ the US strategic deterrent to Europe’s defense via tactical weapons physically deployed on the continent,” he wrote.
Walt suggested that the US failure to discard the weapons will undermine the basic logic of nuclear disarmament, and threaten global efforts to “de-legitimize” nuclear weapons as status symbols, thereby dealing a blow to broader nuclear security objectives.
The persistence of the weapons, he added, will also question the pledges that the United States made when it signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Though there is no single agreed-upon definition of a tactical nuclear weapon, it is generally characterized by a lower yield and shorter range than a long-range (strategic) nuclear weapon. Tactical nuclear weapons are also sometimes referred to as battlefield nuclear weapons.
The US has not made public the number of its tactical nuclear weapons, but according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US is believed to deploy approximately 500 tactical nuclear warheads, including about 200 B61 gravity bombs deployed in five NATO states (Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands).
The US also maintains approximately 700-800 additional tactical warheads in storage.
The original pretext offered by the US for deploying the tactical nuclear weapons in Europe was to deter a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe.
US military leaders increasingly suggest that the European deployment serves no military purpose, and a growing group of NATO members, including host nations such as Germany and Belgium, have called for the removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe.
Given their small size and mobility, tactical nuclear weapons are also particularly vulnerable to loss or theft.
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An Essay on Paul Offit’s Bad Faith
Lies are Unbekoming | July 14, 2026
In June and October 1998, Paul Offit sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and voted twice in favor of Wyeth-Lederle’s RotaShield rotavirus vaccine: on June 25 to recommend it for routine childhood use, and on October 22 to add it to the federal Vaccines for Children Program.¹ Offit’s own rotavirus vaccine, developed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in partnership with Merck, was under development at the time. On October 22, 1999, exactly a year after his second vote, ACIP rescinded the RotaShield recommendation after CDC identified an elevated rate of intussusception in vaccinated infants. Intussusception is a bowel condition in which one segment of intestine telescopes into another and cuts off its own blood supply; without emergency intervention, it kills. The surveillance data at the point of withdrawal included hospitalizations and infant deaths. Offit abstained from the withdrawal vote.² Seven years later, Merck’s RotaTeq, which Offit co-invented, received ACIP recommendation for the same schedule slot. The patent sale netted him at least six million dollars by his own account, with other public estimates running higher.³
In June 2000, the United States House Committee on Government Reform published Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making. The report named Offit specifically. It concluded that “conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings.”⁴
In March 2015, Basic Books published Offit’s Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. The book accuses religious parents of moral failure. It calls for the elimination of religious exemption from vaccination law. It endorses criminal prosecution of parents who withhold pharmaceutical products from their children on religious grounds, including, under the Oregon sentencing guidelines Offit presents as a model, terms of up to twenty-five years in prison.⁵ … continue
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