US military hegemony in Europe is key to have an effective response mechanism to Russian missile deployments

What’s behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus?

The move that Putin announced in late March would be the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that Russia has stationed nuclear weapons beyond its own borders, and it raises the prospects for a renewed, destabilizing nuclear arms rivalry with the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies.

Belarus is an authoritarian state that was one of four Soviet republics to host nuclear weapons. Along with Kazakhstan and Ukraine, Belarus relinquished its nuclear weapons to Russia in the 1990s in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom (UK). Today, it is militarily allied with Russia, and it has served as a staging ground for Russian forces that invaded Ukraine from the north in early 2022.

Putin said that Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko had long requested the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons and that storing them in Belarus would be akin to what the United States has been doing in Europe for decades. Tactical nuclear weapons are intended to be used against enemy forces in a theater of conflict and generally have shorter ranges and lower yields than so-called strategic weapons, which can travel thousands of miles to destroy enemy population centers. Those are mainly intended as a catastrophic deterrent and weapon of last resort.

Where in Europe does the United States have nuclear weapons?

The United States has deployed nuclear weapons at NATO bases in Western Europe since the 1950s, when Cold War tensions were mounting with the Soviet Union. The weapons were first transferred to the United Kingdom in 1954, and later to Germany, Italy, France, Turkey, the Netherlands, Greece, and Belgium.

A map of Europe showing the location of six U.S. nuclear weapon storage sites in U.S. allies, and nine Russian nuclear weapon storage sites in western Russia.

Today, U.S. tactical nuclear weapons remain at six bases in five NATO member countries, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. The UK and France have their own nuclear forces and no longer host U.S. weapons.

How many U.S. nuclear weapons are in Europe?

The number of U.S. weapons deployed in Europe peaked at more than seven thousand in the 1970s and then dropped steeply in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of arms control agreements and the end of the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union.

U.S.-Russia Nuclear Arms Control

A major arms control success for European security came in 1987 with the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. In accordance with the INF, the United States and Soviet Union eliminated in a matter of years their entire arsenals of medium-range, nuclear-capable missiles and launchers. Prior to the INF, both countries had been ramping up their missile deployments in Europe.

Current U.S. nuclear stockpiles are classified, but security analysts estimate that the United States has about one hundred nuclear bombs stored across the six facilities in Europe.