U.S. Government Debated Secret Nuclear Deployments in Iceland

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy toward Iceland, 1951-1960

Washington, D.C., August 15, 2016 – During the Cold War the United States never deployed nuclear weapons in Iceland but a recently declassified State Department record shows that U.S. government officials debated whether they should do so, including through secret deployments. A letter from a U.S. ambassador to Iceland in August 1960, published today by the National Security Archive, rejected such proposals, but the revelation of internal discussions on the subject ties in to the broader issue of the practice of U.S. nuclear deployments overseas during the Cold War.

The author of the recently released letter, U.S. Ambassador Tyler Thompson, was aware that Icelandic authorities wondered whether Washington had ever deployed nuclear weapons there. Recognizing that Iceland’s ties to NATO and the Western security system were fragile, he argued that if Reykjavik learned about a secret deployment, it could leave NATO. Furthermore, a “dramatic row” could “be expected to have an unfortunate effect on our friends and allies, to affect adversely our interests as far as neutrals are concerned, and to provide a propaganda field day for our enemies.”

All references to Iceland were deleted from the archival release of Thompson’s letter but his signature and other evidence confirms that the subject matter was Iceland. Further research indicated that nuclear weapons had been an issue in U.S. relations with Iceland since the Korean War when Icelandic officials asked whether the U.S. had deployment plans. Washington did not, but at the time Thompson wrote the letter U.S. officials were exploring nuclear storage options and secret deployments. Moreover, archival documents discovered by an Icelandic historian and published here today demonstrate that the United States had plans for at least one nuclear weapons storage site in the event World War III broke out.

Included in today’s posting are:

• A request for assurance in November 1951 by Foreign Minister Bjarni Benediktsson that the United States was not planning an “atomic base” in Iceland
• A State Department telegram from December 1951 authorizing the U.S. minister to assure Benediktsson that the United States “has no (rpt no) intention [of] going beyond letter or spirit of [the] defense agreement” which had been negotiated earlier in the year.
• A question posed by Foreign Minister Guðmundur Í. Guðmundsson to ambassador Thompson in June 1960: was the United States keeping atomic bombs at Keflavik air base or carrying them through the base in transit?
• A draft reply to Guðmundsson’s question indicating that nuclear weapons had not been deployed in Iceland but noting that CINCLANT [Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Command] had a “requirement” for a nuclear weapons storage site.

That the United States never deployed nuclear weapons to Iceland is a settled issue. In 1998, Robert S. Norris, William Arkin, and this writer published an article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in which they analyzed a recently declassified Defense Department history of U.S. nuclear deployments from 1945 to 1978. The study included several alphabetically arranged lists of nuclear weapons deployments in various parts of the world, including Western European members of NATO. Because many country and place names were excised the writers made educated guesses about some of them. One guess was Iceland. Certain details, such as Strategic Air Command activities during the 1950s, appeared to support the conclusion. The report in The Bulletin was widely publicized and when the news reached Iceland it created a political furor; the Icelandic government quickly denied the premise and the Clinton administration immediately supported the denial. In a significant departure from the usual “neither confirm nor deny” approach to nuclear weapons locations, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Reykjavik declared that putting Iceland on the list of Cold War nuclear deployment sites was “incorrect.” Further research led to the identification of Iwo Jima as the deployment site.[1]

The fact that the U.S. government never deployed nuclear weapons in Iceland does not mean, however, that it had no nuclear plans for Iceland. Previous research by Valur Ingimundarson and William Arkin demonstrates that during the Cold War Iceland was considered a potential storage site. As Ingimundarson discovered, at the end of the 1950s the U.S. Navy ordered the construction of a facility for storing nuclear depth bombs, an Advanced Underseas Weapons (AUW) Shop at the outskirts of Keflavik airport. The AUW facility was built by local Icelandic workers who thought its purpose was to store torpedoes. Whether Ambassador Thompson knew about it remains to be learned. During the 1980s Arkin reported that a presidential directive from the Nixon period treated Iceland as one of several “Conditional Deployment” locations, where nuclear weapons could be stored in the event of war. An AUW storage facility would make sense in that context. Nevertheless, all such arrangements were kept deeply secret because of the political sensitivity of the U.S. military presence in Iceland.[2] 

The heavily excised release of the Thompson letter suggests that the U.S. national security bureaucracy does not presently acknowledge that Iceland figured in American nuclear weapons planning during the Cold War. This is not surprising because the U.S. government has not acknowledged the names of a number of other countries which directly participated in the NATO nuclear weapons stockpile program during the Cold War (and later): Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey (only West Germany and the United Kingdom have been officially disclosed). As for Iceland’s status as a “conditional” deployment site, even though the horse left the barn years ago in terms of the previous archival releases, time will tell whether declassifiers take that into account when making future decisions on classified historical documents concerning Iceland and nuclear weapons.

DOCUMENTS

Notes

[1]. William Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and William Burr, “They Were,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November –December 1999, pp. 25-35; Arkin, Norris, and Burr, “How Much Did Japan Know,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February 2000, pp. 11-13, 78-79.

[2] . Valur Ingimundarson, The Rebellious Ally: Iceland, the United States, and the Politics of Empire, 1945-2006 (Dordrech, The Netherlands, 2011), 86; William Arkin, “Iceland Melts,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (50) January-February 2000, p. 80.

[3]. One relevant item that could show up in box 3181 was published in the Foreign Relations of the United States: a memorandum to the Deputy Under Secretary of State on “Additional Military Operating Requirements in Iceland,” dated 12 June 1952. It briefly recounts the discussions with the Icelandic foreign minister and mentions a NATO request to the U.S. and the Government of Iceland for a strategic air base in Iceland, but any further discussion of nuclear weapons was excised in the FRUS volume.