Date

Aug 1, 1962

Description

State Department lawyer John Pender remained involved in policy on nuclear weapons custody and eventually had an opportunity to see at first hand the procedures at U.S. nuclear sites in NATO Europe. He was one of two State Department observers with an AEC-Defense survey at the sites during April 1962.

Pender found that the situation—virtually fictitious U.S. custody and control—was close to the one described in the 1961 JCAE report. At Air Force sites, he wrote that U.S. “custodial personnel are … not guardians of the weapons; they do not control access to the fenced areas within which such weapons are positioned.” The custodial personnel “have only accountability responsibilities and are expected to rely upon local allied personnel to deal with any and all intruders.” Moreover, allied military personnel “could easily help themselves to the mated weapons whenever they felt it necessary to use them, without United States consent; there is no over-all considered or effective United States plan in being at the moment to prevent this eventuality.”

Referring to a statement made by General Herbert Loper to the JCAE in 1958 that “we hold in our possession and custody” the nuclear component, Pender observed that he found it “difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile” current arrangements with the “original impressions as to how United States forces would retain custody and control of stockpile weapons.”

On the weapons assigned to the Jupiter missiles deployed in Italy and Turkey, Pender argued that U.S. custody of the warheads was “essentially symbolic” because it was “impossible to evacuate or destroy the warheads” without the cooperation of the Italian or Turkish military. It was essentially a “joint custody” arrangement, not the “exclusive” control that was characterized in a U.S. aide memoire to the Soviet Union.

Before permissive action links became a reality, Pender believed that the Defense Department needed to make some interim arrangements to provide for certain control of the weapons. The U.S. would want “the Air Force custodians to be genuine guards not just symbols; that the aircraft should have some device under United States exclusive control preventing takeoff; that plans and temporary devices for quick destruction of Jupiter [launch control] consoles and the aircraft be worked out urgently.” Whether any of these proposals received further consideration remains to be learned.

Source

DNSA

Document published in following posting(s):

The U.S. Nuclear Presence in Western Europe, 1954-1962, Part II

Sep 16, 2020

L: L/SFP [Assistant Legal Adviser for Special Functional Problems] -J.H. Pender, “Operation of NATO Stockpile Program: Survey of Security Arrangements for United States Atomic Weapons with NATO Units (April 1962),” 1 August 1962, Secret, excised copy