Abstract
In the November/December issue of the Bulletin, my co-authors (Robert S. Norris and William Burr) and I wrote about secret Cold War deployments of U.S. nuclear weapons. We got one country wrong, as we explain on page 11. Iceland is not the country named in Appendix B of the partially declassified Pentagon history; Iwo Jima is.
I've been wrong on Iceland before. But the nuclear history book for this nato ally is hardly closed, and the American government, which went out of its way to deny our conclusion, still has a lot to explain.
In May 1980, Iceland was the subject of my first radio interview as a nuclear weapons “expert.” A resolution had been introduced in Iceland's parliament calling for a law prohibiting the storage or transportation of nuclear weapons anywhere in Iceland, its territorial waters, or its air space.
The Center for Defense Information, where I worked, had identified Iceland as a nuclear base in 1975, and now Icelandic State Radio wanted to do an update. Wet behind the ears, I decided to look for new information to confirm the pesky rumor.
In an innocuous Pentagon office that kept bulging files on military bases worldwide for soldiers and sailors to check out potential assignments, I found the “Welcome Aboard” brochure for the U.S. base at Keflavik. “The Marine Barracks provides security guards for the U.S. Naval Station in accordance with the provision of op-navinst C5510.83B to meet immediate contingency requirements,” it said.
I then learned in the Pentagon library that Chief of Naval Operations (opnav) Instruction 5510.83B was the “Navy Nuclear Weapons Security Manual,” a classified document.
Not quite a smoking gun. But close. The ensuing radio interview, in the words of a declassified State Department telegram, created a “real stir” in Iceland.
Four years later, I obtained a copy of an October 7, 1974 Top Secret White House document, National Security Decision Memorandum 274, titled “Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization for fy75.” Signed by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger for President Nixon, it gave presidential approval for stockpile dispersals worldwide.
Appendix C of the memorandum contained a list of “Conditional Deployments”—that is, locations where nuclear weapons were authorized to be deployed in wartime but not in peacetime. Iceland jumped off the page.
In February 1985, after I had given a copy of the document to the foreign minister of Iceland, Leslie Gelb, then a New York Times reporter, wrote that the host nations involved—Canada, Iceland, Bermuda, Portugal, and the Philippines—had been unaware of the deployment plans. The fallout was worldwide—governments demanded explanations.
And what an explanation Iceland got. On March 14, 1985, Secretary of State George Schultz and Assistant Secretary Richard Burt made an unscheduled stop in Reykjavik on their return from the funeral of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The deployment plan, Burt said, was “never approved by the U.S. president.” Calling the document a “theoretical case drawn up by unauthorized persons,” he said there was nothing to relate to Iceland on the matter. Case closed.
Fast forward to 1999. When the Clinton White House released a list of presidential directives from the Truman era to the present, the government inadvertently released proof that Schultz and Burt lied in Reykjavik 14 years earlier. The list for the Nixon years includes nsdm 274—same title, same date, the very document once downplayed by the U.S. government.
It may well be that nuclear weapons were never permanently stationed in Iceland, but in every other way during the Cold War, the island nation was fully integrated into the Pentagon's worldwide nuclear plans.
Iceland, like Japan, maintained a “fig leaf” non-nuclear status. When Norris, Burr, and I mistakenly fingered Iceland in the November/December Bulletin, we again caused a flap in Iceland. The Pentagon denied that nuclear weapons were ever stationed there. With that, the furor calmed down.
The Icelandic government and media seem only too happy to forget the whole business. But in doing so, the country ignores the bald-faced lie told to their government in 1985, and they evade Iceland's long-term role in preparations for nuclear warfare.
There is much we still do not know about the specifics of Cold War nuclear war plans. Historians have hardly scratched the surface of Iceland's involvement.