London-Sana
The British Guardian newspaper revealed that Britain is moving to modernize military caches on its soil to store American nuclear weapons, 14 years after the closure of these sites.
The newspaper pointed out that the administration of US President Joe Biden requested that Britain be added to its defense budget for 2023 among the list of countries in which investment in infrastructure and storage sites for “special weapons” is taking place, along with Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, which are the countries in which the United States stores about 100 bombs. Nuclear B61.
Hans Christensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that the British site that is being upgraded to store nuclear bombs is the American air base in "Lackenheath", 100 kilometers north-east of London.
The Guardian indicated that the United States withdrew the B61 nuclear bombs from its base in Lakenheath in 2008, marking the end of nearly half a century of keeping American nuclear stockpiles in Britain, but the West's talk about these weapons renewed against the backdrop of the crisis in Ukraine and the Russian military operation in it.
The US defense budget request for 2023 shows that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is close to completing an infrastructure investment program worth $384 million in military caches in several countries, including Britain, with the aim of modernizing security procedures, communications systems, and developing facilities.
As part of the United States' plan to modernize the weapons, the B61 has been upgraded with a new guidance system called the B6112 and is scheduled to go into full production in May.
Britain has become "keen to play a more assertive role when it comes to its own nuclear deterrence" and announced last year that it would increase its stockpile of nuclear warheads by 40 percent to 260, the first such increase since the end of the Cold War.
It is noteworthy that Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed last month that the desire of the Ukrainian authorities to acquire nuclear weapons was a serious challenge and that the Nazi regime in Kyiv could have obtained weapons of mass destruction, which prompted Russia to start its own military operation.
Russia's permanent representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, confirmed that his country has information about the existence of a network of 30 biological centers in Ukraine that contain toxic and dangerous materials with the support of the United States, pointing out that there are 140 containers containing external parasites of bats, which represent dangerous biological materials that can spread in pan europe.
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