Government and opposition members of Britain’s House of Commons joined forces today to express grave concern over last week’s U.S. Senate rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. An early-day motion signed by 157 members of the Commons, nearly a quarter of the total, urged the government, which has already criticized the vote on the treaty that bans nuclear tests, to make further representations to Washington. The motion says the U.S. vote could undermine nuclear nonproliferation, and urged the Senate to reconsider.
Meanwhile, the United States stores about 12,000 nuclear weapons in at least 15 other nations, at Pacific U.S. bases and on Navy ships at the height of the Cold War, this according to a report published today in a scientific journal. The report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says U.S. nuclear bombs, missiles or depth charges were in Canada, Cuba, Iceland, Japan, Morocco, the Philippines, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan and a half-dozen NATO states between 1955 and the late 1970s. The weapons were stationed in some countries, including Iceland, without the knowledge of the officials there, this according to the authors of the report, William Arkin, Robert Norris and William Burr, largely based on a tightly edited official Pentagon history of the custody and deployment of U.S. nuclear arms between the mid-1945 and September 1977.