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HomeVolume 29Could it have a nuclear bomb on board?

Could it have a nuclear bomb on board?

By ERWIN CHLANDA

If a US Air Force B-52 Stratofortress drops into Alice Springs – as American transport planes regularly do to supply Pine Gap – on the way to Tindal near Katherine where it will be based, it could have a nuclear bomb on board.

Local aircraft spotters will have no trouble to tell whether that B-52 is nuclear capable: Just look for the blister with a small fin.

“The presence of [the] fins on a B-52H aircraft indicates nuclear-capability, and the absence of fins indicates conventional-only capability,” says Richard Tanter, a senior researcher with the California-based Nautilus Institute, a frequent visitor to Alice Springs and prominent peace activist with the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN).

“The horizontal triangular fins are about 30 cm in length, attached to blisters mounted on the middle of the rear section of the port and starboard sides of the fuselage, several metres forward of the beginning of the tail structure.”

Professor Tanter and Vince Scappatura, using open sources, have disclosed this information in a report commissioned by the Nautilus Institute, formed in Berkeley, California in 1992.

A release from the report authors states: “Where governments, as in the case of Australia, refuse to state whether visiting nuclear-capable B-52 bombers may carry nuclear weapons, citing the US neither-confirm-nor-deny policy as justification, it amounts to a state of wilful ignorance on the strategic implications of supporting such operations.

Of the 76 B-52H bombers currently in the US active fleet, 46 can deliver strategic nuclear weapons. Another 30 have been converted, under the 2011 New START Treaty with Russia, to conventional-only capability.

How will Australians know if US nuclear-armed aircraft are deployed to Australia?” ask the authors.

The Albanese government has said it ‘understands and respects’ the US doctrine to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on US aircraft.

The first step is to identify which US aircraft entering Australia are capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

This study provides a reliable and transparent source for Australia and other host countries to distinguish between nuclear-capable and conventional-only B-52s bombers.

This research study, based on open sources, could have been – and should have been – carried out by the Australian government and provided to the public.”

[ED – We have asked Defence Minister Richard Marles for comment.]

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