Hi
Were Polaris missiles ever removed from Italy as part of the agreement that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis? If not, why not?
I look forward to your feedback.
Were they ever in Italy? My understanding was that some US short-range weaponry was removed from Turkey, which bordered on the USSR.
Apparently Polaris and Jupiter missiles were stationed in Turkey and Italy. Italy is rarely mentioned on websites and my question is what happened to the missiles in Italy in 1962? My understanding was that Khrushchev demanded the removal of missiles from both countries as a precondition for coming to terms.
At the same time as working with the United States, Italy explored working within the NATO Multilateral Force (MLF) concept to develop a European nuclear force. MLF was a concept promoted by the United States to place all NATO nuclear weapons not operated by their own services under a joint control, with dual-key control by American and European forces. For the United States, the MLF was an attempt to balance the desire from other members to play a role in nuclear deterrence with their interest in bringing all existing and potential Western nuclear arsenals under the umbrella of a more cohesive NATO alliance.[9] Italy had long argued for nuclear cooperation, with Minister of Defence Paolo Emilio Taviani saying on 29 November 1956 that the Italian government was trying to persuade their “Allies to remove the unjustified restrictions regarding the access of NATO countries to new weapons.”[4] The policy was pursued by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and formed a fundamental part of the negotiations around the Nassau Agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom and the attempted accession of the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961.[10]
Under MLF, the United States proposed that various NATO countries operate UGM-27 Polaris IRBM on seaborne platforms, principally nuclear submarines. The Italian Navy took the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi out of service and rebuilt the ship between 1957 and 1961 as a guided missile cruiser with launchers for four Polaris missiles.[6] Shortly afterwards, in December 1962, Italian Minister of Defence Giulio Andreotti officially asked the United States for assistance in developing nuclear propulsion for its fleet.[3]
Date October 16–28, 1962
(naval blockade of Cuba ended November 20, 1962)
Location Cuba
Result
Withdrawal of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles from Cuba
Withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy
Agreement with the Soviet Union that the United States would never invade Cuba without direct provocation
Creation of a nuclear hotline between the United States and the Soviet Union
The deployment of arms abroad was another crucial factor in the balance of international power. By 1962, 30 “Jupiter” Medium Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBMs) had been stationed in Italy by the United States, with a further 15 in Turkey. (See photograph above.) This was in addition to 60 “Thor” medium range missiles deployed in Britain, each with equivalent power and range to the Jupiter. These European bases provided another 126 megatons of nuclear throw-weight capable of reaching the Soviet Union.
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In response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to agree to Cuba’s request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion."
The UGM-27 ‘Polaris’ submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) was never deployed on Italian Navy vessels or with any foreign nation other than the United Kingdom on their dedicated ballistic missile submarines (Resolution class). As your cite notes (link appears to be broken but reading from your cited text) the Italian Navy cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi was outfitted to carry four launchers, and three other cruisers were modified to accept launch tubes and equipment but never outfitted with such. Test firings were performed from the Giuseppe Garibaldi but it was never deployed operationally with missiles or live W47 warheads. With the growing SLBM Atlantic and Pacific fleets with global ‘deterrence patrol’ deployments of alternating crews there was no need for foreign basing and the complications that came with it except to honor the ‘special relationship’ with the UK, which frankly had more to do with prestige and national pride than deterrence.
The PGM-19 ‘Jupiter’ intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) was deployed in both Italy (where the missiles were maintained by a combination of Italian and American personnel bit warheads controlled by USAF) and Turkey (where the entire system was maintained and controller by USAF personnel). Unlike the PGM-17 ‘Thor’ IRBM in the UK, the host countries for the Jupiter had no actual executive authority over launch. The forward basing was considered necessary to counter a surprise bomber attack of Western Europe and the continental United States and Canada, but there were serious security and maintainability issues with the Jupiter basing (in at least three cases the weapon system was partially activated by lightning strikes) and they were largely considered a stopgap until the CGM/HGM-16 ‘Atlas’ and HGM-25A ‘Titan I’ intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems could be deployed from the United States.
By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (16–28 October 1962) both the Atlas and Titan I successor HGM-25C ‘Titan II’ missiles were on their way to being operationally deployed (technically Atlas began deployment in September 1962 but operational problems would habe prevented it from being flown) and the LGM-30A/B/F/G ‘Minuteman’ family of solid propellant ICBMs which would be the backbone of the land-based leg of the “nuclear triad” for the next half century (and still operational today) were under initial development. Although part of the secret agreement between the United States and Soviet Union was the removal of missiles from Turkey and Italy, in truth it had always been planned and at most gave motivation to speed up the removal by a few months at most.
Stranger
Thank you Stranger on a Train. So the UGM-27 ‘Polaris’ submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) was not an issue, since it was never deployed. But (and here is where I’m confused) were these missiles on Italian soil? You don’t refer to any removal of missiles (the Polaris or Jupiter) from Italian soil. Was the precondition for an end to the crisis (16–28 October 1962) not the removal of missiles? Was Khrushchev referring to specific missiles or any missiles pointed at the Soviet Union? I hope you can clarify these points.
There were two squadrons of fifteen missiles each distributed among five launch pads (each pad had three missiles that could be emplaced and fired in sequence, albeit taking the better part of a day to emplace a new missile and fuel it for launch) located around Gioia del Colle Air Base in Italy. There was a third squadron in Turkey located around what was then Çiğli Air Base. All Jupiter missiles and associated weapons were removed per agreement (all references I’ve seen refer to tenets of the agreement or concurrence but I’ve never seen any written agreement or communication; Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin appear to have communicated about this only verbally, and depending who you read it was either a tit-for-tat agreement or simply a concurrence that the United States was going to remove the missiles on the already planned timeline). The Polaris missile was never operationally deployed in Italy (or Turkey) and the plan to install them on surface cruisers didn’t meet strategic muster, especially with US Navy ballistic missile submarines which could patrol for months in the North Atlantic and Western Pacific in a 20 minute flight time from the USSR without the security hassles of making nuclear weapons available to even friendly foreign powers.
All of these weapons were strictly targetted at the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact nations. While rapid retargetting capability now exists, at the time retargetting the fairly primitive guidance system was the work of hours, and of course these missiles didn’t have sufficent range to target nations on other continents. All of these weapons, and indeed all foriegn-based US owned nuclear-armed ballistic missiles outside of West Germany were removed from service by the end of 1963.
Stranger
Thank you Stranger On A Train. Very clear now. It’s surprising how little information there is on this matter.
The ending of the Jupiter and Polaris programmes were incidentally the impetus for theItalian nuclear and ballistic missile programme. Italy hoped to develop nuclear weapons based upon a BM on surface ships and this continued until the Italians joined the NPT in 1975.
I am amazed to this day that Turkey never started a nuclear programme.
I suspect that the US and Israel would probably not welcome a Turkish nuclear program. Even if it got off the ground I wonder if Turkey would be trusted with nuclear weapons by the majority of countries with nuclear weapons.
The US has been opposed to every other country’s nuclear programme, so kind of irrelevant. Turkey has a recent history of losing wars and shytloads of territory to Russia as well as a justuified fear that any Western security guarentee is not worth the paper its written on.
Not quite true; the United States supported supported (with some degree of reticence) the British nuclear weapon program, offering technical assistance (after refusing to share actual weapon designs), access to the Nevada test range, and the Polaris A-3 and Trident D-5 missile systems as well as the penetration aide system design that became “Chevaline”. It also tacitly supported the Israeli nuclear program, allowing expertise and turning a blind eye to cooperation between Israel and South Africa.
In general, though, the US has opposed proliferation while increasing its own arsenal by orders of magnitude during the Cold War, which is a difficult dichotomy from which to hold the ostensible moral high ground. On the other hand, it has offered to share certain elements of permissive action link designs to other nuclear weapon capable nations to help secure nuclear weapons from inadvertant or unauthorized use, although nations have often been reluctant for fear of introducing a design weakness into their weapon systems.
Stranger
Thanks Stranger. To fill some of this out, the British bomb was developed with only very limited US input - “support” however reticent is stretching it! At the end of the war there was a very deliberate effort to exclude the UK from the knowledge base developed in the Manhattan Project. What knowledge was exchanged in these early days - before the first British weapons test in 1952 - was mostly at the individual level, primarily with William Penney the father of the British bomb. Penney had been the senior Brit at Los Alamos and very well respected by his American colleagues, maintaining good contacts even after the passing of the McMahon Act.
For full history of the development of the British A-bomb, Test Of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb by Brian Cathcart (available on Kindle) is a good read.
It was after the (mostly) independent development of a British weapon that Anglo-American nuclear cooperation - sharing data, use of test sites, etc - got underway.
This whole topic is one I’ve always had a personal interest in as my dad was the RAF range safety officer at Maralinga in 1956 and, as a 4 year old, I lived at RAF Feltwell, one of the Thor missile bases in Britain in the late 50s.
Whats your opinion on the Alfa missile and the Italian nuclear programme? Do you think that an Italian surface ship based Independent national deterrent would have added to NATO security or been just another headache?
I don’t really know much about the Alfa missile other than that it provided much of the experience with solid propellant rockets that fed into the later Vega and Ariane space launchers. I think a surface ship basing for nuclear-armed long range ballistic missiles is problematic from a security standpoint, though. With nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines they can at least go on patrol for months wihtout requiring resupply or being (ostensibly) discoverable, but diesel surface ships are trackable and require tendering for fuel, and are far more vulnerable to attack. And I’m not clear on the necessity of it; the deterrence relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was not significantly altered by the small number of nuclear weapons maintained by the UK, and can’t see Italy adding to that calculus. France maintained is own independent arsenal (force de frappe or force de dissuasion) largely out of political expediency (to be capable of action independent of NATO, and internally justifying the much strengthened executive power in the Fifth Republic) even though any exchange between the USSR and France would almost certainly be part of or instigate a larger response between the US and USSR.
Italy having a separate arsenal seems like it could only be destabilizing , and of course costly for Italy to develop and maintain. And, from what little I’ve read on the program, that seems to have been roughly the conclusion of the Italian government as well. However, if someone has deeper knowledge on it or a reference that delves into it I’d love to learn more about it.
Stranger
You might also ask, asThe Washington Post did in July 2016, if it is a good idea for the US to pre-position nukes there: an “estimated 50-90” B-61s, as of 2016, according to this chart somebody somewhere came up with in Wiki “Nuclear sharing” and posted without discernible-at-a-glance sourcing.
As if any of us know.
FWIW, relative to OP, the size of Turkey’s US treasure house is either the same or nearly double that of its runner-up, Italy.
I thought they had moved them to Romania.