Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: bayonetbrant

The entire 59th Ordnance Brigade were the nuclear weapons custodians for EUCOM.

There were 2 ORD BNs that held the theater-level weapons for the US, and the USAAGs were all partnered with allied nations to provide the tac nuke warheads for their launch delivery systems. So you had units like the 290th married up with the Danes and the north flank of the German army. Another group was paired up with the Brits. There was another that supported the Dutch and Belgians. The 557th supported the Germans, including a detachment that was co-located with a Luftwaffe unit, b/c the German Pershing 1A missiles belonged to them, rather than the Bundeswehr.

They had no organic launch vehicles, and other than local security, no real fighting presence. There were ORD COs in each group that were responsible for warhead maintenance, and those companies included platoons of nuclear demolition engineers in case either (a) the nukes were needed to be used in "demo" mode (not really expected, but occasionally trained) or (b) they needed to destroy the warheads in place to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.

There was a lot of NATO propaganda from a lot of allied countries - Holland, Belgium, Greece, Denmark, (especially) Germany - that they owned no nuclear weapons. That was true. We owned the nukes; they owned the delivery systems.

The 59th ORD BDE were the custodians of those nukes and they were partnered up with allied nations all over western Europe in little 30- and 40-man dets on allied bases and kasernes, working with foreign troops every day. And it's amazing that with such a huge - and sensitive - mission, no one knows who they were or what they did, even today.