U.S.S. Britain: B-52s over Europe

“B-52s are back at RAF Fairford, and will be operating across the theater in what will be a very active deployment. Our ability to quickly respond and assure allies and partners rests upon the fact that we are able to deploy our B-52s at a moment’s notice,” announced Gen. Jeff Harrigian, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa commander. He continued: “Their presence here helps build trust with our NATO allies and partner nations and affords us new opportunities to train together through a variety of scenarios.”

Six B-52s landed at Fairford airbase in the UK at the end of August for what has been described as a ‘routine training mission’. General Harrigian and NATO allies might want to paint this mission as merely ‘routine’, reality tells us a different story.

For a start, the announcement that B-52s were “back at Fairford” tells you that they haven’t been there for some time. We know that the B-52s flew missions from this air-base during the invasion of Iraq and in earlier confrontations. After more than fifteen years, why return now?

Second, B-52s are not simple and straightforward aircraft. Hans Kristensen from the Federation of American Scientists identified two of the bombers deployed to Fairford as being nuclear capable. Were these aircraft carrying nuclear weapons when they landed? Were they carrying them when they took off again? What, exactly, was the intention of the US and NATO in deploying such aircraft with such a capability to Europe at the present moment?

Thirdly, the ‘training mission’ in which the B-52s were apparently engaged included flying over each and every NATO member state in Europe. This was not ‘training’, this was a show of force. Worse, the aircraft then went on to fly over Ukraine - not a NATO member-state - and made close approaches to the Russian border (20km away, according to some reports).

Rather than a ‘training mission’, we have seen an effort from the US and NATO to further increase nuclear tensions in Europe. Great Britain was used as a staging-post for this aggressive and ultimately dangerous show of nuclear force. Are we returning to the days when the UK was little more than a United States Ship off the coast of Europe?

Operation “Allied Sky”, as NATO named the stunt, was designed to show ‘adversaries’ - real and imagined - that should it choose to do so, the ‘Alliance’ is more than capable to delivering genocidal death from the skies.

To take such a course of action during ongoing developments in Belarus and ongoing tensions in Ukraine is completely unacceptable. We already know that the US views the whole of Europe as a ‘nuclear battleground’. In return, we say: make Europe a nuclear-weapons-free zone.