BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK
NATO has quietly begun an annual exercise to practice how it might launch a nuclear attack during a crisis. The drills follow massive Russian war games along its borders with the alliance, including a test of new nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, as well as increasing reports of electronic and cyber attacks likely originating in Russia.
On Oct. 16, 2017, NATO personnel in Belgium and Germany kicked off this latest iteration of the alliance’s main nuclear deterrence exercise, nicknamed Steadfast Noon. Publicly available U.S. military documents describe its main goal simply as “operations plan validation.” This year's iteration involves operations at Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium and Büchel Air Base in Germany, where the United States maintains stores of B61 nuclear bombs.he North Atlantic bloc rarely highlights the event and generally omits it from publicly available lists of upcoming exercises. The drills involve an entirely “fictional scenario,” one anonymous NATO official told The Wall Street Journal.
It’s hard not to see the exercise in the context of the Kremlin’s increasingly revanchist foreign policy, though. Since Russian troops seized control Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and subsequently began actively supporting separatists seeking to break away from the central government in Kiev, NATO has adopted an increasingly more militarized posture along its eastern and southern frontiers. A proposed drawdown of American nuclear weapons on the continent has effectively been on indefinite hold ever since.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/15211/nato-members-train-to-nuke-a-fictional-enemy-after-major-russian-drills
