MOSCOW, April 25 (Reuters) - Russia said on Thursday that Poland was playing a “very dangerous game” by considering the possibility of hosting U.S. nuclear weapons.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Thursday he had invited Prime Minister Donald Tusk for talks on May 1 about the possibility of nuclear weapons from NATO states being deployed in Poland.
Duda has reiterated his position that Poland would be ready for such a possibility, prompting Tusk to say he would like a clarification from the president.
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Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said any U.S. nuclear missiles in Poland could become targets in the event of a Russia-NATO war.“It is not difficult to assume that if American nuclear weapons appear on Polish territory, the corresponding objects will immediately join the list of legitimate targets for destruction in the case of direct military conflict with NATO,” she told reporters at her weekly briefing.
Nukes in Poland would be very bad to apocalyptic in the event of a war, but also it’s just passively dangerous; between 1950 and 1980, the US military reported on 32 accidents involving nuclear bombs, including 8 whose cores were not recovered. After which they stopped officially reporting them. The USSR/Russia’s record is not significantly better.
That count does not include logistics mishaps, such as in 2007 when 6 nuclear bombs were accidentally shipped across the country and left attached to an unattended aircraft for 36 hours, at which point somebody asked why they had nuclear bombs just hanging off that plane without any guards or anything. No, this was not discovered because someone noticed their nukes were missing for a day and a half, this was discovered when someone stumbled across them.