The US-owned nuclear weapons in Europe are all stored inside the WS3 system.
The Protective Aircraft Shelters provide the first line of defense against bombing.
The Weapon Storage Vault (WSV) provides the second line of defense against bombing. The floor of the PAS consists of a 16 inch thick reinforced concrete slab. A WSV is integrated into this concrete slab, with a section of the floor being cut to allow for the WSV to operate. The WSV has a 16 inch thick slab of metal and reinforced concrete for a lid. When the WSV is closed, the lid lies completely flush with the PAS hanger floor.
Any bomb would need to hit the correct PAS, in the correct spot corresponding to the WSV location, then through some combination of blast effects and penetration, it must defeat the PAS outer shell, then it must penetrate through 16 inches of metal and reinforced concrete to reach the nuclear weapon(s) stored inside the WSV.
Can you destroy a nuclear weapon stored inside a WSV? Sure – but you're gonna be dropping quite a bit of ordinance to accomplish that if you want to do it conventionally.
Moreover, what are you expecting the destruction of a handful of WSVs to accomplish?
Most individual European air bases have a tiny number of WSVs. The typical host-managed delivery base has 6–11 WSVs (and in the past, a significant number of additional since-decommissioned bases had as few as 2 WSVs!). The typical American-managed delivery base has 18–55 WSVs (although the 55 WSV case is a special extreme outlier with split-responsibility delivery).
So a base in Poland may have anywhere from 6–55 WSVs – likely towards the lower end of the range.
It's difficult to get exact figures, but current informed estimates are that there are only around 100 US nuclear weapons deployed in Europe at the moment. It's a bit unclear if this figure includes all tactical and strategic mods, or if it's limited to only a subset. It's also a bit unclear if this includes all US-managed and host-managed weapons, or if it's limited to just one or the other.
It is certainly highly plausible that only 100 weapons are deployed in Europe though, although it's also plausible that slightly more weapons are deployed.
Back in 2005, there were estimated to be a total of up to 280–300 US-managed and 160–180 host-managed B61 nuclear weapons in Europe – a total of 440–480 B61 bombs spread across the eight operational airbases (of a total of 12 airbases with WSVs, with the remaining 4 airbases having empty WSVs that were mothballed but still retained). There were 204 WSVs available across all 12 airbases, although when limited to the 8 active airbases, only 175 WSVs were available at airbases with nuclear weapons present. At the time, WSV utilization at the active bases averaged either 2.74 weapons per WSV (which was 68.5% utilization of capacity at active bases), or 2.51 weapons per WSV (which was 62.75% utilization of capacity at active bases).
If there are currently only a combined total of only 100 B61 nuclear weapons in Europe, then WSV loading may have fallen to as low as 0.57 weapons per WSV. In reality it is probably a bit higher than this due to certain air bases no longer having a active nuclear mission, but it's probably not unfair to assume that average WSV loadings are probably no higher than 1 weapon per WSV at the moment.
Let's say we build some WSVs in Poland and stage some weapons there. Based on existing base sizes, I'd say the most plausible estimate for an aggressively sized base in Poland would be 25 WSVs. At current average loadings, we'd probably only deploy 25 bombs/missiles in those WSVs. I'm assuming that we'd ship in additional weapons in from the US for this, and expand the total stockpile size of the US owned nuclear weapons pre-staged in Europe accordingly rather than moving existing weapons there (although that is certainly also a plausible option as well).
Let's say Russia decides to hit those WSVs since they're nice juicy targets so close to their borders. Russia sends a ton of bombers loaded up with 2000 lb bombs fitted with the Russian equivalent of the JDAM kit to accomplish this mission. First of all, how are these bombers even getting to the air base unopposed? They're going to show up on US/NATO radar and get intercepted long before they get anywhere near close to the base.
But whatever, let's pretend that Russia has a secret fleet of B2/B21 bomber equivalents in the wings, and they use this secret fleet to haul the requisite number of 2000 lb JDAMs to the Polish airbase. Or maybe we're assuming they send every single bomber they have left on this mission and overwhelm the air defenses through sheer volume. The whole scenario is non-credible, but I'll suspend my disbelief and hand wave away the issues of getting the munitions to the target.
Okay, Russia has bombers in position. They dump their bombs on the targets. They breach every single WSV vault. And they destroy a sum total of...25 nuclear warheads? What? Seriously? They trigger article five over the "juicy" target of a miserly 25 warheads? We have warheads coming out of our ass! There are 1700 strategic warheads in the US arsenal, and god knows how many hundreds more sub-strategic/tactical warheads in the active stockpile. In theory we may have as many as 1240 B61-3/4/12 tactical warheads in the active stockpile. That's not counting the 215 B61-10 tactical warheads in the inactive stockpile. And I'm not even getting into the up to 600 B61-7/11/13 warheads, the up to 650 B83 warheads, the up to 1715 W80 AGM-86B ALCMs, etc.
Sure, a good quantity of those warheads are probably sitting in the hedge stockpile, not the active stockpile. And a decent size subset of the B83 and W80 warheads have probably been tossed into the reserve stockpile, or even dismantled. But the weapons in the hedge stockpile are still available for use in an emergency with only some minor to moderate rework required (which could be accelerated significantly in an emergency to replenish and augment stocks), and the weapons in the reserve stockpile are in a similar state, albeit likely with more rework required to requalify them.
Bottom line is, we have a huge number of warheads. A minuscule number are pre based in Europe. And the number that might be placed "at risk" in a Polish airbase is a vanishly tiny number.
And this is all without even getting into the whole issue of the ICBM and SLBM fleets. We could use up every single gravity bomb and cruise missile in our stockpile without significantly compromising US nuclear deterrence thanks to our ICBMs and SLBMs. So there is no real reason to be worried if we lose a handful of weapons. Oh no, big fucking deal, we have hundreds more where those came from, and we can afford to use them in Europe. Sure, we'd need to airlift them from the US, but that's hardly difficult. We have plenty of capacity in existing European WSVs to load in additional weapons airlifted from the US, so that's not a problem either. And we could also easily reactivate the WSVs in mothballed air bases to gain even more capacity.
Bottom line is, Russia can't accomplish any useful objective by destroying any nuclear weapons we pre-base in Poland. Said weapons aren't even particularly valuable to begin with. The US has such an absurd number of nuclear weapons that we can afford to do stupid things with them like pre-basing 100+ bombs in Europe just to appease our nervous European allies' anxieties over the Russian nuclear threat. We have thousands of warheads in the hedge and reserve stockpiles. Wiping one airbase off of the map just means that we'll airlift some additional nuclear weapons from the US to another airbase. It's a minor inconvenience at worst.
Oh yeah, and wiping those Polish WSVs out would trigger Article 5, which would not end well for Russia. Sure, they can rattle their nukes around all they want, but we can absolutely devastate their military capabilities with conventional forces alone, and if the act that triggers article 5 is the destruction of WSVs containing nuclear warheads, then the response is all but guaranteed to include wiping out some critical piece(s) of Russian nuclear infrastructure at bare minimum. Russia depends on their ridiculously large stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons (often estimated at 2000 active warheads) to ensure the survival of the state in the event of a ground invasion from European forces. If they took out some loaded Polish WSVs, we'd probably take out nuclear munitions bunkers containing some fraction of their stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons as part of our proportionate response. In light of the response from article 5, Russia would be swiftly forced to the negotiation table.
The whole idea is just stupid from start to finish. Despite appearances, Putin isn't stupid. Neither is Kim Jon Un for that matter. They're from the same breed of dictator.
Poland is a member of NATO. They have just as much right to participate in NATO nuclear sharing (regardless of if they are responsible for delivery) as any other NATO member. Yes, they are close to the Russian border. So was West Germany during the Cold War, yet that didn't stop us from building 146 WSVs in that country (which may have contained up to 584 warheads), or from pre-staging 3500 US nuclear warheads on West German soil.
Remind me, how is Poland any different from West Germany? The Soviet Union didn't attack any of the WSVs (or other nuclear assets) pre-staged in Germany during the Cold War, even though it was literally right next door to their borders.
Well, anyways, this was a fun little experiment to research and write up, but I think I'd better get back to doing whatever I was before I started writing this post. Hopefully someone finds this somewhat interesting.
