American nuclear weapons return to British soil
An American C-17 transport plane visited RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on Thursday, making a transatlantic journey from Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico, where the US Air Force (USAF) stores nuclear bombs.
Analysts said it was likely that the flight contained nuclear bombs, which were last stationed in the UK in 2008, before being removed under the Obama administration.
The Telegraph previously revealed details of an upcoming 'nuclear mission' at Lakenheath in unclassified documents that appeared to have been published by the US government by accident.
Neither the British nor American governments routinely comment on the location of nuclear weapons.
However, experts said the C-17 flight last week closely matched previous missions by the USAF to transport nuclear bombs.
The airspace over the base was restricted on Thursday and the aircraft did not immediately return to the US, in what one analyst told the Times appeared to be a 'one-way drop-off'.
Priority mission
The plane also refuelled over the East Coast of the US. The Aviationist specialist news website said this was a clue that it was flying a priority mission.
RAF Lakenheath is the home of the USAF's 48th Fighter Wing, which contains two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle fast jets and two squadrons of the fifth-generation F-35A jets.
The UK announced recently that it would purchase its own squadron of F-35As, which the Ministry of Defence confirmed on Monday could drop nuclear gravity bombs. These British planes are expected to be equipped from a stockpile of US weapons stored in Britain.
It will be the first time that Britain has the capacity to air-launch nuclear weapons since the retirement of the WE.177 gravity bomb in 1998.
'This decision reintroduces a nuclear role for the RAF for the first time since the UK retired its sovereign air-launched nuclear weapons after the Cold War,' said an MoD document published on Monday.
The decision by the previous US government to station nuclear weapons in Britain again came as part of an adjustment of Nato's nuclear posture in Europe, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Telegraph revealed last year that the Lakenheath base had bought new blast shields and was building a 'surety dormitory'. Surety is a euphemism used by the US military to refer to the safe storage of nuclear weapons.
William Alberque, the former director of Nato's nuclear non-proliferation, told The Times that the transport aircraft that visited Lakenheath on Thursday had flown from the US with its transponders on, which allowed it to be tracked by foreign governments and aviation enthusiasts.
He said: 'Flying transpondered C-17s from hot storage in Kirtland to Lakenheath and then returning and not going to a storage facility tells me this is a one-way drop-off flight.
'Sometimes these particular C-17 flights are flown without transponders. So, the fact that they transpondered, this suggests to me that this has got to be deliberate.'
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