By IRNA,
Berlin : Germany stockpiled around 700 atomic bombs which the US had provided to Germany, the online site of the Munich-based weekly Focus news magazine quoted German historian Detlef Bald as saying Sunday.
The Germans could have detonated the nuclear bombs at any time, if they had chosen to do so, according to Bald who cited various archives and documents.
“The atomic bombs were supposed to be ignited in case of a military attack on Germany. They were planned for a nuclear first-strike,” he added.
As part of the secretive nuclear weapons arsenal, Germany also stored at least 50 nuclear mines, each of them having three times the destructive capability of the US Hiroshima bomb.
Only two dozen people were let in on the secret, according to Bald who was the former scientific director at the Social Science Institute of the German Army University in Munich.
The scholar said “only the military” was authorized to issue the order for the use of the weapons.
No German and no American politician would have been needed to give his consent to detonate the atomic arms, Bald added.
German then defense minister Helmut Schmidt eventually stopped what he described the “deadly nonsense” by dismantling the controversial nuclear arms program, according to the military historian.
Schmidt who later became Germany’s chancellor in 1974, has reportedly confirmed the veracity of Bald’s research on the secret storage of nukes on German soil.