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A number of European outlets, however, viewed the report as confirmation of an open secret. “Finally in black and white: There are American nuclear weapons in Belgium,” ran the report in De Morgen. “NATO reveals the Netherlands’s worst-kept secret,” said Dutch broadcaster RTL News.

The presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe was indeed “no surprise,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat-reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said in an email. “This has long been fairly open knowledge.”

There had been a number of clear indications of the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons before. A diplomatic cable from a U.S. ambassador to Germany suggested that there were concerns about how long the weapons could be kept in these countries.

We do not comment on the details of NATO's nuclear posture

“A withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany and perhaps from Belgium and the Netherlands could make it very difficult politically for Turkey to maintain its own stockpile,” read the memo, written by then-U.S. Ambassador Philip Murphy in November 2009.

The presence of the weapons derived from an agreement reached in the 1960s and is in many ways a relic of the Cold War era – designed not only to act as deterrence to the nuclear armed-Soviet Union, but also to convince countries that they didn’t need their own nuclear weapons program.

But times have changed. In 2016, after a coup attempt and the rapid spread of the Islamic State extremist group next door, analysts openly wondered whether Turkey was really such a great place to store nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, near Germany’s Büchel air base, the failure of arms-control treaties with Russia has prompted fears about a new arms race.

“The military mission for which these weapons were originally intended – stopping a Soviet invasion of Western Europe because of inferior U.S. and NATO conventional forces – no longer exists,” Reif said.