[uberuberuber]

Daniel Ellsberg discusses this in a great talk at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The US didn't think Khrushchev was insane enough to delegate control over the weapons (which we did and still do), but he in fact had. He revoked delegation at some point after Kennedy's speech if I recall correctly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk1-2qtWph0

[jackpirate]

Technically, the US Air Force owns and operates all our nuclear weapons in Europe; but in the event of war, the control is automatically transfered to the host country. This isn't that different than what Kennedy thought was going on in Cuba.

[honestcoyote]

Am I understanding you correctly? If war had broken out, say in the early 80's, West Germany, and not the United States, would have had the final word on launching the Pershings stationed on their soil?

What would happen in the case of differing opinions? West Germany gets to order a launch even when the US strongly opposes? Or the opposite with the US wanting a launch and West Germany says no?

[jackpirate]

Technically they'd be under the NATO chain of command at that point. In practice, a rogue major could have easily launched one if he wanted to.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing for more information.

[honestcoyote]

Thank you for the information. Very interesting article and different than how I had imagined the chain of command regarding nukes. I had always assumed it was US (or UK or France, depending on who owned the bombs) only.