Nuclear training flights will take place over Belgium, the North Sea and the United Kingdom. No live weapons will be used.
Exercise “Steadfast Noon” involves 14 countries and up to 60 aircraft of various types, including fourth and fifth generation fighter jets, as well as surveillance and tanker aircraft.
The exercise is set to finish on October 30.
As in previous years, US B-52 long-range bombers will take part; this year, they will fly from Minot Air Base in North Dakota, say NATO.
“Training flights will take place over Belgium, which is hosting the exercise, as well as over the North Sea and the United Kingdom. No live weapons are used.”
Steadfast Noon is hosted by a different NATO Ally each year.
“This exercise helps ensure that the Alliance’s nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective,” said NATO Spokesperson Oana Lungescu.
NATO’s new Strategic Concept, adopted by Allied leaders at the Madrid Summit in June makes clear that “the fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”
It stresses that, “as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance. NATO’s goal is a safer world for all; we seek to create the security environment for a world without nuclear weapons.”
Key Points
- The exercise was planned before the Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
- The exercise involves the participation of fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear warheads but they will not be armed with nuclear warheads.
- 14 of the 30 NATO members will participate in this exercise.
- Conventionally armed jets, surveillance and refuelling aircraft will also take part in this exercise.
Are we still the only country othe than the States to pay the required amount into NATO?
Doubt it. France do, Poland definitely do. Baltic states bloody well should do.
Others…not so sure.
With what’s going on with HMG are we going to keep up with pay to defence budget or are we going cut again,we may be saying good bye to 3% what was planned. 😕
Well your guess is as good as anyone else’s. New chancellor hunt has truss bent over a barrel and is thrusting his interests hard. Any plans that were mentioned are now up for review.
Call me in 2030 to see if the 3% happened. We will have a different government from today.
It’s like in 2030 me going to my neighbour and saying I know you only moved here in 2029 but the person that lived here 2 owners ago promised in 2030 that my driveway would be mono blocked at your expense and it’s 2030 so here’s the bill
Thin Pinstriped today hinted, as an example, that 3% may be only sufficient to stand still, after all the shenanigans. No one’s putting money on the 3% outcome with Hunt, though not his fault in reality. I’m currently developing a ‘leadership’ selection procedure that’s both simple and so far evidenced-based, and at least as reliable as anything the real politicians seem to rely on:- No Blondes. Holds true for the US and Russia in addition to the UK, I reckon. Probably also holds true for China, if they had any, but I get over that by declaring Xi only Nominally… Read more »
Hunt said there’d have to be more “efficiency savings” from the MOD. Sounds like cuts or at least a slow down of the necessary rise. Cuts to public services & protecting the rich are Tory dogma whenever there’s a problem. With public services already failing after 10 years+ of cuts & public sector workers facing a cost of living crisis needing better wages, I can’t see how more cuts can work. Tories make cowardly choices, as above, not difficult ones. Meantime we face existential threats from Russia, PRC & growing RW authoratarianism at home. All the while we’re getting dangerously… Read more »
Bear in mind that Hunt is the son of an admiral. In the leadership race he was stating 4% GDP defence budget: which is far too high. He has already said that in the long term defence spending needs to rise. THB the markets are more likely to accept that an increase of defence spending actually leads to better financial stability on the world scene. It is worth holding that thought. If Putin had got his way then there would be less financial stability. There is a very justifiable need to increase if only to modernise a few things and… Read more »
Defence is wise spending to a point. Especially if it is used to buy products made or partially made in your own country as that reinvests the same money
Family resemblance 😎
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1c/Nicholashunt.jpg/330px-Nicholashunt.jpg
I doubt anyone who has money is relying on the UK these days after all most who have a say 10 million or more have overseas residency or dual nationality, reality is its the middle class who pay no matter who’s in power. Frankly pinging back and forth between tory capitalism and labour socialism does the country no good. Time for a new party to form that’s not wedded to either of these old outdated ideologies.
I totally agree, we need a new party. Infact I’d say we may need two. There’s a great website called The Political Compass which, I think, redefines politics in terms of four quadrants rather than left or right. I’d like to see a party for each quadrant that people actually vote for and not against. Then perhaps we could have a proportionally representative government by quadrant (not party). As for the Tories being “capitalist”. We haven’t had capitalism for decades. In my opinion capitalism is the redistribution of (existing, invested) capital to realise the best returns – that’s it. We… Read more »
There’s been something like a £70 billion real-terms increase in public spending since 2019. The fact that public services continue to fail is not a lack of money.
Many other members pay the 2% minimum or are increasing.
Due to some fancy/terrible accounting the U.K. also does. When the U.K. was going to be under 2% George osbourne started some very questionable accounting to make it look like the U.K. was above 2%.
As there is no standard on what’s to be included/excluded from a defence dept budget it’s not entirely accurate to compare countries.
An example could be Italy where the department of business helps pay for defence projects that are in the national interest and benefit defence but this isn’t in the defence budget.
Very confusing.
Statista website
‘Where NATO defence spending stands in 2022’
NATO figures for 2021. It won’t have gone down this year!
So Greece is greasing the cogs
anyone know if these will appear on flightradar and if so what call signs should i look out for?
Whatever the arguments on the military budget 2% I think we can agree is looking pretty thin at the moment. After the chancellor I can see the Defence minister will be next to go. Hunt would probably replace him with Corbin if he could! Or just as bad make these islands a colony of the EU and our defence will rely on some failed European minister such as a VDL type. I advocated on this forum that we should do what the Germans are doing and inject one off 100 billion into defence on equipment etc. I was shot down… Read more »
Rather than doing the sensible thing & tackling the huge hikes by the gas sector by capping them at responsible(for consumers), Tories chose instead to use public money on our credit card to subsidise their obscene profits, fuelling their greed & cynical choices & trashing the economy. Having all energy produced tied to oil or gas makes even cheaper & green energy needlessly expensive too. Seems like a scrooge’s charter to me.
So we seem to be sabotaging our own ability to defend against rising threats.
Frank what are obscene profits? I check Centrica’s H1 reports for 2022, have you? Whilst the group has done well mainly due to a disposal of Spirit, the British Gas part of the group made £98m in H1 down 74m from last year. The whole group made 1.3b in profit for H1 globally and that was taxed at 46%. Forget the news paper sound bites like ‘ profits doubled’, of course they did we were in lock down last year! Most numbers quoted are figures which include Shell and BP global operations, UK can’t tax profits from these as they’re… Read more »
Profits are obscene when they cause a widespread crisis for consumers due to our government failing to provide the checks & support that other similar nations have.
Frank 62 is not wrong those contracts at least for home produced energy could have been re-negotiated. In fact as an incentive I would have allowed all the tax on home produced energy to be charged at zero tax rate. That way it would have cost the taxpayer a few 10s billions instead of 100 billion plus. Too many invested Tory interests. The media can kick off about partygate, but not about things that real matter to the public like 10s billions of unnecessary expenditure by the government.
I think Wallace has a pretty solid hold on his defence job, given that he backed out of PM running when early favourite as he felt his talents were beter suited to his current position.
Rare for a politician to recognise his shortcomings – Don’t you wish others had that self awareness!
Wise words.
Or he realised the top job now is a poisoned chalice and thought better to wait till the party loses the next election having not tarnished himself….
Post brexit problems starting to dawn? we really should not be in this position at all compared to the EU nations.
Yep everything over the ditch is just peachy isn’t it🙄
And your ‘remoaner’ correlation between Brexit and war in the Ukraine is what?🙄
Well the U.K. leaving can be skewed to give the impression that the EU was weak and irrelevant.
In the world there are the USA, Russia, China and the EU (maybe India in the coming years). Anyone out side of that is viewed as not crucially important, not big enough to have massive impacts of world issues etc. There opinion is not as important as those large countries.
EU is a “Country” ??
That is one of the things that moved people to vote leave.
The EU was meant as a trading block, nothing more. It was voted for as such in 1973 or whenever it was.
If it had stayed as a trading block I wouldn’t have voted to leave. I didn’t want to be part of the United States of Europe.
Sorry I don’t know what I did on my reply lol, I’m not a hardcore remoaner , I was against Merkel and silly political moves and its not good Italy have gone Alt right, France is getting there, quite happy for us to leave the EU if it does not effect our economy, standing power and influence ,our current status is worrying. Well with the Ukraine war I ask how is the UK with its gas reserves in the north sea coming off worst than the EU nations ? 2008 most of the world was in recession yet the UK… Read more »
Hi, dave. Non of us should be hardcore anything in a democracy, of course. As voters, we have to get used to things not aligning with our political preference on a very regular basis. Suitably humbling, and never permanent, as I think you’d readily acknowledge. Transient politics necessitates a longer viewpoint & thus national patience. Our system’s still here after a couple of centuries, after all. What does concern me more for the longer term, however, is the assumed wisdom* of the Market, or at least that part of it that encompasses debt leveraged acquisitions of a nation’s intellectual property… Read more »
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Did we not do nuclear exercises before brexit? At least this exercise shows that defence can work together when needed. I’m not totally against brexit just some of the stupidity in how it was done and the thought that we can leave the club but keep all the good parts of being in the club. At least if ur in the club you can have an influence on the direction the club takes.
Agreed.
I don’t think there is an issue with the various militaries working together, it’s the politicians that are the issue.
PLUS…I am glad they are not using live weapons! (As per headline)…whew,
AA
“that we can leave the club but keep all the good parts of being in the club”
On the contrary, voters who understood what it meant knew that full well.
You’re basically reversing what the soft brexit fan club wanted which hamstrung parliament from 2016 to 2019, that its leave, stay in the clubs in some respects, have no say, and no ability to do what we might want to do elsewhere.
If you leave a Gym, you leave. You do not leave but keep paying them!
Would be interesting DM hear your opinion of why the UK is in one the worst positions economy wise in Europe right now?
Looks to me we are all in the same boat!
https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/09/30/record-inflation-which-country-in-europe-has-been-worst-hit-and-how-do-they-compare
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As a German, I will not comment on the Brexit discussion(I do have an opinion on it, but I will only say so much that I, as many from our coutry, respectfully regret the decision). However, this discussion seems to be a bit off topic with regards to this article on the current Nato exercise. I found an interesting link to the original discussion after Threads was aired, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0VcT-XWb7M Hopefully, we never get there. From a german perspective, the German participation in the NATO nuclear deterrent (“Nukleare Teilhabe” in German) was discussed vividly with especially the… Read more »
To some extent OT, but w/in the nuclear realm, is anyone else a trifle disconcerted that Mad Vlad’s Orcs have raised the issue of an Ukrainian ‘false flag’ operation re detonation of a radiological or tactical nuke on Ukrainian soil? Believe this is just the type of op the Orcs believe themselves to excel at, though the democracies have seen that page of the playbook too often to accept the premise. Nonetheless, would still result in a CBRN incident, w/ all attendant issues. 🤔😳☹️
Any chance of seeing a B-52 flying above Peterborough?