Italian nuclear weapons program
There was an Italian nuclear weapons program , intermittently, between 1948 and 1975. Leading roles in this program were played by the United States and the Italian Navy , among others . Italy ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on May 2, 1975.
history
In 1948, a working group was formed at the Livorno Naval Academy with some officers, university professors and young scientists to prepare the construction of a research reactor , the training of specialists and the development of ship reactors and nuclear weapons . The work of the working group fizzled out due to political and internal resistance. A few years later the project was resumed: in 1956, in collaboration with the University of Pisa , the Naval Academy established the “Center for Military Applications of Nuclear Energy” (CAMEN - Centro per le Applicazioni Militari dell'Energia Nucleare) . In 1961 the CAMEN was relocated to San Piero a Grado, in the wooded area of San Rossore between Livorno and Pisa ( ⊙ ). The American military depot Camp Darby was set up in this former hunting ground of the kings of Italy in 1952 , and from the end of the 1950s it played a role in Italy's nuclear participation . With American support, the RTS-1 Galileo Galilei research reactor was commissioned on April 4, 1963 in CAMEN, just north of Camp Darby .
The reasons for the nuclear ambitions of the Italian Navy were the involvement of the other two branches of the armed forces in nuclear participation, which began in the late 1950s , and the negotiations between France , the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy on a joint nuclear weapons program , which were broken off by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 US control over the nuclear warheads ), the nuclear weapons programs of other European countries (including Yugoslavia , Romania and Switzerland ) and the discontinuation of American support for Italian medium-range missiles and nuclear submarine plans.
At the end of the 1950s, the Italian Army set up the 3rd Missile Brigade , which was assigned nuclear warheads for its Honest John missiles , but which remained under American control. There were comparable developments in the Italian Air Force in its first air defense missile brigade and a short-lived missile brigade with Jupiter missiles in the southern Italian Gioia del Colle . In order not to remain excluded from this development, the navy began in 1957 with the conversion of the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi , which received silos for the launch of Polaris missiles . In addition, the first of two planned Italian nuclear submarines was laid down in Taranto in 1957 . Immediately after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis , the US stopped supporting these projects: apart from a few test missiles, the Polaris missiles and the associated nuclear warheads were never delivered, and the Jupiter missiles were withdrawn from southern Italy. The construction of the nuclear submarine Guglielmo Marconi had to be canceled. After the multilateral force initiative was also discontinued in 1964 , Italy resumed the national nuclear weapons program at CAMEN and, with the support of the scientist Luigi Broglio , under whose direction the first Italian satellite launches had taken place from 1964, a national missile program to replace the Polaris missiles. 100 Alfa medium-range ballistic missiles, each equipped with a nuclear warhead, were planned as equipment for larger warships and nuclear submarines.
Italy acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, but did not ratify it for the time being because it was observed that some European countries were sticking to their nuclear weapons program. It was only when Yugoslavia (apparently) gave up its nuclear weapons program that Italy ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1975, also under American pressure, and discontinued its nuclear weapons and medium-range missile program. In the years that followed, the CAMEN was transformed into a military research center with a different focus and is now called CISAM (Centro Interforze Studi per le Applicazioni Militari) . The reactor was shut down on March 7, 1980. The development work for the Alfa rocket flowed into the European Ariane rocket project , and in part also into the Vega rocket, which was initially developed in Italy .
literature
- Paolo Cacace: L'atomica europea. Fazi Editore, Rome 2004.
- Vincenzo Meleca: Il potere nucleare delle Forze Armate Italiane, 1954–1992. Greco & Greco, Milan 2015.