….estimates suggest the Americans have owned, or maintain authority over, more than 1,000 military installations abroad. The network of bases is so expansive that even the Pentagon may not be sure of the exact number.

In Europe, some of the US military facilities currently in operation date to the Cold War era. Much has changed over the past generation, as many European states have joined the Washington-dominated NATO, an increasingly aggressive military association. NATO enlargement of course continues, despite the fact that membership leads inevitably to significant erosion of sovereignty and independence, especially for the smaller countries which have chosen to join NATO.

A study by the Brooking Institution in Washington calculated that, from the World War II years until 2007, US governments spent in total $7.2 trillion on nuclear weapons. Washington’s overall military expenditure in the same 6 decade period, taking into account conventional weaponry, amounted to $22.8 trillion. Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America has produced around 70,000 nuclear weapons. When the Cold War was said to have officially ended in 1991, Washington had an arsenal that year of 23,000 nuclear warheads.

The Americans, in the Cold War era, stationed their nuclear bombs in 27 different nations and territories including Greenland, Germany, Turkey and Japan. In spite of the major decline of communism in the early 1990s, the Pentagon in 2006 still possessed 9,962 intact nuclear warheads, including 5,736 warheads believed to be active and operational. The plan has been to maintain between 150 to 200 nuclear bombs in Europe; but one of the final initiatives, of president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), was to sign into law on 29 November 2000 the Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-74, which authorised the Department of Defense to stockpile 480 nuclear warheads in Europe, a substantial amount of them in US-run bases in Germany.

750 U.S. Military Bases Globally, $7.2 Trillion US Nuclear Weapons Expenditure Since Hiroshima, Nagasaki – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization