Although the Netherlands do not have weapons of mass destruction made by itself, the country does participate in the NATO nuclear weapons sharing arrangements and trains for delivering U.S. nuclear weapons, i.e. it has weapons of mass destruction made by another country.

The Netherlands is also one of the producers of components that can be used for creating deadly agents, chemical weapons and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction. Several Dutch companies provided Iraq with components for these weapons during the 1980s.

The Netherlands ratified the Geneva Protocol on 31 October 1930. It also ratified the Biological Weapons Convention on 10 April 1972 and the Chemical Weapons Convention on 30 June 1995.

Uranium enrichment

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The Urenco Group operates a uranium enrichment plant at Almelo to produce low enriched uranium for use in nuclear power plants. The same plant could be used to produce highly enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons. The Netherlands has not actually produced HEU, however; HEU for use in its Petten research reactor was imported from the USA. The reactor has now been converted to run on LEU ^*.

Urenco's enrichment technology may have been stolen by A. Q. Khan in the 1970s as the basis for Pakistan's nuclear enrichment program, which has resulted in Pakistan developing and testing nuclear weapons. See Pakistan and weapons of mass destruction.

United States-NATO nuclear weapons sharing

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The Netherlands ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on 2 May 1975. The United States provides about 20 tactical B61 nuclear bombs for use by the Netherlands under a NATO nuclear weapons sharing agreement. The weapons are stored at Airbase Volkel, and in time of war would be delivered by Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16 warplanes ^*.

Dutch Navy P-3 Orion aircraft and their predecessors the P-2 Neptunes, based at Valkenburg Airbase near Leiden and Curacao in the Caribbean were assigned U.S.Navy NDBs (Nuclear Depth Bombs) for use in anti-submarine warfare. These weapons were originally the Mk-101 Lulu yielding 11 kT, and a later replacement the Mk-57 (also referred to as the B-57). The NDBs were stored under U.S. Marine guard at RAF St Mawgan, Cornwall, UK, with sixty similar weapons stored there for RAF Shackleton and Nimrod aircraft. The storage arrangements were agreed between the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and President Johnson in 1965 in a secret memorandum now declassified in the U.K. archives.

Many countries believe this violates Articles I and II of the NPT, where the Netherlands has committed:

"... not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly ... or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices ...".

The U.S. insists its forces control the weapons and that no transfer of the nuclear bombs or control over them is intended "unless and until a decision were made to go to war, at which the ^* treaty would no longer be controlling", so there is no breach of the NPT.

Dutch production of weapons of mass destruction

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Alongside other companies from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Belgium, Spain, India, and Brazil, Dutch companies provided Iraq with chemical agents used to produce chemical weapons for use against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War.

Two thousand Iranians who suffered from chemical warfare during the Iraqi imposed war (1980-1988) submitted an indictment some years ago with a Tehran court against nine companies that had provided Saddam Hussein with the deadly weapons. 455 American and European companies provided aid to Iraq during its aggression on Iran and two thirds of the companies were German. The United Nations published a 12,000-page report about the conflict and named the entire suite of companies involved in the fiasco. The Iraqi special tribunal started trial of Saddam Hussein after his fall. Iranian Chemical victims were absent in the closed-door trial and the grievances of Iran's victims was not a part of the agenda in the tribunal. ^*

Sale of WMDs by Dutch businessmen

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A Dutch businessman named Frans van Anraat, 62, has been prosecuted for complicity in genocide for selling chemicals to Iraq in the 1980s while knowing that Saddam Hussein might use them as weapons against Iranians and others. He has acknowledged that he sold chemicals to Saddam's regime. He exported tons of European-made chemicals between 1984 and 1988 that were turned into mustard and nerve gas. He continued delivering materials even after the March 1988 gas attack on Halabja.^*

On December 23 2005 he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for complicity in war crimes, as the court argued the charges of genocide could not be substantiated. His case was also notable because it established that the chemical bombings in North Iraq constituted genocide according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

References

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• To Dutch Navy weapons sharing and storage.
• Nuclear Weapons Databook Vol.5. British, French and Chinese Nuclear Weapons. Authors: Norris, Burrows, Fieldhouse. Pub: Westview Press, Oxford 1994. ISBN 0-813-31612-X
• Radiator. Pub: Southern Region CND. April 1985.
• U.K.-U.S. Memorandum of Understanding of Use of Nuclear Weapons. 1965. Contained in an exchange of letters between Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Pres Lyndon B.Johnson, declassified 2002, and now in the U.K. National Archives, London filed as DEFE 24/691-E28

Weapons of mass destruction | History of the Netherlands | Politics of the Netherlands