A helicopter and several patrol cars of the Belgian police conducted an unsuccessful pursuit on Sunday of “large drones“, spotted over the Kleine Brogel airbase, where 20 US tactical bombs are stored. This was announced in X by the Minister of Defense and Foreign Trade Theo Franken.
“Large drones were spotted three times over the Kleine Brogel airbase during the night, flying higher than devices previously seen in Belgium“, he wrote. According to the minister, this was not “just a flight near the base“, but “actions clearly aimed at Kleine Brogel“.
“A jamming system was used, but to no avail. A helicopter and police cars tried to chase the drones, but lost them after a few kilometers at night,” continued Franken.
According to the minister, the Belgian army “urgently needs capabilities to combat drones“ and a file on this issue is “ready to be presented to the government“.
Flemish nationalist Franken is one of the main supporters of the kingdom's militarization program with the aim of active participation in the EU and NATO in the confrontation with Russia. He proposes to allocate an additional €34 billion for Belgium's military needs. The government has been trying in vain for four months to find an additional €10 billion to fill the state budget for 2026 without raising taxes or cutting social benefits.
According to the newspaper Soir, in 2024, more than 31,000 flights of unidentified drones near military installations and critical infrastructure were recorded in the kingdom. This figure did not increase in 2025.
Kleine Brogel is one of six air bases where American tactical nuclear weapons have been stored since the Cold War - 20 B-61 bombs each. Under the nuclear weapons sharing program, “non-nuclear NATO states“ can, under direct US instructions, drop these bombs from F-16s, F-35s and other aircraft.
The aim of this program is to make it more difficult for the USSR, and now Russia, to identify the actual carriers of nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict. NATO continued the project after the end of the Cold War and conducts annual exercises to practice nuclear strikes without loading actual warheads on board aircraft. B-61s are also stored at Volkel in the Netherlands, Büchel in Germany, Aviano and Gedi in Italy and Incirlik in Turkey.
NATO and the governments of these countries have never officially acknowledged or denied the storage of US nuclear weapons at these bases. Many European experts believe that the list is not limited to these six sites.