Similarly to their German counterparts, Italian Air Force pilots can only use nuclear weapons with the approval of the President of the United States who exercises exclusive authority over their use. In a situation of conflict, however, the command of the armed forces belongs to the president of the republic who is the commander in chief of the armed forces. This configuration could in principle complicate or even make impossible the effective use of nuclear weapons, since, in both cases, as soon as arms control was transferred from the US to its European allies, Italy would be in violation (according to most treaty parties) of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
German and Italian pilots train annually in the use of nuclear weapons during the NATO exercise Steadfast Noon. In addition to the United States and the countries part of the nuclear sharing, the exercise involves countries that offer air support for nuclear missions (Support Nuclear Operations with Conventional Air Tactics / SNOWCAT). SNOWCAT countries are Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland and Romania.
NATO’s operational plans for the use of nuclear weapons are secret, in principle however, the Alliance rates the likelihood of using them very low. Furthermore, NATO does not explicitly exclude “first use”, i.e. the possibility for the forces of the Alliance to use nuclear weapons as the first in the course of a conventional conflict. This would obviously involve risks since it could lead to a nuclear counterattack and, consequently, to an escalation. Other deployment scenarios envisaged in the Alliance’s nuclear sharing arrangements include nuclear retaliation in response to an adversary’s nuclear attack.
For quite some time now Italy has had issues in relation to the performance of nuclear missions within NATO’s nuclear-sharing agreement as its nuclear capable aircraft, the Tornado, had a combat radius of 1.300 km and was therefore barely able to operate beyond NATO’s borders (an even more acute problem for countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands). In principle, through in-flight air refueling it was possible to extend the autonomy and range of the aircraft, nevertheless, in peacetime, this is only possible within NATO’s airspace, and therefore would not add substantially to the delivery systems’ operational range, whereas in wartime it would obviously turn into a very high-risk mission. It is not therefore entirely clear which military targets could realistically be attacked by the B61-equipped Tornados stationed in Italian bases (as well as in bases in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands (the problem does not exist on the contrary for Turkey). The problem moreover has not been solved by replacing Tornados with F-35A, which has the even smaller combat radius of 1093 km.