The story starts with an administrative handover rather than an arrival. French occupation engineers laid out the field in 1954 and 1955 on farmland above the village of Büchel, in the Cochem-Zell district of the Eifel, then passed it to the German federal property office on 6 June 1955 without ever basing an aircraft there. Bundeswehr administration took it over on 13 August and the first 250 German soldiers moved in on 15 August. Very few German military airfields were handed over that cleanly; most arrived with a French or British tenant already in residence.

Flying began in 1957. Infrastructure work for Waffenschule der Luftwaffe 30 started in February, the first 140 soldiers arrived from Fürstenfeldbruck on 12 July, the logistics tail followed on 6 August, and the aircraft — 72 Republic F-84F Thunderstreaks, three T-33s and a pair of T-6s — came in October. The school itself lasted barely a year. It closed on 30 June 1958 and the next day the same people and much of the same equipment became Jagdbombergeschwader 33, placed under NATO command that December.

The wing’s first Kommodore, appointed in November 1956 while the unit was still a weapons school at Fürstenfeldbruck, was Walter Krupinski — a Wehrmacht fighter pilot with 197 claimed victories who went on to become a Luftwaffe lieutenant general and, in 1976, to lose his post over remarks about the Luftwaffe’s wartime generation. The Bundeswehr’s nuclear-mission wing was founded by a man whose own past is exactly what the tradition decrees of 1982 and 2018 were written to handle.

Three categories of fact get mixed together in almost everything written about Büchel, and they are worth separating. The first is what is officially published. NATO states in general terms that American nuclear weapons are forward deployed in Europe under nuclear sharing and that allied aircraft are assigned to deliver them. The United States Air Force lists the 702nd Munitions Support Squadron and its location. The Bundeswehr does not deny that Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 33 trains for the alliance nuclear mission, and German ministers have discussed the mission itself in parliament.

The second is what is officially refused. Asked in the Bundestag about numbers, storage, handling or the details of the weapons, the federal government answers with the same sentence every time: the alliance’s information policy on NATO nuclear forces is subject to binding secrecy rules by which the government is bound. It appeared in Drucksache 19/19884 of 5 August 2020 and in the March 2021 answer to Die Linke, and it has appeared in answers about aircraft accidents at Büchel too. This is not a denial. It is a refusal, and it is deliberate.

The third is estimate. The work is chiefly that of Hans Kristensen, Matt Korda and their colleagues, published in the Nuclear Notebook in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by the Federation of American Scientists. Their 2023 assessment of nuclear sharing states that eleven protective aircraft shelters at Büchel are fitted with WS3 underground vaults, that each vault holds up to four bombs, and that around ten to fifteen B61 weapons are actually there out of roughly one hundred in Europe at six bases in five countries. Kristensen and Korda’s 2021 figure for Büchel was about fifteen. Older work and much German campaigning material still say twenty.

So the honest sentence is this: the American custodial unit is confirmed, the mission is not denied, the German government refuses to confirm or deny the weapons, and the number most often quoted comes from named analysts with a long and consistent record who are explicit that it is an estimate. Anybody who tells you the precise figure is either reading Kristensen or guessing.

Peace groups have kept an annual presence outside Büchel since June 1996, and it has grown into the most persistent civil-disobedience campaign in Germany. The two strands that carry it are the international campaign "Büchel ist überall! atomwaffenfrei.jetzt" and the local Initiativkreis gegen Atomwaffen; both were given the Aachener Friedenspreis in 2019. In 2016 and again in 2019 the campaign ran a twenty-week action presence under the slogan "20 Wochen gegen 20 Bomben".

The actions themselves are of a recognisable kind: blockades of the gate, symbolic die-ins, a peace concert played on the runway on 23 July 2018, picnics staged inside the perimeter, and repeated fence cuttings. On 10 July 2019 four activists — three Americans and a Dutch woman, aged between 26 and 75 — cut the new security fence and the old military fence behind it with bolt cutters bought for 15.99 euros, walked up the hillside and photographed themselves with banners before anybody noticed. They spent a night in cells and were released.

The legal record is where the story becomes serious. At least ninety-nine people have faced charges since 1997, most for Hausfriedensbruch, and the Amtsgericht Cochem and the Landgericht Koblenz have handled dozens of them. Seventeen convicted defendants have taken constitutional complaints to the Bundesverfassungsgericht, arguing that international humanitarian law and the illegality of nuclear weapons justify the trespass; almost all were dismissed, and two remain undecided. Around thirteen people have served prison terms, usually replacement custody for unpaid fines.

Some of the sentences are long by the standards of a trespass case. The American Susan Crane, convicted of a series of go-ins between 2018 and 2019, began a 229-day term in June 2024; the Dutch activist Susan van der Hijden served 115 days; Gerd Büntzly went to prison on 14 October 2024 for the same offence. Against that sits the acquittal of Hermann Theisen at the Amtsgericht Cochem on 6 February 2017 over leaflets calling on soldiers to blow the whistle on the weapons, a decision that became final.

Public opinion has moved with events rather than with the campaign: polling before February 2022 ran heavily against keeping the weapons, and polling after the Russian invasion of Ukraine ran the other way. The gap is the whole German nuclear argument in two years.

The most-forgotten fact about Büchel is that the German parliament has formally asked for the weapons to go. On 24 March 2010 CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen jointly tabled Drucksache 17/1159, "Deutschland muss deutliche Zeichen für eine Welt frei von Atomwaffen setzen". Point five of its operative section asked the federal government to press, within the alliance and with the American ally, for the withdrawal of United States nuclear weapons from Germany. It was adopted on 26 March 2010 with the support of four parliamentary groups spanning government and opposition.

It came out of the coalition agreement the CDU/CSU and FDP had signed in October 2009, in which Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle had insisted on a commitment to work for withdrawal. For about three years that was mainstream German policy in a way that is hard to remember now. Nothing happened. NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept and the 2012 Deterrence and Defence Posture Review reaffirmed the forward-deployed arsenal, the allies hosting weapons were not going to move alone, and German governments stopped pressing.

The Zeitenwende reversed the politics entirely. In March 2022 the government announced it would buy the F-35A specifically to carry the nuclear mission after the Tornado, and in December 2022 it contracted for 35 aircraft. The 2010 resolution has never been rescinded; it has simply been overtaken. That is the kind of thing worth saying plainly on a page about this base, because the campaigners at the gate and the pilots inside it are both, in their different ways, arguing with the same parliament.

The conversion began as a construction project. Five separate programmes run at Büchel: a complete reconstruction of the runway, an F-35 campus of hangars, workshops and operations buildings, new shelter doors and jet exhaust channels, an expanded wide-area surveillance system with vehicle barriers, and the energy and media supply to feed all of it. The cost has climbed from an original estimate under a billion euros to figures around 1.1 billion in German reporting and roughly two billion in the ministry’s own 2026 statements, with completion pushed to 2027 and further work running beyond.

Because the runway had to come up, the flying had to go. Twenty-five Tornados and their crews moved to Nörvenich in June 2022 and stayed four years, flying the wing’s missions, including its Operation Inherent Resolve reconnaissance commitments, from a borrowed base. The first two aircraft came home on 15 and 16 June 2026. It is one of the larger peacetime relocations the Luftwaffe has managed, and the fact that it worked is an argument for keeping more than one usable fighter airfield in the west of the country.

The aircraft side is now moving fast. Boris Pistorius took formal delivery of the first German F-35A at Fort Worth on 18 September 2026, four years after the decision. The first eight aircraft stay in the United States for aircrew and technician training at Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith, Arkansas; deliveries to Büchel start in autumn 2027, initial operational capability is planned for the end of 2028, and full operational capability for 2029. The Tornado is due to fly at Büchel until the end of 2030, which means roughly three years of two very different aeroplanes sharing one hillside.