Luis Ayllón
The Spanish government last week once again voiced its complaints to the United States over the stopover of a US Navy nuclear-powered submarine at the Gibraltar naval base, The Diplomat has learned from reliable sources.
The USS Florida arrived at the Rock on Wednesday 28 September, where it remained until Sunday 2 october, although the reasons for its stay have not been specified.
The USS Florida belongs to the Ohio class and was built 40 years ago. Equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, it is 159 metres long and has been in Gibraltar on four other occasions since 2008.
According to sources consulted by The Diplomat, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned a counsellor from the US Embassy in Madrid in the middle of last week to express Spain’s displeasure at the arrival of the USS Florida at the base in the British colony and to remind him of the existing facilities at the US naval base in Rota, located a few miles from Gibraltar.
The complaint was not expressed through a note verbale of protest, but it was communicated to the US representative in the same terms as those expressed on 13 April for the arrival at the naval base in Gibraltar. of another US nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Georgia, which, precisely in August 2021, had used the Rota base to anchor in its waters.
The Spanish government raises these protests every time a nuclear-powered submarine arrives in Gibraltar, although it is aware that the complaints do not have much effect.
The port of Gibraltar, with its internal waters, was ceded by Spain to the United Kingdom under Article X of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, so Spain cannot prevent these calls from taking place and has to limit itself to expressing its displeasure at the arrival of ships from allied countries in a territory over which our country claims sovereignty.
The stopovers of this type of vessel, whether American or, above all, British, also provoke public protests from environmental organisations. Thus the spokesman for Verdemar-Ecologists in Action in Campo de Gibraltar, Antonio Muñoz, regretted the presence of this type of vessel in the Bay of Algeciras, and affirmed that “the port of Gibraltar has become in recent years a port where all types of repairs are carried out on these floating bombs”.
Muñoz underlined that “the port of Gibraltar is a type of port which can only be accessed by these dangerous devices for provisioning tasks”. And he warned: “Any incident involving a nuclear submarine would have a terrible impact on the Strait, not only on the Campo de Gibraltar and the Rock, but also on part of Andalusia and Morocco”.
