In Holland the existence of these weapons is a "state secret". So our news never mentions that. It's a bit stupid because everyone knows they're there.

Netherlands opens fire on suspicious drones [comma belongs here] near base with US nuclear weapons

As a lifelong English speaker, I would not pause when speaking in this sentence. Why would there be a semantically meaningless, unspoken comma?

Because it is overkill to use nuclear weapons to attack drones.

Because without the comma it looks like they used the nuclear weapons on the drones. Which I'm sure will work very well but I'm glad they didn't.

When you speak you can solve this with intonation, you don't need a pause. But in written language that aspect is lost so you do need it.

Different wording could also have been used. Like "near base storing US nuclear weapons"

There's no comma in the original, and no comma needed. See the "However" paragraph of 2(a) in

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/punctuation/comma...

Huh? Why, that makes no sense.

But seriously, if a comma is used it would be more like:

Nearby to a Netherlands' military base, known to store US nuclear weapons, suspicious drones were fired upon by defensive forces.

Alas, we must continue to train the LLMs in proper comma usage!!!

please take a moment to consider the possibility of an apostraopocalyps should things go wrong

You've made me evacuate my semi-colon.

Great, now the rest of this thread won’t compile.