While Donald Trump was executing his betrayal of the Syrian Kurds by green-lighting Turkey’s attack on them, the media briefly reminded us that the United States still has 50 aging nuclear bombs stored in Turkey. That’s about a third of the nukes it has deployed in five NATO nations, with 40 in Italy and 20 each in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. In all cases, these are versions of the B-61, a gravity bomb designed in 1963. Hundreds of these still make up a major element of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The explosive yield of the bombs can be set anywhere from 0.3 to 340 kilotons—that is, from about 2% to 2300% as powerful as the nuke dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
These 50 nukes are stored in vaults at the giant Turkish air base in Incirlik, in south-central Turkey, about 60 miles northwest of Syria. Built with U.S. help in 1955 as a bulwark against the Soviets, the base’s primary mission until the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was deterrence. At Incirlik now there are some 550 U.S. military personnel of the 39th Operations Support Squadron, together with A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft and KC-135 Stratotankers.
Turkey refused to allow the base to be used as a platform for U.S. missions in the 2003 Iraq invasion, but in 2015, Ankara agreed to allow its use for operations against the ultra-extremists of ISIS. But Turkey has not allowed the U.S. to base any permanent fighter squadrons there. That means Americans would have to fly into Incirlik and pick up the nukes if it ever wanted to use them. There were once 90 nukes stored at Incirlik, 40 of them meant to be flown to their targets by Turkish F-16s. Those bombs were shipped back to the United States in 2005.
What purpose do these remaining bombs now serve as the Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan builds growing ties to the autocrat in the Kremlin? That question has been asked by a lot of people. One of them is Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. He recently wrote:
According to The New York Times, State and Energy Department (??) officials last weekend quietly reviewed plans for evacuating the weapons from Incirlik. “Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.”
That review is long overdue! [...] Some of us have been calling for withdrawal for years (see here and here), but officials have resisted saying it wasn’t as bad as it looked and that the deployment still served a purpose. They were wrong. And by waiting so long to act, the United States has painted itself into a corner where the choice between nuclear security and abandoning Turkey has become unnecessarily stark and urgent.
The situation is even more untenable because Incirlik in just a few years is scheduled to receive a large shipment of the new B61-12 guided nuclear bomb, which would be a recommitment to nuclear deployment in Turkey.
Back in 2016, when elements of the Turkish military launched a failed a coup against Erdoğan, talk about pulling those nukes made the rounds of the Pentagon and the State Department.
At the time, Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, wrote:
These weapons serve no purpose. Neither Turkish aircraft nor U.S. aircraft in Turkey can deliver the bombs. The United States Air Force regards them as an expensive distraction from the mission of countering the Islamic State. The Turkish government regards them as a political liability that shouldn’t be mentioned.
Why do they stay? We are told the weapons are an important symbol of our commitment to NATO. What the bombs at Incirlik really symbolize, however, is our inability to relinquish our nuclear stockpiles, even once they have no purpose and are an evident security threat.
Lewis suggests that the 50 bombs could be redistributed to other NATO countries for storage in their vaults along with other weapons. But that, he says, could raise hackles in those nations too: “And if you think the sight of the Turkish commander of a NATO nuclear base being arrested for treason worries some people in NATO’s nuclear bureaucracy, it is nothing compared to the terror of defending this posture in public.”
Meanwhile, Erdoğan has said he wants nukes of his own. In an early September speech to his AK Party members, he said, “Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads, not one or two. But (they tell us) we can’t have them. This, I cannot accept. […] We have Israel nearby, as almost neighbors. They scare (other nations) by possessing these. No one can touch them.”
Erdoğan has made no public move toward obtaining nukes. Perhaps his declaration was just meant to give his supporters something to applaud that he has no intention of carrying out. But if Turkey were to decide to give the required three months’ notice to opt out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that it ratified in 1980, it would be the clearest possible signal that it means to have its own nuclear arsenal.
The more nations that obtain nukes, the more likely that, someday, one of them will decide to use one or a barrage of them to take out an enemy. And that could, of course, drag other nations into the mix. Nobody who has been alive for the past 70 years needs to be told what a catastrophe that would be.