The H-Bombs in Turkey
newyorker.comWhile Turkey has conflicts with some groups who want to grab part of the land or overthrow the government, they are FWIW a useful ally in the region because they have mostly-friendly dealings with UAE, Saudis, Iran, parts of Africa and also Israel. The degree of diplomacy varies, but there aren't many NATO members in that region who are as compatible when it comes to diplomatic ties with the region's powers. Russia, unfortunately doesn't deal with Iran, Israel and the Saudis the same way.
Given their growing business ties and influence in the region, maybe China can be another powerful ally. Or India. It certainly would help to have more than one dependable ally there, but China, like Russia, is in a weird power-play game with the USA, Australia, etc. Russia is more biased than Turkey, and that says a lot since Turkey cannot be a neutral Switzerland type because of their borders and demographic, so they're less of an option.
Also, let's not forget that Turkey has better relations with some ex-USSR nation that have considerable natural resources, due to cultural heritage, but then again strained relations with most of the ex-USSR countries.
It's a mess, but that's world politics.
Turkey has the same advantages now that caused it to be the arguable center of the Western world for parts of the previous several centuries: it's simply wildly well-placed, geopolitically. Russia needs at least the presence of a relationship given its never-ending pursuit for warm water ports. Europe realizes that, as the sole overland route to the Middle East (and by extension, all of Asia) without going through Russia, that Turkey is key to both the economic and territorial security of the continent. The Middle Eastern nations recognize that Turkey is a nation with enough Islam in its identity that they are more able to sell their populaces on explicit cooperation, and due to Turkey's importance geopolitically, can be a convenient partner that allows them some interaction with the West (that doesn't need to be sold or hidden to their population). Finally, so long as the US continues to have ambitions in the Middle East or in counterbalancing against Russia, Turkey will remain important because of all of the previously listed reasons.
Once you start paying attention to geopolitics, it becomes fascinating. It helps explain a huge slice of Russian behavior that seems far less logical at first glance, as well as why certain parts of the world seem to be perennial hotbeds of conflict, no matter the prevailing rulers or ideologies.
This doesn't explain why you need obsolete nuclear warheads sitting 70km from ISIS. Maybe it's a honeypot?
Turkey has not been a particularly useful US ally in the region in several decades and it won't be again, perhaps ever. The continued decline of US, Saudi and Russian influence in the Middle East is an irreversible trend, and Turkey is configuring itself to become a leader in the future of the region, both in cooperation and competition with Iran. I think its time for the US to depart Turkey, H-bombs and all, and stop clinging to delusions of power and influence that no longer exist and which face continued decline.
Declining Russian, Saudi, and US influence in the Middle East? So who's influence is growing at the expense of all of those? Iran's?
Iran's for sure, particularly with Shia countries, but even with the others as Iran's economic clout growth with the end of oil sanctions.
China's as long as they are willing to funnel money their way via One Belt One Road. (Though China is more interested in Africa than the ME, with good reason.)
Turkey's, particularly with Sunni countries, and also Azerbaijan (shiite but they are united in hatred of Armenians).
The people living in each individual country?
That's the complicated viewpoint.
The simple viewpoint is that it is completely nuts.
I'm skeptical that the PALs are as easy to bypass as this article says. It's possible that the arming code includes critical information necessary to properly detonate the bomb, such as timing info for firing the various detonators. Even if it doesn't, the critical PAL hardware is deep inside the bomb, requiring the bomb to be disassembled to get to it, then reassembled afterwards, and that's not quite as easy as swapping out your car's spark plugs.
So, the PALs can be completely disabled at the pull of a plunger. This plunger takes <1s to pull and I'm sure that 1 of those soldiers on base could pull it. Once this happens, the bomb is no longer immediately valuable as it has to be remanufactured.
There is also a tamper-resistant membrane that prevents individuals from getting to the fissile material, and nuclear payload. This could render the bombs likely free of design information. In fact, it turns out these bombs have a ton of conventional explosives inside of them as well and adjusting the timing could make harvesting the fissile material a pain in the ass.
Design: http://i.imgur.com/tv7JVXC.png
Source: http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/060315-slides-...
Interesting reading. Thank you for posting that.
B61 bombs have command disable mechanism. It can be rendered permanently unusable just by entering 3-digit code and pulling a handle.
It's also possible to encode the required code physically into the explosives by mixing high and slow explosives randomly in each bomb. PAL code is then needed to adjust the timing of the detonators so that detonation front is symmetrical. Even if you bypass all the electronics, it's impossible to guess the timing without the code.
You can still extract the warhead for use in a dirty bomb
Command and Control lays out the internal fight over Pals; the military wanted easy access and reliable bombs, and the Pals added complexity, reduce ease of access in an emergency, and so on. So the parts of the military less concerned with safety were arguing for more promising designs. I believe the early Pals could be over ridden with a screwdriver. But yeah, I don't know about these particular ones.
Yes, I've read that book (highly recommended, by the way, for anyone else reading this who's interested in the history of nuclear weapon control and accidents), and if these were the older PALs I wouldn't have any problem with that statement. But "control" seems to have won that fight eventually (for the most part... Navy nukes still don't have PALs) and I'd imagine that modern PALs are far more robust than those early ones.
Are those the same PALs that were (allegedly) set to 00000000 for most of the Cold War?
Sort of. Those were on Minuteman missiles, and that was put to a stop long ago. The PALs in the B-61 these days should be much more sophisticated and much less useless.
As I said in my other reply, I'd totally believe it if this was happening in past decades, but it seems much less likely now.
But the problem isn't nuclear detonation, it's about using the weapons as a dirty bomb:
With a few hours and the right tools and training, you could open one of nato’s nuclear-weapons storage vaults, remove a weapon, and bypass the pal inside it. Within seconds, you could place an explosive device on top of a storage vault, destroy the weapon, and release a lethal radioactive cloud.
Those are two separate ideas. You don't need to bypass the PAL if you just want to blow it up conventionally to spread radioactive material around.
Command and Control [1] is highly recommended, and discusses this very situation, along with the always/never constraints on nuclear weapons.
Nuclear Weapons should Always go off when used legitimately, and Never go off when not authorized.
Before reading this I had never really thought through the idea of fail-safe, especially that it has an implicit opposite: fail-deadly.
1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
While still concerning, they really buried a key detail: "About two thousand U.S. military personnel remain stationed there."
Turkey has the largest standing army in the region. 600K or so. Those 2000 troops wouldn't last long enough to get the weapons out.
The point of the troops isn't to be an invincible garrison that no army can conquer, it's just to act as a deterrent and trip wire.
I don't believe there's any realistic scenario where the Turkish military would attempt to seize the bombs, but if they did do something so insane the garrison would force them into fighting and killing hundreds of NATO personnel and capturing the rest. That sets in motion an inevitable response, and one that ensures any rouge military authority in Turkey would not last long.
There's similar logic to why the US maintains a force in South Korea. They aren't expected to solely defeat a full scale attack from the North, but can directly respond to smaller aggressions. If the north did overrun them, killing US troops, there would be no domestic political debate concerning whether to respond in the US.
To put it so bluntly as to be distasteful: they're there to die.
>> To put it so bluntly as to be distasteful: they're there to die.
Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft can reach the airbase in 15 mins. That is enough of a deterrent, I'm certain.
It's possible the US has some sort of pre-arranged agreement with Israel, and if not, Israel would certainly respond to a US request as they did to help protect Jordan from Syrian tanks in 1970.
Because declaring war on the most potent military force on the planet (along with all of NATO), murdering its troops in an ambush, and taking at least hundreds of hostages, is going to turn out really well for Turkey.
They'd be likely to get carved up in a back-room deal with Russia and NATO. The US would immediately declare war on Turkey and begin destroying its cities and infrastructure. The Turkish air force would be completely disabled within a week. All major access points to Turkey's cities, all transit lines, would be bombed and disabled, shutting down their economy and supply lines. All power generating stations and major grid lines would be disabled or bombed and non-functioning within the first week. Air superiority would be accomplished rapidly, the US could sit outside of Turkey and hit major targets with cruise missiles at will.
So what was your premise again, the US would lose some troops? Well that happens in a war. Is the premise that Turkey would threaten to use or attempt to use the nukes on US allies? All that would accomplish is providing justification for either preemptively nuking Turkey to put an end to the war, or dramatically escalating the all-out attack on Turkey to attempt to cripple them faster and convince the military to turn on Erdogan (which would happen very quickly). There's no scenario in which Turkey is a meaningful threat for long.
> There's no scenario in which Turkey is a meaningful threat for long.
That may be true, but the intermediate will be extremely messy, to put it mildly.
I think you're vastly underestimating 1st world intelligence capabilities. By the time anyone is brainstorming how exactly they want to take the base the big players in NATO already have guys sitting in jets idling on the taxiway, an aircraft carrier is taking a hard turn into the wind and an aide is popping popcorn and cracking a beer so Mr. Putin can enjoy the spectacle.
When nukes are involved things get taken very seriously. Nobody wants to be the guy who thought it would all blow over and got it wrong.
Really? Doesn't the following section from the OP directly contradict that view: "In 2010, peace activists climbed over a fence at the Kleine Brogel Airbase, in Belgium, cut through a second fence, entered a hardened shelter containing nuclear-weapon vaults, placed anti-nuclear stickers on the walls, wandered the base for an hour, and posted a video of the intrusion on YouTube. The video showed that the Belgian soldier who finally confronted them was carrying an unloaded rifle."
I'm sure conditions are exactly the same in Turkey right now; who'd dream of taking guard-duty seriously there?
And yeah, I'm sure the western intelligence-agencies are as sure to plant moles in anti-nuclear movements as in the rapidly deteriorating Turkish military high command.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but c'mon.
I think you are giving people far too much credit, and wrapping it in too much nonsense. The amount of absolute intelligence failure (intentional or otherwise) in the last 15 or so years has been astounding.
I think there's a lot of confirmation bias there, you never hear about intelligence successes.
I don't disagree but keeping tabs on a nation's militarily (and related stuff) is a throwback to the cold war. They should be able to handle it.
You mean the same intel which said Iraq / Iran / Libya / Syria has weapons of mass destruction? There is also a chance Israel or Russia would bomb the site, before those bombs get in wrong hands.
It is very sad that chemical weapon used by Iraq against Kurds is still not found. Moreover, it was used again year ago in Iraq against Kurds.
PS. Moreover, large quantities of mustard agent were found in Syria in 2013.
Don't get me wrong, I oppose the kind of government that the Iranians have right now, but the chemical weapons supplied by the West were mainly used against the Iranians. And with a terrible outcome for the Iranians.
AFAIK, West governments (USA, West Germany) supplied only dual-use pesticides to Iraq, but then, after Iran-Iraq war with use of chemical weapons by Iraq, these dual-use chemicals were banned [1]. Do you know any other facts about supplying of dual-use chemicals or chemical weapons to Iraq by West?
1: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/chemical_warfare...
"Other German firms sent 1,027 tons of precursors of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and tear gasses in all. This work allowed Iraq to produce 150 tons of mustard agent and 60 tons of Tabun in 1983 and 1984 respectively, continuing throughout the decade. All told, 52% of Iraq's international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin. One of the contributions was a £14m chlorine plant known as "Falluja 2", built by Uhde Ltd, a UK subsidiary of a German company; the plant was given financial guarantees by the UK's Export Credits Guarantee Department despite official UK recognition of a "strong possibility" the plant would be used to make mustard gas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program...
This looks implicating to me to a degree that there is no doubt in my mind that these governments supported the chemical weapons program of Iraq. I also read that there were actually German soldiers on the ground during the Iran-Iraq war that helped the Iraqis use the chemical weapons correctly, although there is no proof for that other than a few people who testified. I at least believe this is possible.
But yes, they wanted Iraq to destroy Iran, when they saw that they couldn't do it they wanted the weapons gone.
Intelligence has discovered some very valuable information, but it has always been unreliable. There's plenty of information that is never discovered, and there's an incredible amount of noise that these intelligence agencies are collecting, that the signal is hard to find. To make things worse, other intelligence agencies are purposely spamming everyone else with noise and false information. The really hard part is figuring out what's true and what's valuable.
Agents have historically been fond of generating false intelligence to prove that they are valuable, and historical documentation has shown that agents aren't always that competent.
Using technology certainly helps, but it has its limits. Human intelligence tends to get better information, but can be unreliable and generate lots of false information.
It would not surprise me at all if intelligence agencies failed to realize something is coming. Hindsight shows that the intelligence failures in 9/11 and Iraq were due to valuable information not being identified or the intelligence community sucking up false information from informants who were just making it up to stay in the CIA payroll. It's a real hit and miss sort of business.
Then how come they are still there?
If what you write is true they should have had clear warning about that coup attempt. It might have succeeded.
> If what you write is true they should have had clear warning about that coup attempt. It might have succeeded.
Or, the relevant intelligence agencies had clear warning, a good estimate of capabilities and what it would take to defeat it, and were able to intervene to assure that the Erdogan government was capable of putting down the coup
Or they had clear warning, sufficient intelligence about the intentions and orientation of the coup plotters that they were comfortable that the weapons would be no less safe even if the coup succeeded.
Or...
I'd be surprised if they don't have the capability to disarm them and destroy the "interesting" components relatively quickly.
I would also be surprised if (besides initial instability) the expected outcome of a military coup is much worse than the status quo.
With the current situation there's probably not much good of saying "yeah, that place is pretty fked so we gtfo'd." Which exactly the message sent by loading up all your nukes and gtfoing at ~Mach 2.
> Then how come they are still there?
Because they correctly perceive there's very little risk in remaining there.
Unless this is exactly what they planned.
That could be but there is absolutely zero evidence for that, it appears that they were caught flat-footed, the (Turkish) base commander was arrested.
Let's see:
* there's a list of 6000 people to be arrested, military and non-military, which must have existed before
* offensive on the ground took place at a time when they must have known Erdogan wasn't there
* they could have shot down his plane with F16s, but didn't
* the coup was generally terribly organized, in a country where the military certainly knows how to do it
* Erdogan is known to be a mischievous POS
Many people are sceptical and for good reasons.
If find that a more worrisome scenario than a failed coup. The previous (successful) coups in Turkey ended with the military handing back power as soon as it was feasible and they have traditionally only done this to safeguard Turkey as a secular state.
Going with your suggestion would indicate that this safeguard no longer exists.
> safeguard Turkey as a secular state
In '61 and '97. Go to turkish leftists, ask what happened in 1980.
Why would the weapons need to get out? Why wouldn't the weapons be equipped with a self-destruct, or self-disablement mechanism? Why wouldn't the US destroy the facility if there was a risk of the weapons being used?
> Why would the weapons need to get out?
Non-proliferation, for one. If Turkey goes hardline Islamic and it would get its hands on those weapons that would make it yet another hard to predict factor in Middle-East politics.
> Why wouldn't the weapons be equipped with a self-destruct, or self-disablement mechanism?
Anything that can be added can be removed and likely such mechanisms would not work (for obvious reasons) by remote control.
> Why wouldn't the US destroy the facility if there was a risk of the weapons being used?
Because they were too busy saving their asses? Because raining bombs on Turkey would probably not be a better solution than getting those weapons out while it was still possible?
>Anything that can be added can be removed and likely such mechanisms would not work (for obvious reasons) by remote control.
Surely the 2000 troops would be able to initiate a self-destruct sequence before being overtaken. I'm sure there are already protocols in place. The mechanism would likely not be remote control, but hard-wired into the facility.
>Because they were too busy saving their asses? Because raining bombs on Turkey would probably not be a better solution than getting those weapons out while it was still possible?
You posited a situation where the US troops were already overtaken. In such a situation, the US probably would have already launched a strike that would destroy the facility <30 minutes from authorization.
They can provide the necessary standard of security from random intruders, and hopefully act to disable the bombs rather than lose them if it comes to that.
And Incirlik is in an urban area of 1.7 million people.
If only they had some bombs to defend themselves with...
Three days ago they had the power to the base cut off and a 'no fly' zone was created over the base. It has exactly one runway that would only take a few well placed bombs to put it out of commission. Yesterday they were still on 'internal power' (aka diesel generators).
Now, I'm sure the US would do everything they could to avoid those weapons falling the wrong hands but I think you're being a bit over-confident about the situation there, which even now is far from stable and the US/Turkey relationships are right now at a historic low.
How long will they hold in case of an ally betrayal? In the unlikely event of having crazy Islamist dictator with imperial ambitions as the God Emperor of Turkey?
Aren't most/all airplanes, missiles, etc... operated by the Turkish military from the U.S.?
Doesn't the U.S. have the capability to disable them remotely?
No, the US doesn't export its armaments with any sort of remote disabling functionality, who would buy arms like that?
Actually it should be a simple as expiring whatever API key the jets use to communicate back to the US-based control servers. So when it POSTs to a StartEngine endpoint or whatever, it wouldn't start.
Lol.
No government would buy unreliable weapons.
What if they came with an Enhanced PROMIS Contract that guaranteed their reliability and lack of back doors and trojan horses?
No government could guarantee the reliability of purchased weapons. It is already known and been demonstrated that sabotaged arms will be bought.
If web developers ran wars the world would be a safer place.
Apart from war machines communicating through HTTP, I can't help but giggle to the thought of such a dialog:
- I repeat, the enemy seems to be not responsive. - What, you already killed them? - No we came with a bigger force but their layout didn't change. I don't think they're war-scale.
Joking aside, there's nothing making HTTPS inherently less secure than any other secure channel out there, right?
(disclaimer: I'm a web developer)
You're joking, right?
After WWII we Brits sold cracked Engima machines internationally. You need to assume a foreign power would be willing to try and sell you equipment with backdoors. If they reasonably believed you wouldn't be able to spot them, or change actions if you did.
I remember this in the news, and again during the first Irak war (the stories were that the U.S. were asking France for the "code"), hence my question:
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exocet...
Yes it does. The US nuclear weapons have PALs, and although they're not remote disabling functions, they require special codes, which are not given to the host country for arming them.
I'd have to look it up online, but while they used to import jet fighters from the US, Turkey builds similar F?? fighters and also drones like the Heron and other tools. But as a NATO member, I don't think they'd have a problem getting gear from third parties.
With current cad/cam systems I think it is possible to design a not bad Katusha analog in a weekend. And produce a couple in the next week. 20-30 of those build in secret could deliver a nasty first blow.
As purchased supplies? That would be disasterous for the industry, no?
One thing most people don't hear in the traditional American story about the Cuban Missle Crisis is that we put our weapons close to Russia (in Turkey) before they put any weapons close to us.
Really? I thought that Kennedy's secret agreement to trade the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba was the standard ending to the story.
Hmm. I don't disagree, but -- it's "standard" only if you've been paying close attention.
Because the original "standard" version ("encroaching communists") which I first read in Bobby Kennedy's everywhere-available book Thirteen Days was accepted for decades -- up through the 1980s IIRC.
This article (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real...) pegs the date where the old standard story was rendered untenable, and replaced by the new standard story that you mention, as 1997 -- when tapes from the JFK administration became available. The relevant book (https://www.amazon.com/Averting-Final-Failure-Meetings-Stanf...) was copyright 2003, 50 years after the crisis itself.
It's always hard to remember at what point the old story became the new story. Some caches don't even update at all.
Thanks for the historical perspective. I'm only 35, so I really only saw the "new story." Obviously the phrase "secret agreement" implies that it wasn't known right away, but I didn't realize it became known that recently.
Still, being out there for almost two decades, and being incorporated into the plot of a major movie about the crisis, it doesn't seem like it should still be described as "most people don't hear."
In general, it seems like a surprisingly lot of the stuff that was known to be fact, surrounding the Cold War, was not actually true at all. This has only become hazily evident with the drip-drip release of sealed archives.
I don't recall ever hearing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
Under result: "Withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy"
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Cuban-Missile-C...
> No one was sure how Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would respond to the naval blockade and U.S. demands. But the leaders of both superpowers recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and publicly agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would dismantle the weapon sites in exchange for a pledge from the United States not to invade Cuba. In a separate deal, which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not.
http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis
> During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real...
> Once that was straightened out, Kennedy himself declared repeatedly that the Jupiter missiles were “the same” as the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Rusk, in discussing the Soviet motivation for sending missiles to Cuba, cited CIA Director John McCone’s view that Khrushchev “knows that we have a substantial nuclear superiority … He also knows that we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under fear of ours. Also, we have nuclear weapons nearby, in Turkey.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, had already acknowledged that the Soviets’ primary purpose in installing missiles in Cuba was “to supplement their rather defective ICBM system.”
> if the administration’s domestic political priorities alone dictated the removal of the Cuban missiles, a solution to Kennedy’s problem would have seemed pretty obvious: instead of a public ultimatum demanding that the Soviets withdraw their missiles from Cuba, a private agreement between the superpowers to remove both Moscow’s missiles in Cuba and Washington’s missiles in Turkey. (Recall that the Kennedy administration discovered the missiles on October 16, but only announced its discovery to the American public and the Soviets and issued its ultimatum on the 22nd.)
These are all US-based sources so I'm not sure what gave you that impression unless you only heard about it in the 60s/70s when it was embargoed/classified?
I don't recall any of my social studies books or any reading I did as a high school student in the 80s mentioning anything other than "we found missle sites being built in cuba and it led to a crisis".
Well, it wasn't declassified until 1988 so it wouldn't have been included in anything written before that year.
I must have misunderstood what you meant by "These are all US-based sources so I'm not sure what gave you that impression unless you only heard about it in the 60s/70s when it was embargoed/classified? "
I made a mistake when writing a post quickly. I really should have just done a range (i.e. 1963-88).
No, what I mean was, I did most of my "history learning" about the Cuban Missle Crisis from my parents (my dad lived in florida at the time), and then in high school (just before the documents were declassified). I didn't really look back at the incident until fairly recently (IIRC while reading one of Rhodes's books about atomic weapons) and it was then that I learned about the Turkey missles. I don't think most people who heard about CMC are even aware (post declassification) that we had missles there. Knowing about those missles changed my opinion about the CMC a bit.
>the “dial-a-yield” of the B-61 bombs at Incirlik can be adjusted from 0.3 kilotons to as many as a hundred and seventy kilotons.
Wow that's quite a range. I wonder if it's the hydrogen volume adjusted to determine the yield.
The fuel for the large majority of the fusion energy in a thermonuclear weapon is lithium deuteride, a solid. But here's some theories now how this works, one of which is changing the amount of tritium gas in the primary; but note that the primary (no pun intended) purpose of the tritium in the primary is to boost fission output through neutron release
I'm picturing an 8 position DIP switch on the side of the bomb and a bomb tech with a small flat blade screwdriver selecting ON ON ON ON OFF ON ON ON
lol
Is there no US response to their base being isolated and restricted like that? Or just no direct military response? They've effectively been taken hostage from the sound of this article.
Quote "...it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them. "
What kind of aircraft would be that?
>it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them.
This is a lie. B-61's mount on to any NATO MIL-STD-8591 hard point. Any F-15, F-18 can mount and fire B61's without any modification.
My take was the author meant no aircraft with the range to drop them on Russian targets.
The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.
If that is what the author meant, that is what the author should have said. "Equipped to deliver" pretty clearly means no aircraft that can load the bomb.
At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.
You can load the bomb onto a Toyota Hilux; it doesn't mean it's equipped to deliver it.
The Toyota Hilux isn't an aircraft. The B61 is an air-dropped dumb bomb. Any aircraft that can load it and drop it in the air can deliver it. If you didn't care about accuracy you could roll the thing out the back of a C-130 and successfully deliver it.
The point is, there is no equipment required to deliver the B61 other than a standard weapons rack with any air-to-ground aircraft has. The only A/G aircraft I am aware of that can't deliver the B61 is the F-22A, and only because the bomb won't fit in the weapons bay.
I was under the impression that many nuclear bombs had arming mechanisms that required special electronics in the plane. Is that not true for the b61?
The B61 is designed to be delivered from any aircraft that can carry Mark 80-series iron bombs. Combined with the two-man rule (which means at least partial arming on the ground for a weapon launched from a single-seat aircraft), this means most of the setup needs to be done on the ground. It may be that the weapon is completely armed at that point, save for a failsafe tied to the rack that keeps the bomb from going off when still attached to the aircraft.
That is incorrect. For example the F-16s delivered to Pakistan lacked the nuclear firing circuits.
"Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Hughes also tells Congress that the nuclear wiring has been removed from the planes"
Similarly when the UK withdrew its WE177 weapons the nuclear circuits were removed from the RAF's Tornados, and the Typhoon lacks them too.
> It may be that the weapon is completely armed at that point, save for a failsafe tied to the rack that keeps the bomb from going off when still attached to the aircraft.
Weird. This would make these modern weapons a lot less safe than some of the bombs we've lost (without catastrophe) in B-52 incidents over the years.
Other than maybe the A-10, all the US tactical and strategic aircraft have that wiring.
i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.
new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away. whether you can put the package on the truck does not imply any fitness for delivery.
> i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.
So "the target" is always and forever Russia, and mainland Russia at that? No, the generic statement "equipped to deliver" cannot be interpreted with respect to a particular use case among many. It means "capable of loading the weapon and striking a target".
> new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
Any aircraft capable of carrying air-to-ground ordinance can "get it there", for some set of "it"s.
> i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away.
By your definition no truck is "equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away", yet trucks do this every day. You are adding a bunch of hidden assumptions about what "equipped" means, many of which aren't valid.
i think this level of pedantry is pretty unnecessary.
>My take was the author meant no aircraft with the range to drop them on Russian targets.
This is likely true. It's about ~5Mm from Incirlik to Russia (across the Black).
Edit 1: s/Baltic/Black/g
What's a Mm?
Edit: Apparently it's 5000km, Mm seems a bizarre choice of unit given mm exists as something else entirely and km is far more common.
Mega is a standard SI-prefix. It is denoted with a capital 'M' as opposed to Milli which is denoted with a 'm' prefix.
I'm just following the standard :|
What if the Turks decide to take the weapons and attack the Armenians who are protected by the Russians?
In addition to that the Turks view the Armenians as their enemy, they have basically sealed off the borders to them for decades because of that.
If Turkey shot Armenia with a nuclear bomb, given the location and size of Armenia, that'd also affect Azerbaijan, Turkey herself, and, Iran. That means if we shot Armenia with an American nuclear missile, we'd be left in the middle of an interracial nuclear orgy where the US, the Russia (ally of Armenia) and the Iran wipe us out of the world map (quite geographically).
The dirt secret about nuclear war is that Russia and the USA were much more willing to engage in a limited war where each side nuked the hell out of the allies of the other but without directly attacking each other.
There is no way Russia launches a nuclear strike on America on the behalf of Armenia. It would be suicide.
"us" means Turkey in my comment, was unclear sorry.
I have no direct knowledge, but I thought there was special command consent hardware required to arm the bomb. I'd be surprised if nuclear consent capability was standard on every plane.
Edit: After some googling I'm surprised to find that they do indeed all seem to have consent controls standard. Not sure what I think about that.
I read an Air Force safety standards memo[1] which seemed to confirm that the PAL codes are entered on the ground.
[1] http://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_se/publica...
Out of interest, at what time is the PAL (presumably a code?) entered in one of these bombs? Is it done in flight or before the weapons are loaded?
I don't know to be honest.
To speculate the B61 is a dumb bomb. And most photo's of the casing show no plug/contact point for electronics. I'm assuming at take off. When the neutron reflector's distance is set, and the barometric pressure for denotation height is calibrated.
Yeah, my guess is the bomb is armed and the yield and other parameters set just before the aircraft is set to taxi out for takeoff. Some part of it must be done on the ground, because no US nuclear weapon can be armed by a single person.
It wouldn't have to have a port. The US has had radio programmed artillery shells for a long time so using the same tech to set and arm bombs isn't a stretch.
>The US has had radio programmed artillery shells
These are just proximity fuses. I can find no reference to actual communication with in-flight artillery shells. Furthermore Nuclear Artillery shells were armed when loaded. They were one of the few systems outside of the two-man rule. As a single inferior officer would arm the shell when loading it.
I didn't mean radio programmed in flight just before they were loaded proximity fuses could be armed and configured via rf.
I wonder if arming of a bomb like that has a time limit - so that it safes itself if not "used" or explicitly deactivated within a particular time period.
'0000'.
I think it was actually "00000000" ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Develop...
Edit: Unless you mean that bike locks that the UK used to secure nukes, these days we just trust our submarine crews not to do anything rash.
I had no idea - thank you :)
>To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.
>Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
>The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120311235156/http://news.bbc.c...
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4ad_1227686113&comments=1
I like to believe it's the same bike locks that could be defeated with a ballpoint pen:
Ah, thank you. Some faulty bits in my memory caused an early nul termination.
As long as there are no premature detonations! ;-)
They can mount it but most exported aircraft models lack the firing circuits that initiate the PAL chain.
F15s, F16s, and many aircraft that the Navy uses. Still I would think that its high time to get them out of Turkey with the stability of the region in question, let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged
>let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged
I don't understand why you are being downvoted for this. A decent number of military analysist and Turkish civilians have come to this conclusion.
-No government buildings were seized, only bridges and airports.
-Normally within the first 30 minutes of a coup a Turkish Military General was on TV directly addressing civilians as to why this had taken place, and what was going to happen.
-The past 5 coups took place in <2 hours.
-The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
-Turkish troops weren't equip for crowd control, or even for fighting most were lacking body armor and helmets.
-Turkish troops didn't set up fire-hoses, or wear riot gear for crowd control like previous coups.
-More Judges have been fired from their posts in Turkey then Military Officers post coup.
-Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
Turkey has had 5 successful coups in the past 100 years why did this one differ so extremely from the previous ones?
Incompetence is a simple defense, but this is a NATO trained and drilled military. Officers education requires they be able to switch between nations, and officer sharing programs are common. Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO, and it's attempts to standardize education/training across member nations.
In turkey we have a supreme military council every year, on august, called YAS, where promotions and dismissals. It is rumoured that these lot did this madness to not be dismissed, because that was planned. This is the most believable story to me.
A bigger, more weird stupidity is that, the parliament was on vacation, that is there were no parliamenters in the national assembly building when the coup started, they actually went there during the coup to defend the parliament. And since the beginning, in none of the coups, there were an assault of the parliament building.
But we must bear in mind that social media was crucial. People knew that sth. was going on very early, whereas in the past, they'd do the thing and then we'd know.
> The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
He came istanbul after the airport was rather safe though.
> Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
It was the work of a junta within the army. In fact most other generals quickly ordered soldiers to retract. They didn't shoot the planes and the choppers down, but how could they? Those were flying over very populous cities, I guess in case they did attempt to take them down, there would be at least thousands of dead, because the jets were coming from a base only 30km away from the city of Ankara.
At the end of the day, 2 days into the aftermath, everything is too hazy to properly reason, I think.
One thing to point out is most solders arrested for taking part in the coup didn't know they were part of a coup. They were drilling responses to wide scale terrorist attacks.
Both the AP's story and RT corroborate that many troops didn't know they were involved in a coup.
"Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO."
A determined invader could probably take Europe in 48 hours. The Cold War days of preparedness are gone; just witness the commitment of EU NATO members to ME conflicts; the lack of preparedness in Nice. The train has already begun derailing, one carriage at a time.
> the lack of preparedness in Nice
There is no way you can pin this on NATO unless you whole-heartly support a military police state.
And even then nobody would be able to stop a truck aimed into a crowd in time for it not to do any damage at all.
True to some extent, however. the police barriers were taken down hours before the attack, the numbers of police were also shown to be low; and last, but not least, they were not armed to deal with a credible threat.
Reports from SOF at Bataclan, for example, revealed that AK47-equipped terrorists forced the French SWAT teams to withdraw due to lack of firepower, and yet that lesson was not taken seriously to deal with attacks like the one at Nice.
WW2 showed that peace is never enabled by flowers, candles, and sandals.
No way. Not even Russia, using all its military.
Now, if you had said one week...
> Although Incirlik probably has more nuclear weapons than any other nato base, it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them
What the hell is the point of that?
Why did not they think of this while facilitating coup guys?
Thanks for down voting. Well fact is fact.
I understand that stationing nuclear weapons is a good way to ensure your allies of your support in case of an attack, but having them stationed anywhere in the Middle East in these chaotic times sounds completely nuts to me.
You can't know who will be in power in any of these countries in one year from now and what they'll do.
The Turkish military is probably strong enough to easily overpower the US soldiers stationed at that base. What if they decide to simply take the nuclear weapons by force?
Edit: The Germans have removed their NATO forces from Turkey some time ago (Turkey protested against that) and I believe that this is due to them viewing the situation in Turkey as extremely unstable.
They don't want to get caught in a situation where they might have to go to war to protect a government that acts unpredictable. (meaning: they might incite the war themselves)
First thing the Turks did when they shot down the Russian plane was to call for article 5 of the NATO treaty! (collective defence against an attacker)
It would be a declaration of war on the US and NATO.
I think you may be underestimating the results of that attempt to take the nukes by force. Syria, Libya and Iraq are representative of what would happen to Turkey if they did that. The US is vindictive, and tends to hold a grudge for a long time - and it behaves that way on subtle matters, this would be 10x. The US would proceed to do everything possible for the next two decades to destroy Turkey and turn it into a third world basket-case, and it wouldn't care about the fall-out from doing so.
I'm sure that you are correct. But that doesn't solve the problem what we'll do once they have the nuclear weapons.
Turkey is no North Korea, they have strong ties to many governments and are in a strategically central position.
On top of that they have a lot of open disputes with many countries around them and they are known to act militaristically.
It's the mosques calling for jihad we should be paying attention to.