The H-Bombs in Turkey

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).

If what you write is true they should have had clear warning about that coup attempt. It might have succeeded.

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.

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.

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?

That may be true, but the intermediate will be extremely messy, to put it mildly.

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.

> 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?

Under result: "Withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy"

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."

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.

At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.

This is likely true. It's about ~5Mm from Incirlik to Russia (across the Black).

Edit 1: s/Baltic/Black/g

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.

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.

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.