While still concerning, they really buried a key detail: "About two thousand U.S. military personnel remain stationed there."
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.
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.
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.
That may be true, but the intermediate will be extremely messy, to put it mildly.
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.
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.
PS. Moreover, large quantities of mustard agent were found in Syria in 2013.
1: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/chemical_warfare...
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.
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.
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 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.
Because they correctly perceive there's very little risk in remaining there.
* 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.
Going with your suggestion would indicate that this safeguard no longer exists.
In '61 and '97. Go to turkish leftists, ask what happened in 1980.
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?
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.
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.
Doesn't the U.S. have the capability to disable them remotely?
No government would buy unreliable weapons.
- 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)
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exocet...