US nuclear bombs at Turkish airbase complicate rift over Syria invasion | Hacker News Reader

US nuclear bombs at Turkish airbase complicate rift over Syria invasion

theguardian.com

15 pointscarrozo6 comments

> However, Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert and political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said removing the weapons would not be straightforward. “Extracting them under these circumstances may be incredibly risky since it would involve removing 50 nuclear weapons from the vaults, moving them on a Turkish base and flying them out of Turkish airspace,” Narang said. “They could be vulnerable to accidents, theft or attack.”

On the other hand, the weapons already are vulnerable to accidents, theft, or attack. A 2016 report notes:

> The continued presence of dozens of U.S. nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey raises serious risks of their seizure by terrorists and other hostile forces, a new report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center finds. The report titled B61 Life Extension Program: Costs and Policy Considerations, found that it was an “unanswerable question,” whether the U.S. could have maintained control of the approximately 50 B61 nuclear weapons based at Incirlik during a protracted civil conflict in Turkey. During the failed July 15 coup attempt, power to Incirlik Air Base was cut off and the Turkish government prohibited U.S. aircraft from flying in or out. Eventually, the Incirlik base commander was arrested and implicated in the coup plot. The report’s findings come exactly one month after the failed coup attempt and on the heels of a milestone earlier this month authorizing the production and engineering phase of the B61 Life Extension Program.

https://www.stimson.org/content/us-nuclear-weapons-turkey-ri...

Take this with a pinch of salt, but there are some rumors here in Greece that US will move nuclear bombs from Incirlik, Turkey to Araxos, Greece. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araxos : ”From 1978 to 2001 Araxos Air Base was also home of the NATO 345 Air Munitions Company. This unit was responsible for U.S. B61 nuclear bombs”

...Vipin Narang, a nuclear expert and political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said removing the weapons would not be straightforward. “Extracting them under these circumstances may be incredibly risky since it would involve removing 50 nuclear weapons from the vaults, moving them on a Turkish base and flying them out of Turkish airspace,” Narang said. “They could be vulnerable to accidents, theft or attack.”

Yikes.

Note that all U.S. nuclear weapons have PAL systems that cryptographically secure the nuke. These ensure that a.) the nuke can't be armed unless the President authorizes it b.) the nuke can't be armed unless at least two members of the chain of command responsible for the nuke authorize it and c.) the nuke can't be armed unless delivered in the manner expected. For example, a gravity bomb like the B-61 would have to be dropped from the height that nuclear weapons are expected to be dropped from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link

The worst that a hostile power could do with these nukes is to dismantle them, keep the plans to accelerate their own nuclear program, and store the raw nuclear materials. This is nothing to scoff at, but the threat model of "terrorist group steals nukes and blows up an American city" isn't actually realistic.

Incidentally, this is why the Ukraine is not a major nuclear power. When the Soviet Union broke up a significant number of their nuclear weapons were physically located in the Ukraine, but the PAL codes were all generated in Moscow, and so the Ukrainians had a bunch of useless U-235 & explosives. They eventually destroyed the nukes because they were of no use.

Considering that Turkey has recently purchased a (non-nuclear) weapons systems from Russia and that their military excursion into Syria has the potential to destabilize the whole region (again, following the US' last destabilization of the whole region), I would not have too much confidence in the security of those weapons in place either. NATO looks disturbingly like a game of Jenga right now.

The reality has changed (collapse of the Soviet Union), but the strategic thinking has not.

Now an increasingly authoritarian regime could become a nuclear power with just a small scale assault on the base.

We should remove the cores and ship them by sea under Navy protection.

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