The H-Bombs in Turkey(newyorker.com) |
The H-Bombs in Turkey(newyorker.com) |
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.
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.
The simple viewpoint is that it is completely nuts.
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?...
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.
Wow that's quite a range. I wonder if it's the hydrogen volume adjusted to determine the yield.
lol
What kind of aircraft would be that?
What the hell is the point of that?
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)
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't the U.S. have the capability to disable them remotely?
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.
The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
Under result: "Withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy"
> 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?
No government would buy unreliable weapons.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exocet...
- 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)
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.
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.
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.
>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:
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.
Both the AP's story and RT corroborate that many troops didn't know they were involved in a coup.
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.
There is no way you can pin this on NATO unless you whole-heartly support a military police state.
Now, if you had said one week...
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.
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.
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.
At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.
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.
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.
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.
This is likely true. It's about ~5Mm from Incirlik to Russia (across the Black).
Edit 1: s/Baltic/Black/g
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.
I'm just following the standard :|
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.
There is no way Russia launches a nuclear strike on America on the behalf of Armenia. It would be suicide.
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.
* 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.
"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.
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.
