Coup attempt raises fresh questions about safety of U.S. nuclear stockpile in Turkey

“I think the key lesson is that the benefits of storing nuclear weapons in Turkey are minimal but the risks have increased significantly over the past five years,” FAS’s Kristensen told the Guardian. “I would say that the security situation in Turkey and in the base area no longer meet the safety requirements that the United States should have for storage of nuclear weapons. You only get so many warnings before something goes terribly wrong. It’s time to withdraw the weapons.”

The United States keeps a total of 180 B61 nuclear bombs in Europe (down from about 7,000 in the mid-1960s). In addition to the fifty bombs stored at Incirlik, there are 130 B61 bombs stored in U.S.-run NATO bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. These are tactical nuclear weapons which are no longer operationally relevant to NATO’s military posture. Removing these cold war remnants from the continent requires a consensus among NATO members, and in the absence of such a consensus, the United States keeps them as a symbol of its commitment to protect the continent.

The Obama administration is also planning to upgrade these weapons.

Ian Kearns, the director of the European Leadership Network think tank, said: “If they are stationed at a place base that intelligence suggests is a target of terrorists attacks and prone to instability, it is no longer reasonable to keep them there.”

Aaron Stein, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, wrote in Foreign Policy that the coup and the role of Incirlik in it raises wider questions about Turkey’s role in NATO. “It says a lot about the ability of Turkey to operate in coalition operations if its army can’t be trusted,” he wrote. “To have rogue air force commanders flying around Turkey poses a lot of scenarios that NATO hasn’t planned for.”

Stein added: “The fundamental understanding of Turkey as of forty-eight hours ago was that it was a difficult ally to work with, with a risk of autocratic backslide, but it was stable. Now it’s a difficult ally, with the autocratic backslide maybe going into fast-forward. And it’s unstable.”

Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2014), writes in the New Yorker:

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 [Permissive Action Links] 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. NATO’s hydrogen bombs are still guarded by the troops of their host countries. 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.

Incirlik has more nuclear weapons than any other NATO base, but Schlosser notes that the airbase does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them. “The bombs simply sit at the base, underground, waiting to be used or misused,” Schlosser writes.