Nuclear weaponsU.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey at risk of seizure by terrorists, hostile forces

Published 17 August 2016

The continued presence of dozens of U.S. B61 nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey raises serious risks of their seizure by terrorists and other hostile forces, a new report says. These weapons no longer serve any military purpose, and ending B61 presence in Europe would save $3.7 billion over five years.

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 United States could have maintained control of the approximately fifty B61 nuclear weapons based at Incirlik during a protracted civil conflict in Turkey. During the failed 15 July 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 Stimson Center notes that the report’s findings come 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.

“From a security point of view, it’s a roll of the dice to continue to have approximately fifty of America’s nuclear weapons stationed at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, just seventy miles from the Syrian border,” said report co-author Laicie Heeley, a fellow with the Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense program at the Stimson Center. “These weapons have zero utility on the European battlefield and today are more of a liability than asset to our NATO allies.”

Over the next thirty years, the United States will spend an estimated $1 trillion to modernize the nuclear triad — which includes the B61 Service Life Extension Program. The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to extend the service lives of an estimated 480 of the approximately 800 total B61 bombs at a projected total cost of more than $8 billion. The United States first deployed tactical nuclear bombs in Europe during the cold war in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to offset a buildup of Soviet tank armies deployed in Eastern Europe. Although most U.S. tactical weapons were withdrawn from Europe during the early 1990s, 180 of the tactical versions of the B61s remain at six bases in Europe — in Belgium, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

The report recommends the immediate removal of all B61 nuclear weapons from Europe and cancelling the procurement of B61s that would be stored in Europe. Doing so, the report finds, would create savings of more than $6 billion over the lifetime of the program, and free up additional military assets that could be used to bolster U.S. conventional forces.

“These bombs are ill-suited for modern warfare and incredibly costly,” said report co-author Barry Blechman, co-founder of the Stimson Center. “The smart move would be to remove these weapons from Europe and double down to strengthen conventional forces that actually protect our NATO allies.”

Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, agrees with the conclusions of the Stimson Center’s report. He told DW that political instability and the overall security situation in Turkey were reasons enough for the United States to pull its nuclear weapons out.

There is no other country in Europe where the United States stores nuclear weapons where a military coup just happened and you have something that looks almost like a civil war with violent explosions and killings, and in addition to that you are less than 100 miles from the border of a completely war-torn country, Syria,” he said.

Those are security and political conditions that are completely out of sync with what you normally require for having nuclear weapons deployed,” he added.

Over the years, security measures have been added  to make the B61 bombs at Incirlik safer, but Heeley says this is beside the point. “There are a lot of safeguards in place…but when you are talking about U.S. nuclear weapons, if there is still a risk, you have to consider whether it is really worth taking that risk,” Heeley told DW. “When we are talking about these particular weapons, the military value is not great enough to justify the risk you are taking.”

Kristensen and Heeley reject the argument that the presence of the B61 bomb reassures Turkey about NATO’s commitment to the country’s defense, and that the withdrawal of these weapons would be taken as a signal of a weakening of that commitment.

The B61s don’t serve a military role in Europe… [withdrawing them] wouldn’t hurt NATO security and may even help NATO security by focusing on conventional forces,” Kristensen told DW.

Heeley agreed.

The United States in the past couple of years has invested significantly in [NATO]; they have put a lot of new conventional resources into the alliance,” she said. “The United States should be able to show its support to Turkey in other ways through conventional support.”