Last week’s failed military coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reignited the public debate regarding the security and value of the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons widely accepted to be deployed in the NATO state.
Any corresponding discussion happening within the Obama administration or Defense Department, though, is being kept behind closed doors.
“Turkey is a key ally to the United States, a key ally to the war on ISIS, and right now they’re going through their issues that are all internal to the government and we’ll see how things flush out,” Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said Thursday at an Air Force Association breakfast.
The White House referred questions on the matter to the Pentagon, which said it does not discuss the location of strategic assets. “Broadly, we have taken appropriate steps to maintain the safety and security of our personnel, their families, and our facilities, and we will continue to do so,” Henrietta Levin, Office of the Secretary of Defense spokeswoman for Europe and NATO, said by email.
The United States is believed to keep roughly 180 B61 nuclear gravity bombs at military installations in five European nations as part of its military commitment to NATO. Roughly 50 of those are at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. The commander at Incirlik and other senior officers were arrested in the wake of the coup attempt and the base’s power was temporarily shut off. The installation itself stands within 100 miles of the Syrian border.
“Washington will need Ankara’s full cooperation to ensure that all U.S. military equipment and forces are fully protected – which appears to be happening, after some moves toward isolating the base Saturday,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, former NATO supreme allied commander, wrote in Foreign Policy this week.
The arguments this week in various forums focused both on the necessity of keeping the bombs in Turkey decades after the Cold War ended and on the protection of the weapons themselves amid Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism and regional threats.
“It is frankly amazing they’re still there given the unique security situation compared with any other nuclear weapons storage site,” Kristensen told sister publication Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor by email.
“Unfortunately the U.S. is most likely to keep them there for the time being. We have already seen statements from U.S. officials that military assets at the base are secure. And NATO has just reaffirmed in Warsaw the continued need to have nukes in Europe and the broadest possible participation in nuclear burden-sharing, so we’re are likely to see hear both NATO and US bureaucrats arguing that they can’t move weapons out of Turkey.”
Kristensen cited a number of potential threats to the security of the bombs, including broadly a developing security threat that challenges U.S. control of the situation, or more specifically infiltrators into the base or terrorists attacking from outside. “One could also imagine the security situation Turkey spinning more out of control because of Erdogan’s continued purge and fights would erupt between different groups in the Turkish military and that the insight would make its way into the base itself.”
Others played down this threat by citing the extensive security measures that surround the bombs, which are reportedly held in underground vaults behind several lines of fences and Turkish and U.S. military guards. Setting off one of the weapons would require a coded Permissive Action Link, and the bombs would be extremely difficult to extract from the base, wrote Cheryl Rofer, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory plutonium storage and environmental cleanup official, in the War on the Rocks blog.
“U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey are under the control of U.S. military forces, so they would be defended by ferociously well-trained and well-equipped American troops,” concurred Kori Schake, a former State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council official now at the Hoover Institution, wrote in The New York Times. “Maintaining control of the weapons would be the top priority if seizure was ever threatened, with all of America’s military power put to the task.”
Kristensen and others acknowledged the security, but said it did not eliminate the danger. The hardened storage area, security perimeter, and codes are not “intended to protect the weapons against a host nation that attempts to seize them. They can buy time, but that is all,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said in a point-counterpoint with Schake on the Times opinions page.
The need to keep the bombs in Turkey was similarly debated. In the Times, Schake noted that President Barack Obama and his fellow leaders at the NATO Summit earlier this month reaffirmed that nuclear weapons would remain a component of the alliance deterrent. Pulling the U.S. bombs out of Europe would suggest to Russia and other potential adversaries that they might take steps to give the United States “second thoughts” about sending them back to the continent. “Even the suggestion that the United States would not honor its NATO pledge would dangerously erode Europe’s security.”
Lewis countered that the weapons in Turkey no longer have a viable military use. There are no U.S. or Turkish military aircraft in the nation that can carry the bombs, which the government in Ankara prefers to ignore and the U.S. Air Force views as an “expensive distraction” in the battle against ISIS, he wrote. While Russian aggression must be deterred, Lewis said, the nation has in recent years invaded two neighboring states and breached the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the U.S. even while the B61s were deployed around the continent.
“If our main goal was improving security, we could consolidate the existing number of nuclear weapons in a smaller number of air bases in Europe,” according to Lewis. “But if the argument is that moving the weapons would be too politically explosive or divisive, then doesn’t that tell us something about the value of the weapons? Doesn’t that tell us that the weapons symbolize a divided alliance?”
This article was originally published in our sister publication Exchange Monitor.