[Over] the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials.
Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.
Have I been warning about our nukes in Turkey for a while now (a shallow and quick search says more than two years), or what?
Have a super sparkly day.
UPDATE: Yeah, that's what I've said:
Ankara doesn’t have access codes for devices, but they could be cracked over time and the fissile material could be used to make homemade weapons[.]
The Turks aren't the problem. Erdogan is the problem.
Sadly, the article says agreements require us to get Turkish approval to move the nukes. Even without such an agreement on movement (which makes sense, who wants nukes traveling in your country without knowing there are safeguards?), we'd need Turkish approval so we don't risk a confrontation.
A better bet would be to disable them until we can get them out.
