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The H-Bombs in Turkey

newyorker.com

101–110 of 145 posts

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a declaration of war on the US and NATO. 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 ne…

I'm sure that you are correct. But that doesn't solve the problem what we'll do once they have the nuclear weapons. 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.

It's the mosques calling for jihad we should be paying attention to.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see: * 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…

If find that a more worrisome scenario than a failed coup. The previous (successful) coups in Turkey ended with the military handing back power as soon as it was feasible and they have traditionally only done this to safeguard Turkey as a secular state. Going with your suggestion would indicate that this safeguard no longer exists.

> safeguard Turkey as a secular state

In '61 and '97. Go to turkish leftists, ask what happened in 1980.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#103
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO." 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.

> the lack of preparedness in Nice There is no way you can pin this on NATO unless you whole-heartly support a military police state.

And even then nobody would be able to stop a truck aimed into a crowd in time for it not to do any damage at all.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#104
>the “dial-a-yield” of the B-61 bombs at Incirlik can be adjusted from 0.3 kilotons to as many as a hundred and seventy kilotons.

Wow that's quite a range. I wonder if it's the hydrogen volume adjusted to determine the yield.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Toyota Hilux isn't an aircraft. The B61 is an air-dropped dumb bomb. Any aircraft that can load it and drop it in the air can deliver it. If you didn't care about accuracy you could roll the thing out the back of a C-130 and successfully deliver it. 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 awa…

I was under the impression that many nuclear bombs had arming mechanisms that required special electronics in the plane. Is that not true for the b61?

Other than maybe the A-10, all the US tactical and strategic aircraft have that wiring.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#106
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F15s, F16s, and many aircraft that the Navy uses. Still I would think that its high time to get them out of Turkey with the stability of the region in question, let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged

>let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged 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, a…

In turkey we have a supreme military council every year, on august, called YAS, where promotions and dismissals. It is rumoured that these lot did this madness to not be dismissed, because that was planned. This is the most believable story to me.

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.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#107
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO." 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.

> the lack of preparedness in Nice There is no way you can pin this on NATO unless you whole-heartly support a military police state.

WW2 showed that peace is never enabled by flowers, candles, and sandals.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#108
post #39
post #29

One thing most people don't hear in the traditional American story about the Cuban Missle Crisis is that we put our weapons close to Russia (in Turkey) before they put any weapons close to us.

Really? I thought that Kennedy's secret agreement to trade the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba was the standard ending to the story.

Hmm. I don't disagree, but -- it's "standard" only if you've been paying close attention.

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.

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#109

>the “dial-a-yield” of the B-61 bombs at Incirlik can be adjusted from 0.3 kilotons to as many as a hundred and seventy kilotons. Wow that's quite a range. I wonder if it's the hydrogen volume adjusted to determine the yield.

The fuel for the large majority of the fusion energy in a thermonuclear weapon is lithium deuteride, a solid. But here's some theories now how this works, one of which is changing the amount of tritium gas in the primary; but note that the primary (no pun intended) purpose of the tritium in the primary is to boost fission output through neutron release

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_yield

Re: The H-Bombs in Turkey

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take was the author meant no aircraft with the range to drop them on Russian targets. The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.

What if the Turks decide to take the weapons and attack the Armenians who are protected by the Russians? 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.

If Turkey shot Armenia with a nuclear bomb, given the location and size of Armenia, that'd also affect Azerbaijan, Turkey herself, and, Iran. That means if we shot Armenia with an American nuclear missile, we'd be left in the middle of an interracial nuclear orgy where the US, the Russia (ally of Armenia) and the Iran wipe us out of the world map (quite geographically).
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