61–70 of 145 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know to be honest. To speculate the B61 is a dumb bomb. And most photo's of the casing show no plug/contact point for electronics. I'm assuming at take off. When the neutron reflector's distance is set, and the barometric pressure for denotation height is calibrated.
I wonder if arming of a bomb like that has a time limit - so that it safes itself if not "used" or explicitly deactivated within a particular time period.
I'm skeptical that the PALs are as easy to bypass as this article says. It's possible that the arming code includes critical information necessary to properly detonate the bomb, such as timing info for firing the various detonators. Even if it doesn't, the critical PAL hardware is deep inside the bomb, requiring the bomb to be disassembled to get to it, then reassembled afterwards, and that's not quite as easy as swa…
Are those the same PALs that were (allegedly) set to 00000000 for most of the Cold War?
As I said in my other reply, I'd totally believe it if this was happening in past decades, but it seems much less likely now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that is what the author meant, that is what the author should have said. "Equipped to deliver" pretty clearly means no aircraft that can load the bomb. At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.
i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'. new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there , as in parcel delivery. i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away. whether you can put the package on the truck does not i…
So "the target" is always and forever Russia, and mainland Russia at that? No, the generic statement "equipped to deliver" cannot be interpreted with respect to a particular use case among many. It means "capable of loading the weapon and striking a target".
> new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
Any aircraft capable of carrying air-to-ground ordinance can "get it there", for some set of "it"s.
> i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away.
By your definition no truck is "equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away", yet trucks do this every day. You are adding a bunch of hidden assumptions about what "equipped" means, many of which aren't valid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're vastly underestimating 1st world intelligence capabilities. By the time anyone is brainstorming how exactly they want to take the base the big players in NATO already have guys sitting in jets idling on the taxiway, an aircraft carrier is taking a hard turn into the wind and an aide is popping popcorn and cracking a beer so Mr. Putin can enjoy the spectacle. When nukes are involved things get taken ver…
I think you are giving people far too much credit, and wrapping it in too much nonsense. The amount of absolute intelligence failure (intentional or otherwise) in the last 15 or so years has been astounding.
While still concerning, they really buried a key detail: "About two thousand U.S. military personnel remain stationed there."
Turkey has the largest standing army in the region. 600K or so. Those 2000 troops wouldn't last long enough to get the weapons out.
They'd be likely to get carved up in a back-room deal with Russia and NATO. The US would immediately declare war on Turkey and begin destroying its cities and infrastructure. The Turkish air force would be completely disabled within a week. All major access points to Turkey's cities, all transit lines, would be bombed and disabled, shutting down their economy and supply lines. All power generating stations and major grid lines would be disabled or bombed and non-functioning within the first week. Air superiority would be accomplished rapidly, the US could sit outside of Turkey and hit major targets with cruise missiles at will.
So what was your premise again, the US would lose some troops? Well that happens in a war. Is the premise that Turkey would threaten to use or attempt to use the nukes on US allies? All that would accomplish is providing justification for either preemptively nuking Turkey to put an end to the war, or dramatically escalating the all-out attack on Turkey to attempt to cripple them faster and convince the military to turn on Erdogan (which would happen very quickly). There's no scenario in which Turkey is a meaningful threat for long.
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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know to be honest. To speculate the B61 is a dumb bomb. And most photo's of the casing show no plug/contact point for electronics. I'm assuming at take off. When the neutron reflector's distance is set, and the barometric pressure for denotation height is calibrated.
It wouldn't have to have a port. The US has had radio programmed artillery shells for a long time so using the same tech to set and arm bombs isn't a stretch.
These are just proximity fuses. I can find no reference to actual communication with in-flight artillery shells. Furthermore Nuclear Artillery shells were armed when loaded. They were one of the few systems outside of the two-man rule. As a single inferior officer would arm the shell when loading it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know to be honest. To speculate the B61 is a dumb bomb. And most photo's of the casing show no plug/contact point for electronics. I'm assuming at take off. When the neutron reflector's distance is set, and the barometric pressure for denotation height is calibrated.
It wouldn't have to have a port. The US has had radio programmed artillery shells for a long time so using the same tech to set and arm bombs isn't a stretch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turkey has the largest standing army in the region. 600K or so. Those 2000 troops wouldn't last long enough to get the weapons out.
I think you're vastly underestimating 1st world intelligence capabilities. By the time anyone is brainstorming how exactly they want to take the base the big players in NATO already have guys sitting in jets idling on the taxiway, an aircraft carrier is taking a hard turn into the wind and an aide is popping popcorn and cracking a beer so Mr. Putin can enjoy the spectacle. When nukes are involved things get taken ver…
Agents have historically been fond of generating false intelligence to prove that they are valuable, and historical documentation has shown that agents aren't always that competent.
Using technology certainly helps, but it has its limits. Human intelligence tends to get better information, but can be unreliable and generate lots of false information.
It would not surprise me at all if intelligence agencies failed to realize something is coming. Hindsight shows that the intelligence failures in 9/11 and Iraq were due to valuable information not being identified or the intelligence community sucking up false information from informants who were just making it up to stay in the CIA payroll. It's a real hit and miss sort of business.
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.