President Donald Trump this week appeared to break with the longstanding norm of not disclosing the location of U.S. nuclear weapons deployed abroad by telling a reporter he was “confident” weapons stored at Turkey’s Incirlik air base remained safe.
Turkish military forces last week crossed into Syria after Trump — in a move widely criticized by Republican and Democratic lawmakers — ordered U.S. forces to withdraw from the civil war-torn nation. There, with help from Kuridsh soldiers, U.S. forces had been fighting Islamic State (IS) militants.
As part of an operation against the Kurds, who Istanbul considers terrorists, Turkish soldiers on Oct. 11 discharged artillery at or near a U.S.-controlled outpost, the Washington Post reported, citing a Pentagon spokesperson.
Against that backdrop, a reporter asked Trump in a White House press conference whether he was “confident” that “as many as 50 nuclear weapons” stored in Turkey would be safe.
Trump, without repeating either the number 50 or specifying where in Turkey the weapons are, replied, “we’re confident.
“We have a great air base there, a very powerful air base,” Trump said. “That air base alone can take any place. It’s a large, powerful air base. And you know Turkey, just so people remember, Turkey is a NATO member. We’re supposed to get along with our NATO members. And Turkey is a NATO member. Do people want us to start shooting at a NATO member? That would be a first.”
The U.S. government is candid about the fact that allies abroad host B61 nuclear bombs, and that allied aircraft can carry them. However, agencies will not typically divulge where those weapons are, or say how many of those weapons reside in which host country.
A former National Security Council staffer in the Barack Obama administration, Jon Wolfsthal, explained the process on Twitter.
to be fair – they do talk about forward deployed nuclear weapons. We don’t say where they are, or how many. Until today.
— Jon B. Wolfsthal (@JBWolfsthal) October 16, 2019
Wolfsthal later said he did not believe Trump’s statement confirmed the storage of nuclear weapons at Incirlik.
According to the latest estimate published by the Federation of American Scientists — which relies on historical data about the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, plus continuing analysis of nuclear weapons bases — there are around 50 B61 gravity bombs at the Turkish-controlled Incirlik air base.
“But these are estimates,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Washington-based organization’s Nuclear Information Project, wrote in a Wednesday email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “There are no official public numbers for the weapons at each base. It is possible that the number at Incirlik is lower than 50.”
The Federation of American Scientists estimates that there are about 150 B61 bombs in Europe, including in Belgium, Germany and Italy. Other than nuclear weapons carried aboard U.S. ballistic missile submarines, the B61 is the only U.S. nuclear weapon deployed overseas.
Allied aircraft could in theory carry B61 gravity bombs. The presence of these weapons aboard European aircraft, according to U.S. strategy, forces Russia or other potential aggressors on the continent to reckon with a possible nuclear response on the battlefield.
