America Keeps Lethal Nukes All Over Europe for No Good Reason

Bonnie Kristian

Security, Europe

It’s not just Turkey.

That the United States briefly lost access to the Incirlik Air Base was almost a footnote in the glut of news about the recent military coup attempt in Turkey. And what attention the incident did get was focused on the immediate implication: Incirlik is central to the United States’ anti–Islamic State air campaigns, and those dependent on the base were forced to come to an immediate halt.

Now, as the Erdoğan government consolidates its restored authority, Incirlik is open to America once again, though as of this writing it reportedly remains without power. With the help of generators, U.S. operations on the base are back in action. All’s well that ends well, right?

Not quite. As Eric Schlosser details in a must-read report in the New Yorker, it wasn’t only anti-ISIS efforts that were imperiled by that loss of access. Incirlik is also home to around fifty American-made B-61 hydrogen bombs—roughly a quarter of the nukes of NATO—each one capable of producing a boom up to eleven times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Sure, they’re stored in a secure underground vault. Sure, they’re equipped with switches known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), designed to prevent a bomb from detonating if the user doesn’t enter the correct code. Sure, there are significantly fewer American-supplied nukes distributed among NATO members than there used to be, thanks to stockpile cuts made by both Presidents Bush.

But it doesn’t take a lot of H-bombs to wreak a lot of havoc. As Schlosser notes, PALs can be bypassed with the right skills. And though there are obviously generators galore at Incirlik, loss of base power plus a significantly below-average U.S. troop presence don’t exactly make those vaults more secure.

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