from Bill Still
Good evening, I’m still reporting on wars and rumors of wars.
7,000 Turkish military and police forces last night surrounded the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey in what Turkish officials called a “security check.”
What does that mean? The Turks claimed that they feared that another coup against Turkish President Erdogan was being staged among the Turkish military personnel still remaining at the big air base.
The top U.S. general will be visiting the base today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford.
Gen. Dunford is, no doubt, sizing up the security situation of the base, which is the top repository of US nuclear weapons outside the United States.
Many arms experts have called for the US to evacuate those nukes back stateside, immediately.
The most dangerous scenario the US military faces is if Turkish forces were to overrun the big air base and take control of the 90 B61 tactical nuclear weapons, that are stored in secure underground bunkers.
Erdogan could then invite top scientists from across the Islamic world to come and try to either make the bombs functional or at least remove the radioactive material from them to be used to threaten the west with a more conventional explosive device that would scatter the highly radioactive material in a major European – or even an American – city.
And once out of US hands, the Turks could even be bluffing that the material had been removed, but western leaders would probably not be able to take a chance on the bluff, and so they would have to cave into whatever the Turks demanded.
Far fetched? Not at all. Turkey has the 2nd largest army in NATO. The US air base houses only a few thousand US and NATO military personnel who would be no match for the Turkish Army. They would have to surrender immediately.
Would President Obama then be willing to go to war to retrieve the prized nukes. Very unlikely. Even if he did, the Russians would probably back up the Turks. So, Obama would face the prospect of a nuclear war in order to retrieve captured nuclear weapons.
Hopefully those nukes have already been spirited away as part of a covert military operation which even Obama may not know about. Working over the past few months, they could have been replaced with exact duplicates, but without the radioactive elements within.
Under the circumstances, there is no good reason to have nukes stationed in Turkey. It’s just too dangerous.
Erdogan has not just gone over to the Islamic side – as the MSM depicts – last December, Erdogan travelled to Saudi Arabia to declared himself the leader of the entire Islamic world!
In fact, he is now using this coup to finish killing off the remnants of the Turkish secular democracy that made the nation great.
Erdogan has announced that he will impose a new Turkish Constitution and bypass democratic laws to achieve it. In addition, he has called for a new Islamic caliphate with Turkey as its center.
I’m still reporting from Washington. Good day