Turkey holding 50 US nuclear bombs hostage

[Dark_Grey]

20 minutes ago, and then said:

Actually, Israel received very little aid from us early on.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-1949-present

  France was more about being their sugar daddy back then and it was France that helped them build their nuclear capability.  As to the desire to keep others from the bomb... what would you have done differently?  This technology was so profoundly dangerous that it rightly caused even warmongers to be sobered by the potential risk.  I think the non-proliferation regimes of the past have failed as witnessed by India and Pakistan now being members of the club.  A barbaric thug in NK has the big fire now as well.  Iran, if it doesn't already have a crude device, almost certainly will within a few years.  The fairness concept doesn't translate well when we're talking about justification for nations going nuclear.  Insanity and documented aggression against neighbors needs to have its voice heard as well.  If the Turks want an arsenal then they need to get to work building breeder reactors and the other infrastructure necessary to refine fuel and create and test weapon designs.  IOW do all the work everyone else has had to do.  Or, I guess they could buy some designs and test data from everyone's favorite proliferator, AQ Khan.

All I know is that we won't forever escape the madness of using them again.  It WILL happen, sooner or later.  I hope I'm either on the other side of the planet or at ground zero.  Either way is fine.

Good post. It seems like a lot came down to timing. The first nations to get "the bomb" more or less shut the door behind them. 

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The fairness concept doesn't translate well when we're talking about justification for nations going nuclear.

I'm just splitting hairs now cause it's a slow day but isn't "fairness" relative? America is not a benevolent force of good, objectively speaking. They are allowed to shout down any objections because of their overwhelming military might. Who can make the call as to who is stable enough to hold the ultimate weapon? "Let he who is without sin explode the first bomb"

[Grim Reaper 6]

16 hours ago, and then said:

While I know that nearly anything is possible, I think the odds of that happening would be longer than the ones that keep me buying lottery tickets.  If there's one thing we've learned to do over the past 70 years, it's to make these things fail-safe.  I read a book once called COMMAND AND CONTROL that dealt with that learning curve that we and Russia, primarily, dealt with during the Cold War and if the population had been aware of how often we nearly killed millions of our own people by accident they would have been SERIOUSLY freaked.  But those experiences greatly improved safety.  The one event that was the most chilling to me occurred after a B-52 crashed and burned with weapons on board.  When the salvage was underway and they had a chance to do the forensics they found that of the three components installed to interrupt the detonation cycle, two had failed and the last one had actually been almost an afterthought in the design and was an extremely inexpensive, basic kind of device.  I want to say it cost under a dollar at the time.  YEP...THAT close.

The situation you are speaking of happened in the 1960s. Our weapons are no longer built in that manner, even the older weapons like those in Turkey have been upgraded with new safeties in place to prevent such an incident from occurring. But I agree in the past some pretty scary things did happen, I am just glad things turned out like they did. 

Like I said previously I would bet the cores have been removed and are already out of the country.

Edited October 17, 2019 by Manwon Lender

[Space Commander Travis]

17 hours ago, and then said:

While I know that nearly anything is possible, I think the odds of that happening would be longer than the ones that keep me buying lottery tickets.  If there's one thing we've learned to do over the past 70 years, it's to make these things fail-safe.  I read a book once called COMMAND AND CONTROL that dealt with that learning curve that we and Russia, primarily, dealt with during the Cold War and if the population had been aware of how often we nearly killed millions of our own people by accident they would have been SERIOUSLY freaked.  But those experiences greatly improved safety.  The one event that was the most chilling to me occurred after a B-52 crashed and burned with weapons on board.  When the salvage was underway and they had a chance to do the forensics they found that of the three components installed to interrupt the detonation cycle, two had failed and the last one had actually been almost an afterthought in the design and was an extremely inexpensive, basic kind of device.  I want to say it cost under a dollar at the time.  YEP...THAT close.

surely they could only possibly have detonated if the fuses had been set beforehand (before takeoff or perhaps from the cockpit, depending on whether that could be done). The worse that could have happened would have been that plutonium would have been scattered over a wide area by the fire - which would have been bad obviously, but it couldn't have resulted in an actual nuclear explosion. You have to set these things to explode, they're designed not to unless you specify otherwise.