10/30/19
National Security Archive Publishes New Briefing Book on Nuclear Weapons and Turkey Since 1959
Breaking Newstags: nuclear weapons, Turkey, National Security Archive, nuclear history
The current crisis with Turkey over Syria has raised questions, yet to be resolved, about the security of 50 U.S. nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base. These questions have been posed before, going back almost to the start of nuclear deployments in Turkey in 1959. How the United States responds carries implications for the region, for U.S.-Turkey relations, and for NATO. Today, the National Security Archive is posting a selection of declassified documents from various sources, including the Digital National Security Archive, in order to provide historical context to the situation.
The facts of nuclear deployments in Turkey have been an official secret for decades, but it is no secret that they are a legacy and a relic of the Cold War. It is also no secret that the deployments caused anxiety in Washington when the U.S.-Turkish nuclear relationship began in the late 1950s. For example, according to a declassified memorandum of conversation in late 1960s staffers with the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) told State Department officials that they saw a “real threat in Turkey” because of the possibility that leaders of an Army coup “might seize control of one or more of the inadequately protected weapons.”
The JCAE staffers also stated that they had learned that during the 1960 military coup that the Turkish “situation was so unstable that twice [Supreme Allied Commander General Lauris] Norstad almost ordered all the weapons to be evacuated.” Norstad later denied that any such thing had happened, but the JCAE remained concerned about overall stability in Turkey.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Chair of Florida Charter School Board on Firing of Principal: About Policy, Not David Statue
- Graduate Student Strikes Fight Back Against Decades of Austerity, Seek to Revive Opportunity
- When Right Wingers Struggle with Defining "Woke" it Shows they Oppose Pursuing Equality
- Strangelove on the Square: Secret USAF Films Showed Airmen What to Expect if Nuclear War Broke Out
- The Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- New Books Force Consideration of Reconstruction's End from Black Perspective
- Excerpt: How Apartheid South Africa Tried to Create a Libertarian Utopia
- Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
- Kendi: "Anti-woke" Part of Backlash Against Antiracist Protest Movements
- Monica Muñoz Martinez Honored for Truth-Telling in Texas History