Next for Turkey? Nuclear Weapons!

During the 17 years he has ruled NATO-member Turkey, the country’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has rarely missed an opportunity stealthily to convert Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular, pro-Western establishment into a rogue state hostile to Western interests. Erdoğan now wants to make it a rogue state with nuclear weapons.

“They say we can’t have nuclear-tipped missiles, though some have them. This, I can’t accept,” Erdoğan said in a September 4 speech, while conveniently forgetting that Turkey has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1980. In other words, Turkey’s elected leader publicly declares that he intends to breach an international treaty signed by his country. Turkey is also a signatory to the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear detonations, for any purpose.

For several decades, Turkey, being a staunch NATO ally, was viewed as the trusted custodian of some of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the early 1960s, the U.S. started stockpiling nuclear warheads at the Turkish military’s four main airbases (Ankara Mürted, Malatya Erhaç, Eskişehir and Balıkesir). If ordered, Turkish air force pilots were tasked with hitting designated Warsaw Pact targets.