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Erdogan says he wants nuclear weapons
David E. Sanger and William J. Broad - The New York Times - Sunday,
October 20, 2019
WASHINGTON — Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants more than
control over a wide swath of Syria along his country’s border. He says
he wants the Bomb.
In the weeks leading up to his order to launch the military across the
border to clear Kurdish areas, Mr. Erdogan made no secret of his larger
ambition. “Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads,” he told
a meeting of his governing party in September. But the West insists “we
can’t have them,” he said. “This, I cannot accept.”
With Turkey now in open confrontation with its NATO allies, having
gambled and won a bet that it could conduct a military incursion into
Syria and get away with it, Mr. Erdogan’s threat takes on new meaning.
If the United States could not prevent the Turkish leader from routing
its Kurdish allies, how can it stop him from building a nuclear weapon
or following Iran in gathering the technology to do so?
It was not the first time Mr. Erdogan has spoken about breaking free of
the restrictions on countries that have signed the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, and no one is quite sure of his true
intentions. The Turkish autocrat is a master of keeping allies and
adversaries off balance, as President Trump discovered in the past two
weeks.
“The Turks have said for years that they will follow what Iran does,”
said John J. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense who now runs
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But
this time is different. Erdogan has just facilitated America’s retreat
from the region.”
“Maybe, like the Iranians, he needs to show that he is on the two-yard
line, that he could get a weapon at any moment,” Mr. Hamre said.
If so, he is on his way — with a program more advanced than that of
Saudi Arabia, but well short of what Iran has assembled. But experts say
it is doubtful that Mr. Erdogan could put a weapon together in secret.
And any public move to reach for one would provoke a new crisis: His
country would become the first NATO member to break out of the treaty
and independently arm itself with the ultimate weapon.
Already Turkey has the makings of a bomb program: uranium deposits and
research reactors — and mysterious ties to the nuclear world’s most
famous black marketeer, Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan. It is also
building its first big power reactor to generate electricity with
Russia’s help. That could pose a concern because Mr. Erdogan has not
said how he would handle its nuclear waste, which could provide the fuel
for a weapon. Russia also built Iran’s Bushehr reactor.
Experts said it would take a number of years for Turkey to get to a
weapon, unless Mr. Erdogan bought one. And the risk for Mr. Erdogan
would be considerable.
“Erdogan is playing to an anti-American domestic audience with his
nuclear rhetoric, but is highly unlikely to pursue nuclear weapons,”
said Jessica C. Varnum, an expert on Turkey at Middlebury’s James Martin
Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. “There would be
huge economic and reputational costs to Turkey, which would hurt the
pocketbooks of Erdogan’s voters.”
“For Erdogan,” Ms. Varnum said, “that strikes me as a bridge too far.”
There is another element to this ambiguous atomic mix: The presence of
roughly 50 American nuclear weapons, stored on Turkish soil. The United
States had never openly acknowledged their existence, until Wednesday,
when Mr. Trump did exactly that.
Asked about the safety of those weapons, kept in an American-controlled
bunker at Incirlik Air Base, Mr. Trump said, “We’re confident, and we
have a great air base there, a very powerful air base.”
But not everyone is so confident, because the air base belongs to the
Turkish government. If relations with Turkey deteriorated, the American
access to that base is not assured.
Turkey has been a base for American nuclear weapons for more than six
decades. Initially, they were intended to deter the Soviet Union, and
were famously a negotiating chip in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy secretly agreed to remove
missiles from Turkey in return for Moscow doing the same in Cuba.
But tactical weapons have remained. Over the years, American officials
have often expressed nervousness about the weapons, which have little to
no strategic use versus Russia now, but have been part of a NATO
strategy to keep regional players in check — and keep Turkey from
feeling the need for a bomb of its own.
When Mr. Erdogan put down an attempted military coup in July 2016, the
Obama administration quietly drew up an extensive contingency plan for
removing the weapons from Incirlik, according to former government
officials. But it was never put in action, in part because of fears that
removing the American weapons would, at best, undercut the alliance, and
perhaps give Mr. Erdogan an excuse to build his own arsenal.
For decades, Turkey has been hedging its bets. Starting in 1979, it
began operating a few small research reactors, and since 1986, it has
made reactor fuel at a pilot plant in Istanbul. The Istanbul complex
also handles spent fuel and its highly radioactive waste.
“They’re building up their nuclear expertise,” Olli Heinonen, the former
chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an
interview. “It’s high quality stuff.”
He added that Ankara might “come to the threshold” of the bomb option in
four or five years, or sooner, with substantial foreign help. Mr.
Heinonen noted that Moscow is now playing an increasingly prominent role
in Turkish nuclear projects and long-range planning.
Turkey’s program, like Iran’s, has been characterized as an effort to
develop civilian nuclear power.
Russia has agreed to build four nuclear reactors in Turkey, but the
effort is seriously behind schedule. The first reactor, originally
scheduled to go into operation this year, is now seen as starting up in
late 2023.
The big question is what happens to its spent fuel. Nuclear experts
agree that the hardest part of bomb acquisition is not coming up with
designs or blueprints, but obtaining the fuel. A civilian nuclear power
program is often a ruse for making that fuel, and building a clandestine
nuclear arsenal.
Turkey has uranium deposits — the obligatory raw material — and over the
decades has shown great interest in learning the formidable skills
needed to purify uranium as well as to turn it into plutonium, the two
main fuels of atom bombs. A 2012 report from the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, “Turkey and the Bomb,” noted that Ankara “has left
its nuclear options open.”
Hans Rühle, the head of planning in the German Ministry of Defense from
1982 to 1988, went further. In a 2015 report, he said “the Western
intelligence community now largely agrees that Turkey is working both on
nuclear weapon systems and on their means of delivery.”
In a 2017 study, the Institute for Science and International Security, a
private group in Washington that tracks the bomb’s spread, concluded
that Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to consolidate power and raise Turkey’s
regional status were increasing “the risk that Turkey will seek nuclear
weapons capabilities.”
In response to the German assertion and other similar assessments,
Turkey has repeatedly denied a secret nuclear arms effort, with its
foreign ministry noting that Turkey is “part of NATO’s collective
defense system.”
But Mr. Erdogan’s recent statements were notable for failing to mention
NATO, and for expressing his long-running grievance that the country has
been prohibited from possessing an arsenal of its own. Turkey has
staunchly defended what it calls its right under peaceful global accords
to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel, the critical steps to a bomb
the Trump administration is insisting Iran must surrender.
Turkey’s uranium skills were highlighted in the 2000s when international
sleuths found it to be a covert industrial hub for the nuclear black
market of Mr. Khan, a builder of Pakistan’s arsenal. The rogue scientist
— who masterminded the largest illicit nuclear proliferation ring in
history — sold key equipment and designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The most important items were centrifuges. The tall machines spin at
supersonic speeds to purify uranium, and governments typically classify
their designs as top secret. Their output, depending on the level of
enrichment, can fuel reactors or atom bombs.
According to “Nuclear Black Markets,” a report on the Khan network by
the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank,
companies in Turkey aided the covert effort by importing materials from
Europe, making centrifuge parts and shipping finished products to customers.
A riddle to this day is whether the Khan network had a fourth customer.
Dr. Rühle, the former German defense official, said intelligence sources
believe Turkey could possess “a considerable number of centrifuges of
unknown origin.” The idea that Ankara could be the fourth customer, he
added, “does not appear far-fetched.” But there is no public evidence of
any such facilities.
What is clear is that in developing its nuclear program, Turkey has
found a partner: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In April 2018,
Mr. Putin traveled to Turkey to signal the official start of
construction of a $20 billion nuclear plant on the country’s
Mediterranean coast.
Part of Russia’s motivation is financial. Building nuclear plants is one
of the country’s most profitable exports. But it also serves another
purpose: Like Mr. Putin’s export of an S-400 air defense system to
Ankara — again, over American objections — the construction of the plant
puts a NATO member partly in Russia’s camp, dependent on it for technology.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New
York.
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