That was how David Sanger teased his and William Broad’s article on Twitter.
“Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads,” Turkey’s president told his ruling party. But the West insists “we can’t have them. This I cannot accept.” @WilliamJBroad and I ask: what would it take for Turkey to build the Bomb? https://t.co/1nbR6YOikh via @NYTimes
— David Sanger (@SangerNYT) October 21, 2019
Unfortunately that is not how the article is written. If you want to read it, write it, they say, so here goes.
In September, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said “Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads,” but the West insists “we can’t have them. This, I cannot accept.”
This is concerning because Turkey is one of the nations that could be capable of building a nuclear weapon and may have taken steps in that direction in the past. Iran’s past work on nuclear weapons and Saudi Arabia’s inordinate interest in acquiring the nuclear fuel cycle could motivate Turkey in that direction again.
But this is one statement, and there is no evidence that Turkey is taking steps toward a nuclear weapon.
Step 1. The decision. The Turkish government would have to decide to withdraw from or violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which they joined in 1980. Building nuclear weapons would also damage, and possibly violate, their treaty obligations under NATO. The cost of a nuclear weapons program would have to be considered as well. Turkey probably could support such a program, but at great cost to the rest of Turkey’s economy. No such decision has been taken.
Step 2. Mining and milling uranium. Sanger and Broad refer ominously to Turkey’s uranium deposits as one of the “makings of a bomb program.” But increased activity at mines is easy to see on overhead photos, and none has been reported. I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of the open-source intelligence organizations prepare a report in the next few weeks.
Step 3. Building centrifuges and/or a reactor. Turkey may have some of the information necessary; Sanger and Broad note that information from A.Q. Khan may have reached Turkey, although they do not say what or if it is being used to build centrifuges. Russia is building four commercial reactors at Akkuyu on the Mediterranean coast. Other projects have been proposed but are still on paper.* Russia’s reactor contracts always include taking back the spent nuclear fuel.
Step 4. Fabricating reactor fuel. Sanger and Broad note that Turkey has done some of this at pilot scale.
Step 5. Recovering plutonium. Spent nuclear fuel, if Turkey retained it from the reactors not yet built rather than contractually sending it back to Russia, can be reprocessed to separate plutonium; Sanger and Broad say that Turkey has done some work in this area, but do not specify at what scale. Bench-scale experiments seem most likely.
Step 6. Fabricating enriched uranium or plutonium into a bomb. There is no evidence that Turkey has looked into this, in terms of materials processing or design.
Bottom line: A lot would have to happen before we need to worry about Turkey getting a nuclear bomb. The alternative would be to take the American bombs at the Incirlik Air Base, but once again, the decision to do that seems far from the current position of the Turkish government.
Here’s one of the reports referenced by Sanger and BroadThe author also posted a Twitter thread, saying clearly that there is no reason to believe that Turkey would pursue a nuclear weapon any time soon.
As the author of the report "Turkey and the bomb" referred in the NYT article, a few comments re this alarming and yet simplistic analysis. https://t.co/9lAnwXQEMR
— sinan ulgen (@sinanulgen1) October 21, 2019
And, if the Times article had followed the plan that Sanger’s tweet teased, it would have had to conclude that too.
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*Thanks to Dan Yurman for information on reactor projects. If you want to know more about the business side of nuclear energy, follow him on Twitter and read his blog.
Patricia Kayden
rikyrah
Because we don’t have enough to worry about…….
sigh…..
mrmoshpotato
I misread the headline as What Would It Take For A Turkey To Build A Nuclear Bomb?
Because we live in “Obummer created ISIS!” times. *sigh*
Autoincorrect, you silly bastard. “Misread” is not “might.”
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: You don’t? What’s your secret? ?
mrmoshpotato
“I want a ‘Victory Day’ … The Fourth of July is too hot.” (Dump from Kyle Griffin inside Poly Sigh’s tweet)
Ummm…..what random day does this jackass want? Ratification of the Constitution took place on June 21st, 1788. How about June, you sweaty, orange turd?
Mary G
“I want a victory day, but the Fourth of July is too hot.” Jeebus.
HumboldtBlue
Pffffttt, Rofer, all they have to do is call Tom Clancy and he’ll teach them how to make a nuclear bomb in a cave.
Amir Khalid
@HumboldtBlue:
Tom Clancy, he dead. They’ll need a medium to get those nukemaking lessons.
HumboldtBlue
@Amir Khalid:
Did he die?
Huh, I was unaware.
Calouste
Can’t Turkey just buy a bomb from Israel? They probably have a few spare. Pakistan could also be an option, but I don’t think they have many.
SFAW
@HumboldtBlue:
A few years ago
Ken B
@HumboldtBlue:
In 2013, heart trouble.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
Unrelated to the topic, but:
If you can get the scratch together, I think I found you a little runabout for when you and Raven go fishing.
Spanky
@Ken B: I’m not sure “heart trouble” adequately describes the condition when it stops.
Much easier for Turkey to just steal the US nukes from the AFB there. What’s Trump gonna do about it?
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
For a million bucks a week, it seems kinda small.
Ken B
@Spanky:
Fair enough.
IIRC, he’d had bypass surgery years earlier.
Cheryl Rofer
@Calouste: Selling bombs is problematic. You are also selling the design and information that someone might need to mess with your bombs. Plus the total cost would never be recovered. And, if relations changed, the other party could turn around and use it on you.
Mary G
I’m not sure Erdogan has a tight enough grip on his rule to screw up his economy. Could he get an old nuke from Russia or something?
O/T, I’m hoping this is fake:
debbie
@Patricia Kayden:
“Phony emoluments clause”! Give me a break.
HumboldtBlue
This picture …. this … ummm … this picture is rather disturbing but eerily accurate.
Meryl Streep as Donald Trump.
(and thanks for the Clancy tips, I re-read Hunt for Red October last year on a whim and it wasn’t as good as I remembered.)
Yutsano
That’s a detail that worries me. A.Q. Khan has pretty much the whole nuclear road map in a neat package that he’s ready to sell to the highest bidder. No wonder he’s a national hero in Pakistan.
debbie
@Yutsano:
He is the proverbial bad penny.
J R in WV
I am a little surprised that Turkey has the expertise to become a member of the Nuclear Club — if in fact they can pull that project off.
I would be quite surprised to learn that other hi-tech nations [ Japan, Taiwan, South Korea for a short list ] don’t have material to assemble into nuclear weapons in very short order, given what we have learned about being in the Nuclear Club in the past few years.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — North Korea — has at this point a dangerous arsenal of nuclear weapons, and no one is talking about invading the DPRK under any conditions. Yet Iran, which agreed to end its nuclear weapons development program in a multi-lateral treaty [ now abrogated by President Trump ] is now threatened by multiple nations.
Lesson learned! No nation with any chance of building out a nuclear arsenal is going to stop development of that weapons system.
Cheryl Rofer
@Yutsano: He’s no longer in a position to sell it.
Mary G
WaPo: Putin and Hungary’s Orban helped sour Trump on Ukraine:
Only the best people! Mattis, Kelly, and Bolton held him back, but now nobody seems to try.
Amir Khalid
@HumboldtBlue:
Streep-as-Trump is eerily evocative. But then I wouldn’t expect any less from her.
Tom Clancy’s oeuvre was mil-tech porn. His plots were time-honoured, you could say, having been used by many many writers before him. With characters and story he didn’t give a crap about originality either, and his prose was devoid of grace and style.
Uncle Cosmo
@Amir Khalid: The story of how a guy selling insurance on MD’s Eastern Shore while scribbling novels in his spare time became a bestselling author, eventually worth enough to buy a major stake in a Major League Baseball franchise, is an object lesson on the enormous role sheer luck plays in the American rags-to-riches mythos. It involved the existential equivalent of sinking 3 or 4 three-cushion billiards shots in a row.
(Just FTR Red October was subjected to major editing before the Naval Institute Press would publish it. Also FTR: Far & away the worst of his oeuvre is Patriot Games; it has all the earmarks of an early bumbling attempt that he’d unsuccessfully shopped around long before he’d lucked his way onto the best-seller lists. My guess is that Clancy had signed a lucrative contract to deliver X manuscripts in Y months, had fallen woefully behind, & rather than give the money back, dragged this typescript down from the attic & hastily tarted it up. FWIW the movie version of PG is even more of an improvement over the book than the film of RO.)
HumboldtBlue
@Amir Khalid:
Good analysis, the writing certainly didn’t have the same oomph as I seemed to recall.
Chris
The problem with nonproliferation is that there really isn’t an answer to this argument other than “do as I say, not as I do.”
Something the whole Kurdish betrayal’s had me thinking a lot about is De Gaulle’s whole argument for a nuclear bomb back in the sixties. Which was, “we can’t base our entire national defense strategy on just trusting that, if push comes to shove, the Americans will be willing to risk New York to save Paris. The only way to be sure of avoiding what happened to us in the last two world wars, is if we have our own ultimate deterrent.” And it’s, well, true. And much more so now. With someone as erratic and as prone to throwing his allies under the bus and embracing his country’s enemies as Trump is, plenty of governments – Turkey, but also Poland, Japan, and various others – probably wouldn’t be doing their job if they weren’t at least considering “should we maybe be looking harder into this nuclear armament thing after all?”
LongHairedWeirdo
You know, from reading classic Heinlein, it was impressed on me that it’s not that hard to build a basic atomic bomb. Really, for a weapons grade uranium bomb, the hard part (I heard) was getting the sub-critical masses to connect precisely when you want them to, and that it’s *not* a difficult engineering problem.
Of course, Heinlein was worrying about a world where we didn’t have eyes in the sky. If someone *did* want to sneak a nuclear program – let’s assume they want to have a successful test, and maybe two warheads, but then to have the capability to ramp up production for another half-dozen. Could that be done, if the overriding desire was secrecy?
I guess I’m asking “could they mine the uranium slowly, or in an especially sneaky manner, without tripping any alarms?” because I don’t reckon there’s any way to obtain enough plutonium without tripping an alarm somewhere along the line.
(Of course, this is an interesting thing. If you decide to take a “quiet” 20 year path to a nuclear bomb, instead of a “loud” 10 year path, that’s 10 more years for a human being to blab, about one of the more valuable pieces of intel that one nation might collect about another.)
Chris
@Yutsano:
A. Q. Khan, along with Erik Prince, are the two guys that really should have had a Bond villain based on them by now.
@Amir Khalid:
I’d say his oeuvre devolved over time away from mil-tech porn, which he was moderately good at, to pure political porn, which… I suppose whether he was any good at it or not depends on your politics. As you can imagine, I wasn’t particularly impressed.
Although I still have good feels for The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
@Uncle Cosmo:
The many things wrong with it aside, the interesting thing about Patriot Games is to compare it with his books just ten years later. In PG, it’s emphasized just how daunting the work of a CIA analyst is, and how the Company never has enough people or resources to effectively sort through all of the data that they need to sort through, and how basically it’s just really really hard to turn raw information into actionable intelligence. Fast-forward ten years, and now-President Ryan has a plan to Make The CIA Great Again – by massively increasing the number of field officers, while at the same time massively decreasing the analytical and administrative departments of the CIA (because it has to be “revenue neutral.”) You can just imagine 1980s Jack Ryan whacking 1990s Jack Ryan on the back of the head and going “you want to double the amount of information passing through here, while at the same time halving our ability to make sense of it? What the fuck are you thinking?”
His books are, if nothing else, a useful portrayal of a very-conservative-but-not-totally-batshit person slowly sliding into becoming a full-blown ideological cretin.
J R in WV
@Chris:
Well said. Clancy, like Trump, went downhill fast. Those guys all let their credo get in the way of actual though.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
Actually, I was thinking you could buy it, then YOU rent it out. But you could save a week or two for sport fishing, B-J meetups, things like that. [One hopes you would give Raven and the rest of us a steep discount.]
Cheryl Rofer
@Chris: The answer to nonproliferation has long been the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Sanger and Broad barely mention it.
The bargain in the NPT is don’t build bombs, and we will share peaceful uses of nuclear energy with you. Also that the nuclear weapons five (US, Russia, UK, France, China) will work toward nuclear and general disarmament (Article VI).
The problem is that many of the non nuclear weapon states feel that the five haven’t done enough toward disarmament. That’s part of what Erdogan is saying.
Cheryl Rofer
@LongHairedWeirdo: Uranium mining, whether underground or open-pit, makes enormous amounts of spoil, which can be seen in overhead photos.
I’m not worried about a twenty-year program. It would likely be discovered. one way or another, and the international situation will change.