{"id":177347,"date":"2019-10-14T18:26:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T23:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/10\/14\/burying-the-lede-4\/"},"modified":"2019-10-14T18:26:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-14T23:26:00","slug":"burying-the-lede-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/10\/14\/burying-the-lede-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Burying the Lede"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>In a story about the rapidly unfolding debacle in northern Syria, they weight until the 9<sup>th<\/sup> paragraph to note that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/10\/14\/world\/middleeast\/trump-turkey-syria.html\">the US is looking at evacuating the nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base in response to the instability and chaos in the region<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials. <\/p>\n<p>Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan\u2019s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think this is a first \u2014 a country with U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in it literally firing artillery at US forces,\u201d Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies wrote last week. <\/p>\n<p>For his part, Mr. Erdogan claims nuclear ambitions of his own: Only a month ago, speaking to supporters, he said he \u201ccannot accept\u201d rules that keep Turkey from possessing nuclear weapons of its own.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-turkey-nuclear-erdogan\/erdogan-says-its-unacceptable-that-turkey-cant-have-nuclear-weapons-idUSKCN1VP2QN\">\u201cThere is no developed nation in the world that doesn\u2019t have them,\u201d<\/a> he said. (In fact, most do not.) <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is unbelievably dangerous.<\/p>\n<p>Also, given the nature of the potential nuclear exchanges these days, the forward deployment of nuclear weapons, particularly in a country run by a delusional megalomaniac, seems to be a profoundly unfortunate decision.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\"> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a story about the rapidly unfolding debacle in northern Syria, they weight until the 9th paragraph to note that the US is looking at evacuating the nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base in response to the instability and chaos in the region: \u2026\u2026\u2026 And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[489,592,378,697,477],"class_list":["post-177347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-civil-war","tag-genocide","tag-middle-east","tag-near-east","tag-nuclear-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}