As President Donald Trump potentially enacts a maximum economic pressure campaign on Turkey's Syria aggressions, the roughly 50 U.S. nuclear warheads in Turkey are precariously positioned, The New York Times reported Monday.
The nukes are now potentially to be held "hostage" by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a senior official told the Times.
"I think this is a first — a country with U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in it literally firing artillery at U.S. forces," according to Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, per the report.
State and Energy Department officials were weighing how to extract the weapons long stored under U.S. control at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, 250 miles from the Syria border, according to Times sources.
"To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance," the Times reported. "To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago."
Turkey's own nuclear ambitions are an underlying situation amid the recent turmoil, and Erdoğan reportedly "cannot accept" rules keeping Turkey from becoming a nuclear power, the Times reported.
"There is no developed nation in the world that doesn't have them," Erdoğan said, per the Times, which noted, in actuality, "most do not."
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