Reports that dozens of American B61 nuclear bombs remain stored at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey have resurfaced questions about why the arrangement persists, and what it means for regional security as tensions in the Middle East continue to shift.
The bombs at Incirlik are part of a broader NATO arrangement, not a Turkey specific stockpile. Roughly 150 B61 tactical nuclear bombs are spread across six bases in Europe, including sites in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, with Incirlik holding an estimated 20 to 50 of them, according to assessments from the Federation of American Scientists and independent nuclear analysts. The exact number has never been officially confirmed by Washington.
The origins of the arrangement trace back to the early Cold War. Turkey shares a border with the former Soviet Union and sits at the most exposed southeastern edge of NATO territory, which made it a strategically valuable location for forward deployed American nuclear capability. Incirlik itself was built starting in 1951 and became a central node in NATO's nuclear posture through the following decades. Turkey was also at the center of an earlier and even more consequential nuclear episode, when the 1961 stationing of American Jupiter missiles there helped trigger the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with those missiles ultimately withdrawn as part of the deal that resolved the standoff.
After the Cold War ended, Washington scaled back significantly, pulling nuclear weapons from several other Turkish bases through the 1990s and consolidating everything at Incirlik by 1995. What remained became part of NATO's nuclear sharing policy, under which a handful of non nuclear alliance members host American weapons and, in theory, could help deliver them in a crisis using their own aircraft. The idea was to spread nuclear responsibility and deterrence credibility across the alliance rather than concentrating it solely with the US, Britain and France.
Much of what has kept the weapons there since is inertia as much as strategy. Removing a nuclear stockpile from an ally is itself a political statement, one that effectively signals a loss of trust, and no administration has wanted to be the one to make that statement, even as Turkey's reliability as a partner has become far more complicated. Erdogan's government has grown more authoritarian, clashed with Washington over Syria and the Kurds, and at times moved closer to Moscow, all while Incirlik sits within range of active conflict zones including Syria and, more recently, Iran.
Security concerns have flared before. During the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, power outages at the base raised alarm over the safety of the stockpile and prompted the US to order military families to leave the base as a precaution. In 2019, as Turkey launched an offensive into northeastern Syria, American officials reportedly reviewed contingency plans for evacuating the weapons, though experts cautioned that moving them under such volatile conditions carried its own risks of theft or accident. FAS and other nonproliferation groups have argued for years that the original Cold War logic no longer justifies keeping the bombs at Incirlik at all.
Custody of the weapons themselves remains under American control. The base uses hardened underground vaults managed by a US Air Force security unit, with Turkish personnel providing surrounding base security under strict dual key protocols designed to prevent unauthorized use. Whether Turkish aircraft are even certified to deliver the weapons in a crisis is not publicly confirmed.
