If that is what the author meant, that is what the author should have said. "Equipped to deliver" pretty clearly means no aircraft that can load the bomb.
At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.
The Toyota Hilux isn't an aircraft. The B61 is an air-dropped dumb bomb. Any aircraft that can load it and drop it in the air can deliver it. If you didn't care about accuracy you could roll the thing out the back of a C-130 and successfully deliver it.
The point is, there is no equipment required to deliver the B61 other than a standard weapons rack with any air-to-ground aircraft has. The only A/G aircraft I am aware of that can't deliver the B61 is the F-22A, and only because the bomb won't fit in the weapons bay.
i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.
new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away. whether you can put the package on the truck does not imply any fitness for delivery.
> i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.
So "the target" is always and forever Russia, and mainland Russia at that? No, the generic statement "equipped to deliver" cannot be interpreted with respect to a particular use case among many. It means "capable of loading the weapon and striking a target".
> new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
Any aircraft capable of carrying air-to-ground ordinance can "get it there", for some set of "it"s.
> i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away.
By your definition no truck is "equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away", yet trucks do this every day. You are adding a bunch of hidden assumptions about what "equipped" means, many of which aren't valid.
If Turkey shot Armenia with a nuclear bomb, given the location and size of Armenia, that'd also affect Azerbaijan, Turkey herself, and, Iran. That means if we shot Armenia with an American nuclear missile, we'd be left in the middle of an interracial nuclear orgy where the US, the Russia (ally of Armenia) and the Iran wipe us out of the world map (quite geographically).
The dirt secret about nuclear war is that Russia and the USA were much more willing to engage in a limited war where each side nuked the hell out of the allies of the other but without directly attacking each other.
There is no way Russia launches a nuclear strike on America on the behalf of Armenia. It would be suicide.
I have no direct knowledge, but I thought there was special command consent hardware required to arm the bomb. I'd be surprised if nuclear consent capability was standard on every plane.
Edit: After some googling I'm surprised to find that they do indeed all seem to have consent controls standard. Not sure what I think about that.
I read an Air Force safety standards memo[1] which seemed to confirm that the PAL codes are entered on the ground.
To speculate the B61 is a dumb bomb. And most photo's of the casing show no plug/contact point for electronics. I'm assuming at take off. When the neutron reflector's distance is set, and the barometric pressure for denotation height is calibrated.
Yeah, my guess is the bomb is armed and the yield and other parameters set just before the aircraft is set to taxi out for takeoff. Some part of it must be done on the ground, because no US nuclear weapon can be armed by a single person.
It wouldn't have to have a port. The US has had radio programmed artillery shells for a long time so using the same tech to set and arm bombs isn't a stretch.
These are just proximity fuses. I can find no reference to actual communication with in-flight artillery shells. Furthermore Nuclear Artillery shells were armed when loaded. They were one of the few systems outside of the two-man rule. As a single inferior officer would arm the shell when loading it.
I wonder if arming of a bomb like that has a time limit - so that it safes itself if not "used" or explicitly deactivated within a particular time period.
>To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.
>Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
>The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.
F15s, F16s, and many aircraft that the Navy uses. Still I would think that its high time to get them out of Turkey with the stability of the region in question, let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged
>let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged
I don't understand why you are being downvoted for this. A decent number of military analysist and Turkish civilians have come to this conclusion.
-No government buildings were seized, only bridges and airports.
-Normally within the first 30 minutes of a coup a Turkish Military General was on TV directly addressing civilians as to why this had taken place, and what was going to happen.
-The past 5 coups took place in <2 hours.
-The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
-Turkish troops weren't equip for crowd control, or even for fighting most were lacking body armor and helmets.
-Turkish troops didn't set up fire-hoses, or wear riot gear for crowd control like previous coups.
-More Judges have been fired from their posts in Turkey then Military Officers post coup.
-Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
Turkey has had 5 successful coups in the past 100 years why did this one differ so extremely from the previous ones?
Incompetence is a simple defense, but this is a NATO trained and drilled military. Officers education requires they be able to switch between nations, and officer sharing programs are common. Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO, and it's attempts to standardize education/training across member nations.
In turkey we have a supreme military council every year, on august, called YAS, where promotions and dismissals. It is rumoured that these lot did this madness to not be dismissed, because that was planned. This is the most believable story to me.
A bigger, more weird stupidity is that, the parliament was on vacation, that is there were no parliamenters in the national assembly building when the coup started, they actually went there during the coup to defend the parliament. And since the beginning, in none of the coups, there were an assault of the parliament building.
But we must bear in mind that social media was crucial. People knew that sth. was going on very early, whereas in the past, they'd do the thing and then we'd know.
> The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
He came istanbul after the airport was rather safe though.
> Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
It was the work of a junta within the army. In fact most other generals quickly ordered soldiers to retract. They didn't shoot the planes and the choppers down, but how could they? Those were flying over very populous cities, I guess in case they did attempt to take them down, there would be at least thousands of dead, because the jets were coming from a base only 30km away from the city of Ankara.
At the end of the day, 2 days into the aftermath, everything is too hazy to properly reason, I think.
One thing to point out is most solders arrested for taking part in the coup didn't know they were part of a coup. They were drilling responses to wide scale terrorist attacks.
Both the AP's story and RT corroborate that many troops didn't know they were involved in a coup.
"Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO."
A determined invader could probably take Europe in 48 hours. The Cold War days of preparedness are gone; just witness the commitment of EU NATO members to ME conflicts; the lack of preparedness in Nice. The train has already begun derailing, one carriage at a time.
True to some extent, however. the police barriers were taken down hours before the attack, the numbers of police were also shown to be low; and last, but not least, they were not armed to deal with a credible threat.
Reports from SOF at Bataclan, for example, revealed that AK47-equipped terrorists forced the French SWAT teams to withdraw due to lack of firepower, and yet that lesson was not taken seriously to deal with attacks like the one at Nice.
This is a lie. B-61's mount on to any NATO MIL-STD-8591 hard point. Any F-15, F-18 can mount and fire B61's without any modification.