[idlewords]

My take was the author meant no aircraft with the range to drop them on Russian targets.

The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.

[vonmoltke]

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.

[idlewords]

You can load the bomb onto a Toyota Hilux; it doesn't mean it's equipped to deliver it.

[vonmoltke]

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.

[sdenton4]

I was under the impression that many nuclear bombs had arming mechanisms that required special electronics in the plane. Is that not true for the b61?

[vonmoltke]

The B61 is designed to be delivered from any aircraft that can carry Mark 80-series iron bombs. Combined with the two-man rule (which means at least partial arming on the ground for a weapon launched from a single-seat aircraft), this means most of the setup needs to be done on the ground. It may be that the weapon is completely armed at that point, save for a failsafe tied to the rack that keeps the bomb from going off when still attached to the aircraft.

[dingaling]

That is incorrect. For example the F-16s delivered to Pakistan lacked the nuclear firing circuits.

"Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Hughes also tells Congress that the nuclear wiring has been removed from the planes"

Similarly when the UK withdrew its WE177 weapons the nuclear circuits were removed from the RAF's Tornados, and the Typhoon lacks them too.

[justin66]

> It may be that the weapon is completely armed at that point, save for a failsafe tied to the rack that keeps the bomb from going off when still attached to the aircraft.

Weird. This would make these modern weapons a lot less safe than some of the bombs we've lost (without catastrophe) in B-52 incidents over the years.

[chiph]

Other than maybe the A-10, all the US tactical and strategic aircraft have that wiring.

[beachstartup]

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.

[vonmoltke]

> 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.

[beachstartup]

i think this level of pedantry is pretty unnecessary.

[valarauca1]

>My take was the author meant no aircraft with the range to drop them on Russian targets.

This is likely true. It's about ~5Mm from Incirlik to Russia (across the Black).

Edit 1: s/Baltic/Black/g

[eterm]

What's a Mm?

Edit: Apparently it's 5000km, Mm seems a bizarre choice of unit given mm exists as something else entirely and km is far more common.

[valarauca1]

Mega is a standard SI-prefix. It is denoted with a capital 'M' as opposed to Milli which is denoted with a 'm' prefix.

I'm just following the standard :|

[DominikR]

What if the Turks decide to take the weapons and attack the Armenians who are protected by the Russians?

In addition to that the Turks view the Armenians as their enemy, they have basically sealed off the borders to them for decades because of that.

[gkya]

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).

[rhino369]

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.

[gkya]

"us" means Turkey in my comment, was unclear sorry.