The United States government is training Turkey on how to use nuclear weapons against Russia

Lavrov criticized the US deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on European soil as well as the involvement of non-nuclear states in training programs, at a session of the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on Wednesday.

“Everybody should understand that the US military are preparing the militaries of European states to use tactical nuclear weapons against Russia,” he stressed.

The US stores an estimated 200 of its B61 nuclear bombs in countries including Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey as part of NATO’s nuclear-sharing program. Russia considers the presence of American nuclear weapons in other nations as a hostile gesture. The US is currently upgrading the B61, making the weapon more flexible in use, claiming it is necessary to counter Russia’s arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Russia says its arsenal is necessary to protect it from NATO’s overwhelming superiority in terms of conventional arms.

This means that countries like Turkey and Germany — some of the most powerful countries in the world — know how to use nuclear weapons.

What I find amazing is so many Americans have become indifferent to what is happening in Syria, thinking that ‘Trump has got it,’ or that ISIS is gone now, when the reality is that what you have in Syria now is worse than ISIS — you have Turkey, the country that did the Armenian Genocide.

A few weeks ago, we wrote an article on Turkey, Japan and Germany, producing their own nuclear weapons. I would like to post some excerpts from it since its information is very relevant.

“America first” declares: ‘Let the world police itself,’ accelerating the restoration of militarist Japan, giving it the green light to become militarily independent. It is also enabling Muslim Turkey and Germany to become military giants (more on that later). With this exclusive report Shoebat.com provides here, this trinity of evil will be a formidable match to the US.

The days of Japan being known strictly as a pacifist nation are beginning to wane. Shinzo Abe’s government has reinterpreted the constitution to allow for “collective self defense,” which is just an elusive and incremental way to bring Japan closer and closer to the warpath, its militarism of olden days.

The former defense minister of Japan, Shigeru Ishiba, said in September of last year that Japan should pursue producing nuclear weapons, stating:  “Is it really right for us to say that we will seek the protection of US nuclear weapons but we don’t want them inside our country?” Ishiba questioned whether or not the US would really come to the defense of Japan in the event of a war between Japan and North Korea. “It’s important to know when the United States would ‘open’ the nuclear umbrella for us,” Ishiba said.  “If Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack, possessed nuclear weapons, it would send a message that it’s fine for anyone in the world to have them”.

While there is constant yammer coming from the masses that Japan will not return to the warpath because it is somehow militarily inept, or overly dependent on the US, the reality is that Japan would not have difficulty in becoming a very dangerous force (the naive do not understand that Japan already has an efficient military force). In fact, the US government knows that Japan and Germany have the ability to make nuclear weapons, not in a matter of years, but  months. The US also knows very well that these countries will begin to show interest in producing nuclear weapons if they start to ‘lose trust’ in the United States. This issue was made known in a report addressed to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate in 2008, entitled: Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East, in which it says:

“In the cases of Germany and Japan, both countries can easily obtain nuclear weapons but have chosen not to because of their integration beneath a NATO (Germany) or an American (Japan) security umbrella. Today, all of these countries have the technical capacity to obtain nuclear weapons in a matter of months or a few short years. Yet, they chose not to because of their respective cost-benefit analyses. Pursuing nuclear weapons demands a large amount of finite money and other resources and could invite punishing international political pressure and economic sanctions. At the same time, little need exists to pursue such an undesirable policy because these countries do not view nuclear weapons as necessary for their national security. This belief derives primarily from the fact that these countries rest comfortably beneath a U.S. or U.S.-led security umbrella. If these countries ever begin to question the reliability of this security umbrella, they would almost certainly reassess past nuclear weapons decisions.”

This statement from the 2008 document proves that the United States knows that if Germany and Japan begin to show distrust for the United States to provide security, they will begin having interests in acquiring nuclear weapons. Trump, before he was even elected, was showing that he would not mind Japan having a nuclear arsenal, when he said:

“Would I rather have North Korea have [nuclear weapons] with Japan sitting there having them also? You may very well be better off if that’s the case. … If they’re attacked… we have to come totally to their defense. And that is a — that’s a real problem.” 

Trump showed that he does not want the US to come to Japan’s defense. What did this do? It gave Japan more of a sign that they can further pursue military independence. 

Remember what the 2008 document said: if Japan or Germany express distrust for the United States security umbrella, they will begin to question old policies on nuclear weaponry, implying that they will pursue the possession of nuclear weapons. Talk of distrust towards the United States has already been happening in Germany. Remember what Merkel said in May of 2017:

“The times in which [Germany] could fully rely on others are partly over. I have experienced this in the last few days… We Europeans really have to take our destiny into our own hands.”

Distrust is a minor issue, in comparison to the ability to have power to revive the wounded beasts of the past.  Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the German parliament for the Protestant Christian Democrats — the same party of Angela Merkel — wrote an article for the Right-wing publication, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, stating that now is the time to contemplate “the altogether unthinkable for a German brain, the question of a nuclear deterrence capability, which could make up for doubts about American guarantees”.

While Japan does not currently have nuclear weapons, it most certainly has the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, and the sophistication to deliver nuclear attacks. Unlike North Korea, Japan is a far more formidable force in East Asia. Japan has enough plutonium to create more than 5000 nuclear bombs. Japan’s capacity for nuclear technology is described by Mark Fitzpatrick:

“While the intentions behind Japan’s nuclear-hedging strategy are often kept hidden, the capabilities are clearly visible. Japan has the largest number of civilian nuclear facilities of any non-weapons state and the only one with complete fuel-cycle technologies, including both enrichment and reprocessing.”

Back in the 1980s the CIA was talking about inquiring to see how fast Japan would be able to obtain nuclear weapons. Shoebat.com poured into numerous CIA archives on Japan and its nuclear capacity. In a 1988 document found in the CIA archives, entitled: Query from Senator Murkowski (R., Alaska) about Japan’s capability to develop a nuclear weapon, it reads:

“During a recent briefing, Senator Murkowski diverted the discussion to Japan’s peaceful nuclear energy program and its acquisition of plutonium. He eventually asked if the Agency could provide a brief overview on the possibility of a nuclear program being undertaken in Japan. What additional capability would Japan need in order to use plutonium from its energy industry to fabricate a nuclear weapon?” 

Where is North Korea ranked in comparison to Japan? Although Japan is currently ranked the seventh most powerful military in the world, with it being the third largest economy in the world, it has the potential to become much higher in the list of the most powerful militaries. In 1982, the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service produced a document entitled Japan Report, in which it presented the transcript of a panel discussion between leading Japanese officials on whether or not Japan must increase its military capacity, independently of the United States, since it could not rely on the Americans in case of a war.

The documents we discovered reveal that Japan has been showing interest in military independence for decades. In one part of the 1982 document, Masatsugu Ishibashi, the secretary general of the leftist Socialist party, said:

“The question has been raised as to whether the United States is certain to come to the rescue in the event Japan is attacked and invaded. I have no confidence at all on this point. I cannot entertain such easy-going expectations that the United States will hurry to Japan’s aid if it expects its own homeland to be devastated.”

Ishibashi goes on to say that if Japan did not honor its pacifist constitution, specifically Article 9 of the constitution (which prohibits any active role in war), then Japan, having the third largest Gross National Product (GNP) in the world, would become the third largest military on earth:

“If there were no Peace Constitution and if we did not have the power to insist that Article 9 be obeyed, Japan’s military strength would not be limited to seventh (some say eighth) place in the world. Since the GNP is third highest in the world, it can be said that the military power would be certain to be comparable, i.e., third largest in the world.”

This means that Japan has been preparing to turn its plowshares into swords. Ishibashi further on in his presentation says: “preparations are being made to alter the constitution, if possible, to officially recognize the right to collective defense.” This was said in 1982, and now in the second decade of the 21st century, this sentiment is stemming right from the top. Shinzo Abe and his government have been talking seriously about amending Article 9 of the Japanese constitution.

In the panel debate, Ishibashi exhorts for Japan to increase its military spending from one percent of its GNP, to three percent:

Japan, being ranked third in its GNP, Turkey ranked second in NATO militarily, and Germany being the most powerful military and economy in Europe, are all striving to make their militaries even more powerful. Knowing past history, the three combined spells catastrophe.

Goro Takeda, a Japanese general who was in the panel, expressed a desire for Japan to be militarily independent, when he said: “it is the will of the people to defend Japan by themselves. Since those we are going to fight are our enemy, there is no one else except the Japanese, in actuality, to stand in the way of the invaders.” Takeda was talking about a war against the Soviet Union. While both Takeda and Ishibashi agreed that peace should be pursued, their words reflected an itching for military independence. The reality remains that talks of military independence has been in Japan for decades, and in the present zeitgeist of militarism and nationalism, this desire is getting closer to fruition.

What makes Japan even more interesting in this aspect of militarism is Shinzo Abe’s unusual amount of collaboration with Turkey. From 2006 to 2007, Abe served as Japan’s Prime Minister. Five years after this, in 2012, Shinzo Abe got voted in again to serve as Prime Minister. For those five years in between his two terms, Tokyo pretty much ignored Ankara. Shinzo Abe has been showing a distinguished interest in devising plans with Turkey. J. Berkshire Miller, writing in a 2014 report for the Diplomat, writes:

“Abe has put an unusual amount of effort into bolstering the relationship with Ankara through two separate trips to the country since taking office. Abe also welcomed Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Japan this past January. The rapid expansion in Japan-Turkey ties is even more dramatic, given that Ankara was all but ignored by Tokyo in the five years between the Abe 1.0 and Abe 2.0 administrations. Indeed, the last Japanese Prime Minister to visit Turkey (before Abe) was former LDP leader Junichiro Koizumi.”

Turkey built an undersea tunnel that crosses the Bosphorus Strait, called the Eurasia Tunnel, which became operational in December of 2016. The project costed $4 billion dollars. One billion of that was given by the Japan Bank of International Cooperation, the very banking company that is, according to Nikkei Asian Review, putting a bid to have Japan purchase one of the world’s largest producers of enriched plutonium, Urenco. Abe visited Istanbul for the opening ceremony of the tunnel back in 2014, and declared in his speech:

“This project has been accomplished thanks to the cooperation of Japan’s high-technology and Turkey’s experienced labor power. The upcoming year is the 90th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Japan. I hope this project will be the new symbol of the two countries’ friendship.”

An even bigger deal than the undersea tunnel is Japan’s agreement to build the Sinop nuclear power plant in Sinop, in northern Turkey. It is being projected that the first unit of the Sinop plant will be done by 2023, and the fourth unit will be in service by 2028. The project goes back to 2013, when Erdogan and Abe signed an outline US$22 billion deal for the construction of the Sinop Nuclear Power Plant in Turkey. The Sinop power plant will be built by Atmea, a joint venture between Orano, a major multinational company that specializes in nuclear technology, and that is owned by the French government, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI).

Last night we published an article on how Atmea — a joint venture company between MHI and Orano — are working to help build Turkey a nuclear power plant called Sinop.

In deals between governments and nuclear production companies, the company agrees to control the operation for decades, to provide enriched uranium, and to take back the spent fuel rods. This was not the case in the agreement between Turkey and nuclear companies, ROSATOM and the Japanese-French joint venture Atmea. In the words of Ruhle:

“Turkey insisted that the deal would neither include the provision of uranium nor the return of the spent fuel rods. Ankara wanted to deal with this matter separately at a later stage. Turkey never provided an explanation for this decision. However, the intention behind this unusual maneuvering is not difficult to fathom. Turkey wants to maintain the option to run the reactors with its own low enriched uranium and to reprocess the spent fuel rods itself. This, in turn, means that Turkey intends to enrich uranium, at least to a low level.”

Turkey is planning to do twenty-three projects for nuclear power plants with enriched uranium, showing just how large their aspirations are. Turkey wants to keep spent fuel rods, but if this is because it wants to use them for strictly energy purposes, then why use these when it is far cheaper to use “new” uranium as opposed to used uranium? That Turkey wants to keep spent fuel rods indicates that these nuclear plants are not being used simply for energy, but for nuclear weapons production. As Ruhle affirms, the fact that Turkey refused to return the spent fuel rods, shows that they are pursuing nuclear armament.

One common argument is that the production of nuclear weapons would require a complex reprocessing plant that currently does not exist in Turkey. But such a plant could be built in only half a year, and Turkey has the capacity to do so. Another common argument is that in order to produce nuclear weapons you would have to have weapons grade plutonium with an impurity level of at most 7 percent. But in 1945, General Groves, the head of the “Manhattan Project,” said that because of the lack of pure plutonium, the US would soon have to use material with an impurity level of up to 20 percent. In 1962, the United States detonated a plutonium bomb in Nevada, and it had an impurity level of 23 percent.

“The Iranian reactor Bushehr offers a telling example. If the reactor were powered down after eight months and the fuel rods removed,” writes Ruhle, “Iran would own 150 kilogrammes of plutonium with an impurity level of only 10 percent—the equivalent of twenty-five Nagasaki-category bombs. In short, the weaponization of plutonium has many facets.”

Turkey has the capacity to build nuclear technology that can create twenty five Nagasakis. In the end, I believe it will have worse than this.