US nuclear weapons in Turkey

Turkey hosts an estimated 20 to 30 US B61 gravity bombs at Incirlik Air Base near Adana, one of the two largest US nuclear weapons stores abroad, alongside Aviano in Italy. Unlike the other sharing states, Turkey maintains no certified national dual-capable aircraft and its crews do not train to deliver the weapons: delivery would fall to US aircraft deployed to the base, making the arrangement closer to forward storage than to classic nuclear sharing.

The weapons' security has periodically drawn scrutiny, most sharply during the 2016 coup attempt, when Incirlik's power was cut and its Turkish commander arrested, and successive analyses have debated relocating them. Ankara participates in NATO's Nuclear Planning Group; its exclusion from the F-35 program in 2019 removed the obvious path back to a national delivery role.

Turkey's talks on rejoining the F-35 program ran through 2025 and 2026 without resolution. At the NATO summit in Ankara on 7 July 2026, President Trump signalled that the US sanctions blocking the sale could be lifted, but according to reports the State Department told Congress on 22 July 2026 that Turkey had not met the conditions, as it still holds the Russian S-400 air defence system. Incirlik therefore remains a storage site without a national delivery wing.

Turkey is a non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT. Senior Turkish statements have occasionally questioned why Turkey should not have weapons of its own, though no program exists; its first civil nuclear plant, at Akkuyu, is being built by Russia's Rosatom.