An even greater peril is that Erdogan would respond to expulsion by building his own nuclear weapons. He definitely wants them. The West says that Turkey “can’t have them,” he ranted in October. “This I cannot accept.”
Nuclear proliferation is one of the world’s most dire problems as it is. One arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia (on “Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces”) recently fell apart; the remaining one (called “New START”) seems destined to lapse in 2021. And as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty turns 50 next March, it looks increasingly toothless. From North Korea to Iran, the wrong people have, or are capable of getting, the wrong weapons.
A Turkish bomb in the Middle East would therefore be a disaster. It would almost certainly lead to an arms race, as not only Iran but Saudi Arabia joined Israel in going nuclear. Superimposed on a map of conflicts that makes Europe in 1914 look simple, this is a recipe for Armageddon.
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