The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.
At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.
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.
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.
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.
This is likely true. It's about ~5Mm from Incirlik to Russia (across the Black).
Edit 1: s/Baltic/Black/g
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.
I'm just following the standard :|
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.
There is no way Russia launches a nuclear strike on America on the behalf of Armenia. It would be suicide.
