U.S. Nukes In the Gulf.

Seven hundred miles from Baghdad, at a U.S. air base in southern Turkey, technicians maintain a stock of more than 100 nuclear bombs. From that coastal base, a fighter-bomber could drop a bomb on former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palace about seventy minutes after takeoff. State-of-the-art nuclear bombs are designed for just such a mission, and they are the most accurate weapons in the U.S. arsenal. When the possibility of the U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Iraq is raised, Pentagon watchers, defense experts and military journalists are incredulous and dismissive. But U.S. military strategists seem most comfortable with the purely military explanation as to why the use of nuclear weapons is unnecessary. They believe that U.S. and allied conventional forces, once mobilized, would provide a credible offensive force, and that sufficient conventional weapons exist to deliver a blow against Iraq that would destroy all the necessary targets in a war.