While speaking at an earlier conference, Turkish Space Agency director Serdar Hüseyin Yıldırım had described a weapon being developed by the United States, as follows:

“There are military satellites that can shoot 10-meter titanium alloy rods from space to any target in the world. They penetrate 5 kilometers deep into the ground, creating a 7-8 magnitude earthquake.”

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This excerpt from his speech having resurfaced in the context of the recent earthquake, Serdar Hüseyin Yıldırım felt obliged to make a clarification:

“This short video is an excerpt from a lecture I gave a long time ago at a strategy institute [the Stratejik Düşünce Enstitüsü]. I explained the weapon system that can wipe a small town off the map when deployed and used in the Earth orbit. Its function is not to trigger fault lines or create tectonic earthquakes. Therefore, it has nothing to do with the Maraş catastrophe, which is a tectonic earthquake that occurred on a known fault line. I don’t want to be misunderstood. The effect of that weapon is comparable to the impact of a meteorite.”

It stands to reason that if he had said otherwise, Türkiye would have had to declare war.