Nuclear Ambiguity: Israel’s “Secret” Arsenal (Eyeopener)

by | Oct 28, 2011 | Videos | 0 comments

[NOTE: The full video report is now available to subscribers of BoilingFrogsPost.com. CLICK HERE to watch.]

James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
October 28, 2011

Hand-wringing over Iran’s nuclear program has been a mainstay of western political discourse ever since an Iranian dissident revealed the Iranian government’s plans for a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in August 2002. Indeed, fearmongering over the possibility of an independent Iranian nuclear program has become so commonplace that it seldom raises an eyebrow even among the most cynical observers of the bought-and-paid-for corporate media.

To defuse the glaring hypocrisy of the world’s greatest nuclear superpower chastising a nation halfway around the world for pursuing a nuclear program that is admittedly still incapable of even producing a single nuclear weapon, it is often stressed that the IAEA ruled Iran to be in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Apart from the exceedingly unusual manner in which that decision was reached — in a highly unusual non-consensus ruling with 12 abstentions–what is never mentioned in this context is that there is in fact only one nation in the Middle East that is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty itself, and only one country with a nuclear arsenal, an arsenal that has never been inspected by the IAEA or anybody else: Israel.

Widely believed to have been the world’s sixth nuclear superpower, Israel actively pursued a nuclear program from the time of its inception as a state in 1948. By the late 1950s, they had begun building a reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona with British and French aid. By 1967, a classified CIA report estimated that Israel would be capable of producing a nuclear warhead in “six to eight weeks” and shortly thereafter, it is believed, Israel began producing and stockpiling a nuclear arsenal.

Although estimates vary, it is now believed that Israel has somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads, and it now has the capability to deliver these warheads to Iran.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the program is not that it was kept secret for so long — it has been openly discussed and acknowledged even in the mainstream American media for decades — but that American officials continue to officially deny knowledge of this arsenal fully two and a half decades after Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona facility, risked his life in smuggling the photographic proof out of Israel and onto the front page of The Sunday Times.

Indeed, American officials go to almost humorous lengths to avoid acknowledging the Israeli nuclear stockpile.

What seems like a curious evasion of a glaring truth is in fact part of an official policy established during the Nixon Administration and maintained by every American president since. The policy, known as “nuclear ambiguity” or “nuclear opacity” holds that America will not press Israel on the nuclear issue as long as Israel makes “no visible introduction of nuclear weapons” to the region.

This official policy has not only fostered a blatant hypocrisy in discussion of nuclear threats in the Middle East, it has shaped international relations and allowed the insertion of a dangerous nuclear paradigm in an already volatile region. More than that, it has allowed for the creation of an officially sanctioned black hole in nuclear security, one of the most sensitive issues facing humanity in the 21st century. And as with any officially sanctioned black hole, corruption and criminality have naturally gravitated toward it.

According to documents released by the Department of Energy in the late 1970s, American intelligence believed that the enriched uranium for Israel’s first bombs was likely stolen from a US Navy-connected nuclear fuel plant at Apollo, Pennsylvania. The plant, run by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, was founded by Zalman Shapiro, a prominent member of the Zionist Organization of America who was placed under investigation in the late 1960s for passing enough highly-enriched uranium to Israel to create a dozen nuclear weapons.

The NUMEC plant–which CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden said was “an Israeli operation from the beginning”–was notorious for violating safety standards and was itself built on a site where groundwater flows at levels where waste was being stored. A $170 million nuclear cleanup at the site was recently halted because of health and safety concerns.

Ironically, the CIA has a treasure trove of information on NUMEC from their days monitoring Shapiro as he shipped the uranium out to Israel, and this information could prove invaluable in helping to ensure the safe cleanup of the site, but all Freedom of Information Act requests for CIA files on NUMEC are being rejected, presumably to uphold the official policy of nuclear ambiguity.

Grant Smith, the Director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy was recently on Anti-War radio with Scott Horton to discuss the issue.

**EXCERPT

Even more worryingly, Israel’s nuclear knowledge has not only helped to arm its own nation, but actually helped to proliferate nuclear weapons to Pakistan through the so-called Khan network. One of the men who helped to transfer the nuclear triggers used in the construction of the Pakistani bomb was Asher Karni, an orthodox Jew living in South Africa who had been a major in the Israeli army prior to emigrating to Cape Town. Upon his arrival there in 1985, he began teaching Torah at the local synagogue and educating Jewish youth, encouraging them to relocate to Israel.

In 2004, U.S. authorities arrested Karni for his role in supplying the nuclear triggers and in 2005 he was sentenced to three years in prison. It has never been officially explained why this Israeli citizen and former Israeli military officer was interested in helping proliferate nuclear technologies to Pakistan.

Now, there are signs that the blatant hypocrisy of open US support for the Israeli nuclear arsenal is becoming too much for even the American government to bear. Cracks are beginning to emerge in the official policy of nuclear ambiguity, with Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller making headlines in 2009 for insisting that India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The inclusion of Israel in that list, tantamount to an admission that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, was considered major news at the time.

Rather than decreasing the danger posed by this threat, however, the gradual official recognition of Israel’s nuclear weapons may be the first steps toward an even more aggressive Israeli stance. At this moment, Israel is more vulnerable than it has been for decades, with long-standing alliances with strategic regional partners Turkey and Egypt both coming into question. Turkey’s recent condemnation of Israel over the Mavi Marmara incident and the fall of Israeli-friendly Mubarak in Egypt means that the Israelis are more isolated than ever. Combined with a more open position on the admission of their nuclear arsenal and the fact that Israel supposedly feels threatened by Iran’s nuclear program, this vulnerability has led many analysts to speculate that Israel is more likely to strike out than ever, likely by striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Such an action would almost certainly ignite large-scale hostilities in the already volatile Middle East and potentially draw in Iran’s strategic partners, China and Russia, in the beginning of a World War III type scenario.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that it is Iran who has been arguing for decades that the Middle East should be a nuclear-free zone. The idea was first floated by the Shah in 1969, and was first formally proposed by Iran in a joint UN General Assembly resolution, but the idea failed to garner any support. The idea was again raised by current Iranian President Ahmedinejad in 2006 and again by Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki in 2008, but these calls have not even been acknowledged by the west, let alone seriously considered.

Now more than ever, the prospect of a nuclear free Middle East seems the only way to prevent a nuclear conflagration that threatens to draw in the world’s superpowers, and yet the idea is being ignored by Israel and its staunchest ally, the United States.

Why does Israel refuse to declare its nuclear weapons stockpile? Why do they refuse to sign on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?

Why do they refuse IAEA inspections of their nuclear facility?

Why did they kidnap and imprison Mordechai Vanunu for 18 years for providing the proof of their nuclear program?

And perhaps most importantly, why does the United States, the only country who could single-handedly force NPT compliance from Israel, still refusing to even admit the openly-acknowledged status of Israel as a nuclear power?

Until these questions are answered, or even asked by a free press willing and able to hold the government accountable for its complicity in this nuclear threat, the fate of the Middle East and potentially of the human civilization, will continue to hang in the balance.

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