On Israel's Nuclear Capabilities
Press Action
Friday, December 29, 2006
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/israelnuclear12292006/
Excerpted from a message posted on the Northern Virginians for Peace & Justice listserv
An analysis on Fox by one of its more rabid (or is that redundant?) commentators about Israel wiping out 40 million Iranians in a nuclear attack has provoked me to convey my concern over an assumption that virtually everybody—left, right, and center—seems to make: that Israel HAS nuclear weapons. I doubt it, for the following reasons:
1. We would not tolerate any power, even a podunk power like Israel, obtaining nuclear weapons if we can help it, because it would cause us to lose leverage. Politics is a funny game; today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy - look at Iran. Were the shah still in power, would we allow him to develop nuclear weapons to use, say, against Iraq? I think not.
2. With a country as totally dependent on us as Israel, we are in a supreme position to ban a nuclear program. We have had inspection rights to Israel’s famed Dimona reactor (too puny an affair to constitute a real nuclear weapons program) since 1961. To believe the Israelis fooled us with fake walls and the like doesn’t say much for our competence in this field, which I think has been amply demonstrated in any number of other contexts. It’s laughable, yet dangerous, to make us out to be such buffoons.
3. Just when did Israel test those couple of hundred nuclear weapons it is supposed to possess? The only reputed test I know of is a mysterious light flash in the Indian Ocean back in the 70’s - supposedly a joint South African/Israeli test of a nuclear bomb. That’s not much of a testing program for such a vital weapons program that is a tremendous drain on the resources of a tiny country like Israel. Again, I find it laughable, and dangerous, to think that any country would engage in such behavior, or that we wouldn’t know whether that blip in the Indian Ocean was an atomic bomb or not.
4. Just what is Israel doing with the waste products of a nuclear weapons program? There’s not too many places to hide it in a dinky country like that. And, unlike us, they don’t seem to be interested in using depleted uranium in weapons. I believe they have refused to accept such weapons from us.
To a certain extent, it’s a moot point whether Israel has nuclear weapons or not. If they do, they wouldn’t dare use them unless we wanted them to; if they don’t, we’ll just give them some if we do want them to use them. And that’s where the danger lies in assuming Israel has nuclear weapons. It gets us off the hook should we decide to nuke Iran. We’ll just let the Israelis do it, and present it to the world as if those wacky Israelis did it with their own weapons. Our hands would remain clean, at least as far as our Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-linked pledge not to use nuclear weapons against signatories to the treaty goes. (I suspect it wouldn’t matter much to the Iranians which country nuked them; they’d respond as if both countries had.)
I don’t pretend to be an expert on nuclear weapons and so would love to hear more on this from those better informed (and with the right motivations).