Israel Has Nuclear Weapons - Updated 4/24/08

by CKR

That is the sentence that cannot be uttered in international relations. The silence distorts much, perhaps most, of our discussion about the Middle East.

That distortion is in today’s news three times over.

Another Nuclear Spy for Israel
A man in New Jersey has been charged with selling US nuclear secrets to Israel in the 1980s. His handler was the same person who got nuclear information from Jonathan Pollard. At the time of Pollard’s arrest and trial, Israel told the United States that there had been no other spies. In Israel, it is being suggested that the arrest is being used to “to loosen support for Israel as the two countries enter a tenacious period of negotiations.”

Ben-Ami Kadish says he shared the information to “protect Israel.” At the time Kadish provided that “protection,” Israel had a nuclear arsenal.

Update (4/24/08): The Israelis respond. Still no mention of their nukes. Emptywheel speculates on how they found Mr. Kadish and his activities.

Clinton Promises to Nuke Iran
Hillary Clinton this week brandished the US’s nuclear arsenal at Iran for a hypothetical attack on Israel with nuclear weapons.

…what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.…their use of nuclear weapons against Israel would provoke a nuclear response from the United States…

“Massive retaliation” was the description of what the United States would do if Russia attacked with nuclear-tipped missiles. Or vice versa. She made that explicit in her later words. She also proposed that the United States offer a “nuclear umbrella” to other states in the Middle East that might feel intimidated by an Iranian nuclear arsenal.

But Iran is a long way from a nuclear arsenal, and Israel is quite capable of its own nuclear retaliation. And I might point out that long before Iran would launch a nuclear attack on Israel with its still-in-a-hypothetical-future arsenal, we might just consider a diplomatic approach to the problem.

Israel, of course, has a real nuclear arsenal. Who needs a “nuclear umbrella” from whom in the Middle East today, in 2008?

Israel’s Mystery Attack on Syria
The CIA plans to brief members of Congress on the Israeli attack on that Syrian whatever. We are told that the whatever was a reactor being built with the help of the North Koreans. Paul Richter and Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times tell us it was a “plutonium-based reactor,” but more likely, if it was being built with the aid of the North Koreans, it was a reactor like theirs, more or less a Magnox design that could produce plutonium.

If that is what it was.

The administration has hit another rough patch in its negotiations with North Korea. Whatever the difficulty, the war party in the administration seems to have been looking for a way to justify breaking off negotiations with North Korea. It will be interesting to see what the public will be told.

Israel, of course, can attack its neighbors with impunity because of its nuclear arsenal, the threat from which keeps them from complaining much about it. The Israeli government is objecting to the congressional briefing.

The latest from Robin Wright

Update (4/24/08): More about possible maneuvering inside the Bush administration. Nothing about Israel's nukes. Just exactly how do you distinguish "North Korean faces" from others whose eyes have epicanthic folds? Interesting quote from "a senior administration official" in The Guardian.

Ignoring the Elephant
Even though Robert Gates, the incoming Secretary of Defense, said in 2006 that Israel has nuclear weapons, the reaction in Israel was to continue in denial. Ehud Olmert came close to admitting the existence of his country’s nuclear arsenal in 2006 (video), but Israel continued in denial.

Organizations that track nuclear weaponry are unanimous that Israel has nuclear weapons, probably 100-200 of them. That’s enough to take out Russia or the United States, certainly enough to stop any nation in the Middle East. (Center for Defense Information, Federation of American Scientists, Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control)

Those three current stories in the MSM are devoid of any mention of Israel’s nukes. Even Emptywheel mentions them only in passing. But Israel’s nuclear weapons are as much a part of the calculation of international politics as are those of India and Pakistan, or the United States and Russia.

This context is particularly acute for Israel’s neighbors, who recently declared that they would remove themselves from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if Israel openly declared its possession of nuclear weapons and the United Nations Security Council did nothing about it. This, of course, is one of the reasons that the United States prefers to continue the pretense. And look at that news story: only at the very end does it add that little qualification about the Security Council doing nothing. That would be in addition to all the other Security Council resolutions that Israel has flouted.

No article on North Korea is published without a reference to its nuclear ambitions. We do not find such repetition necessary for the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India and Pakistan because the context of a nuclear arsenal underlies those discussions and surfaces when appropriate.

For Israel, the context is different. We are learning to think of Israel as a nuclear power, and today’s three news stories are absurd without explicit consideration of that capability.

Juan Cole on two of these news stories

Comments

[jhm]

Do we have any idea as to what delivery systems that Israel might possess?

[CKR]

Check out the Center for Defense Information link above. That has some information on delivery systems.

[Andrew Foland]

acw has posted the "Syria video", and I for one am more than willing to concede that those are pictures of a nuclear reactor. Ten years ago that would have been enough. After the debacles of this Administration, though, one still has to ask: so just how solid is the provenance of those pictures?

[CKR]

I've got a visitor here today, so I won't have time to analyze the video. But I have a lot of questions about the provenance of the material and the timing of this presentation.

Heck, Pete Hoekstra, usually happy to go along with the administration's intelligence claims, has questions.

I haven't seen the entire video, but here's a question that I haven't seen asked: how do we know that interior shots correlate with a claimed location? If there are "North Korean" faces (identified, presumably, by that widely-distributed epicanthic fold) around the reactor, how do we know it's not photos of Yongbyon?

And lots of other questions out there, particularly at ACW.

[Andrew Foland]

The famous epicanthic fold is not shown at the reactor, but instead in a meeting in Damascus with someone identified as a Syrian nuclear program official. For myself, I'd regard this as underwhelming evidence that the DPRK was involved in building the reactor.

Your question about where-were-these-pictures-taken is exactly why I think the provenance needs to be tested.