Extremely Important: The Israeli Nuclear Program That is Never Discussed

Long-time blog readers as well as friends know that I have railed many times about one of the world's worst-kept and certainly almost never acknowledged secrets: that Israel which is not supposed to have a nuclear bomb indeed does have one and that the United States largely developed, bought, and paid for it.

You also know that I have a real ethical problem with the US constantly developing bigger, better, and more lethal nuclear weapons while telling every other country they can't have one and threatening to "attack" such countries if they try to get one. Part of my issue here is that we silently permit everyone to pretend that Israel does not have one when that is a lie.

In my perfect world, there would be no nuclear weapons. With that said, however, I almost fell out of my chair when I was reading through the Washington Post and discovered the article, "The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb".

Now, what I've read here conflicts with some of the other material I've read in the relatively few places I've ever found reference to Israel's nuclear program, but I'm still fucking amazed WaPo covered it at all. It's important and I recommend you read it and, as you do, consider what it means that we play such games by pretending Israel isn't fully capable of blowing Iran or Iraq or other players away while bringing on a nuclear winter in the process.

Israel, like the U.S. and many Islamic countries now, is in severe danger of becoming ONLY a theocracy governed by the most extreme people. The only thing worse than a country with a nuclear bomb is when that country is run by people who like to believe they are God's chosen and that God gives them the right to do whatever it takes to retain their advantage.

A snippet, if you will...

Israel's nuclear program began more than 10 years before Helms's envelope landed on Nixon's desk. In 1958, Israel secretly initiated work at what was to become the Dimona nuclear research site. Only about 15 years after the Holocaust, nuclear nonproliferation norms did not yet exist, and Israel's founders believed they had a compelling case for acquiring nuclear weapons. In 1961, the CIA estimated that Israel could produce nuclear weapons within the decade.

The discovery presented a difficult challenge for U.S. policymakers. From their perspective, Israel was a small, friendly state -- albeit one outside the boundaries of U.S. security guarantees -- surrounded by larger enemies vowing to destroy it. Yet government officials also saw the Israeli nuclear program as a potential threat to U.S. interests. President John F. Kennedy feared that without decisive international action to curb nuclear proliferation, a world of 20 to 30 nuclear-armed nations would be inevitable within a decade or two.

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations fashioned a complex scheme of annual visits to Dimona to ensure that Israel would not develop nuclear weapons. But the Israelis were adept at concealing their activities. By late 1966, Israel had reached the nuclear threshold, although it decided not to conduct an atomic test.

By the time Prime Minister Levi Eshkol visited President Lyndon B. Johnson in January 1968, the official State Department view was that despite Israel's growing nuclear weapons potential, it had "not embarked on a program to produce a nuclear weapon." That assessment, however, eroded in the months ahead. By the fall, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul C. Warnke concluded that Israel had already acquired the bomb when Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin explained to him how he interpreted Israel's pledge not to be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the region. According to Rabin, for nuclear weapons to be introduced, they needed to be tested and publicly declared. Implicitly, then, Israel could possess the bomb without "introducing" it.

The question of what to do about the Israeli bomb would fall to Nixon. Unlike his Democratic predecessors, he and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, were initially skeptical about the effectiveness of the NPT. And though they may have been inclined to accommodate Israel's nuclear ambitions, they would have to manage senior State Department and Pentagon officials whose perspectives differed. Documents prepared between February and April 1969 reveal a great sense of urgency and alarm among senior officials about Israel's nuclear progress.

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