Washington, D.C. When
Shimon Peres, Israel's former prime minister, was asked if his country
had nuclear weapons, he allegedly responded: "The suspicion and
fog surrounding this question are constructive, because they strengthen
our deterrent."
The fog was only temporarily lifted when in 1986 Mordechai Vanunu, a
technician at the nuclear facility at Dimona (in the Negev desert),
gave the London Sunday Times details about Israel's nuclear weapons
production. He calculated that his country had the world's sixth largest
arsenal of nuclear arms--now estimated at up to 200 warheads.
Not long after the whistleblower's revelations, Israel's intelligence
service, the Mossad, illegally seized him in Rome, Italy, and spirited
him back to Israel where a secret tribunal sentenced him for treason
to eighteen years in solitary confinement. The Jewish Peace Fellowship,
the Federation of American Scientists, former President Carter, and
the late Senator Paul Wellstone were among those who in vain called
for Vanunu's release. Recently emerging from prison after eighteen years,
he defiantly vowed he would continue to expose Israel's secret production
of nuclear weapons.
From the beginning of Israel's development of nuclear power in 1953,
the U.S. Government secretly supported the program with financial and
technical aid. In his book The Sampson Option, Seymour Hersh reports
that we even supplied the project with krytons, i.e., nuclear triggers.
Israel is one of the 137 members of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) that has the mandate to enforce the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT). Israel, however, has persistently refused--just like India,
Pakistan, and Cuba--to sign the Treaty and submit to IAEA surveillance
and verification.
When questioned about their country's nuclear arms, Israeli government
spokesmen have routinely asserted that Israel would not be the first
in the Middle East to unleash nuclear war. Today, however, this argument
is irrelevant. Since 1998, Iraq has had no deployable nuclear weapons,
and the other Arab states never possessed any at all. Their conventional
arms, moreover, remain inferior to Israel's equipment, much of it American-made
and American-financed.
Deploying nuclear arms against any Arab target within a radius of several
hundred miles could produce radioactive fallout lethal not only to millions
of Arabs but also to Israel itself. For military purposes, therefore,
Israel's nuclear arms build-up is probably useless. Psychologically,
however, it does serve as yet another potent provocation to both the
Arab and the Muslim world.
Worse yet, we Americans are being depicted worldwide as the providers
of Israel's nuclear weapons program and as apologists for Israel's refusal
to sign and respect the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both we Americans
and our Israeli friends are in dire need of making friends, rather than
ever more enemies, in the Middle East and worldwide.
Since the IAEA has decided to promote a "nuclear weapons-free zone"
in the Middle East, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector, Mohamed
El Baradei, wants to visit Israel in July and urge the Sharon regime
to accept this proposal. While the members of the Likud Party have always
rejected arms limitations, hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Jews
the world over are known to favor any agreement that would remove obstacles
to the improvement of Arab-Israeli relations.
Now is the time for Congress, if not the White House, to urge upon our
Israeli friends the shutting down of their production of nuclear, chemical,
and biological weapons and use their human and material resources for
peaceful purposes. Weapons of mass destruction are not needed for Israel's
defense because everybody knows that if the state of Israel in the borders
of 1967 were ever threatened, the United States as well as the other
members of NATO would come to Israel's defense.