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Israel's Worst-Kept Secret
Is the silence over Israeli nukes doing more harm than good?Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith Sep 16 2014
Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Former CIA Director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he notedwhile serving as a university presidentthat Iran is surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons, including the Israelis to the west. Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israels nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.
But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.
The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the worlds worst-kept secrets dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutinyand occasional disapprobationapplied to the worlds eight acknowledged nuclear powers.
But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national-laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the governments lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/israel-nuclear-weapons-secret-united-states/380237/
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Israel's Worst-Kept Secret (Original Post)
Purveyor
Sep 2014
OP
If Israel has 300 nukes, and of unknown quality or capacity, why are they allowed to keep it secret,
Fred Sanders
Sep 2014
#2
libodem
(19,288 posts)1. Mums the word
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)2. If Israel has 300 nukes, and of unknown quality or capacity, why are they allowed to keep it secret,
enough to destroy a planet?
Hush is the word when Israel then pounds the table when Iran dares to dream about having even one.
It is called lack of credibility, which always "complicates the position....". Hypocrisy is like that.
Larkspur
(12,804 posts)3. It's anti-Semitic to order Israel to give up it's nuclear arms but OK
to order Iran and any Arab or Muslim state to give up their nuclear ambitions.
Personally, no one should have nuclear weapons. They are too costly to build, maintain and use.