Israel, Not Iran, Started Middle East Nuclear Arms Race

Claims that the Iran deal will spark a nuclear arms race in the region ignore the fact that Israel has led the race for the last 65 years.

July 29, 2015 | 2:12 p.m. EDT
By: Bruce Riedel, Columnist for Al-Monitor

The debate about the P5+1 agreement with Iran on its nuclear program has already produced a storm of angry rhetoric and a tsunami of opinion pieces. But one issue is notably absent from the debate: the fact that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal and sophisticated delivery systems that are decades ahead of anything Iran could develop in the foreseeable future. Iran should be constrained by a global regime from getting the bomb, but the notion that Israel is a weak powerless state like Czechoslovakia in 1938 is ludicrous.

The American intelligence community first detected the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program through U-2 overhead imagery at the end of the 1950s. President John F. Kennedy pressed Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion very hard not to proceed with a weapons program, arguing it would precipitate a regional nuclear arms race. Under pressure from Kennedy, Israel agreed to American inspections of its French-supplied Dimona reactor, but then systematically blocked any serious inspection process.

Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has never admitted it has a nuclear weapons arsenal. The United States stopped protesting the Israeli program in the Nixon administration. Neither Jerusalem nor Washington publicly discusses Israel's arsenal. If pressed, US officials refer to an alleged nuclear arsenal.

The Economist this year estimated Israel has 80 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. That puts it just behind India and far ahead of North Korea in terms of the number of bombs.

MORE...

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/07/29/israel-not-iran-started-middle-east-nuclear-arms-race