It’s Official: The Pentagon Finally Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons, Too | The Nation

It’s Official: The Pentagon Finally Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons, Too | The Nation

It’s
Official: The Pentagon Finally Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons, Too

William
Greider on March 20, 2015 - 10:56 AM ET

http://www.thenation.com/blog/202129/its-official-pentagon-finally-admitted-israel-has-nuclear-weapons-too

While the Washington press corps obsessed over Hillary Clinton’s e-mails at
the State Department, reporters were missing a far more important story about
government secrets. After five decades of pretending otherwise, the Pentagon
has reluctantly confirmed that Israel does indeed possess nuclear bombs, as
well as awesome weapons technology similar to America’s.


Early last month the Department of Defense released a secret report done in
1987 by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analysis that essentially
confirms the existence of Israel’s nukes. DOD was responding to a Freedom of
Information lawsuit filed by Grant Smith, an investigative reporter and author
who heads the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy. Smith said he thinks
this is the first time the US government has ever provided official recognition
of the long-standing reality.


It’s not exactly news. Policy elites and every president from LBJ to Obama
have known that Israel has the bomb. But American authorities have cooperated
in the secrecy and prohibited federal employees from sharing the truth with the
people. When the White House reporter Helen Thomas asked the question of Barack
Obama back in 2009, the president ducked. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you
know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said. That was an awkward fib. Obama
certainly knows better, and so do nearly two-thirds of the American people,
according to opinion polls.

In my previous blog, “What
about Israel’s Nuclear Bomb?” I observed that the news media focused solely
on Iran’s nuclear ambitions but generally failed to note that Israel already
had nukes. That produced a tip about the Pentagon release in early February.

Yet the confirmation of this poorly kept secret opens a troublesome can of
worms for both the US government and our closest ally in the Middle East.
Official acknowledgement poses questions and contradictions that cry out for
closer inspection. For many years, the United States collaborated with Israel’s
development of critical technology needed for advanced armaments. Yet
Washington pushed other nations to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which
requires international inspections to discourage the spread of nuclear arms.
Israel has never signed the NPT and therefore does not have to submit to
inspections.


Washington knew all along what the inspectors would find in Israel.
Furthermore, as far back as the 1960s, the US Foreign Assistance Act was
amended by concerned senators to prohibit any foreign aid for countries
developing their own nukes. Smith asserts that the exception made for Israel
was a violation of the US law but it was shrouded by the official secrecy.
Since Israel is a major recipient of US aid, American presidents had good
reason not to reveal the truth.

The newly released report—“Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and
NATO Nations”—describes Israel’s nuclear infrastructure in broad terms, but the
dimensions are awesome. Israel’s nuclear research labs, the IDA researchers
reported, “are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge
National Laboratories.” Indeed, the investigators observed that Israel’s
facilities are “an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing
at our National Laboratories.”

The IDA team visited Israeli labs, factories, private companies and
government research centers in Israel and relevant NATO nations (details on
NATO allies were redacted from the released version). On Israel, the tone of
the report was both admiring and collegial. “The SOREQ center,” it said, for
instance, “runs the full nuclear gamut of activities from engineering,
administration and non-destructive testing for electro-optics, pulsed power,
process engineering and chemistry and nuclear research and safety. This is the
technology base required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.”

The IDA team added: “It should be noted that the Israelis are developing the
kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes
which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic
level.” So far, The IDA estimated, Israel scientists were about where the US
had been in the 1950s in understanding fission and fusion processes.

The report does not include a single declarative sentence that directly
states the taboo—Israel has nukes—but the meaning is obvious. For many years,
scholars and other experts have estimated that Israel has at least 100 to 200
bombs, possibly more.

Some of the IDA’s observations seem to hint at a copy-cat process in which
the US government either actively helped or at least looked the other way while
Israel borrowed or purloined technologies to establish a parallel nuclear
system that looks a lot like America’s. The IDA document does not say anything,
one way or the other, on the history of how this happened. But critics of
Israel and advocates for banning all nuclear weapons have harbored suspicions
for decades.

The Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Smith said, is pushing
another FOIA request aimed at the CIA, hoping to pry open long-secret
intelligence investigations about how Israel managed to get the bomb in the
first place. The institute is seeking disclosure of a CIA study that supposedly
investigated how quantities of uranium were leaked or allegedly smuggled by
Israeli agents from a Pennsylvania defense plant to provide seed corn for the
Israel bomb.

Smith and others suspect that elements of the US government knew what
happened back then or may even have assisted the stealthy transfer. That
particular mystery was a hot issue back in the 1970s. It seems likely to get
renewed interest now that the pretense of official ignorance has been
demolished by release of the 1987 report.

However, the IDA’s most powerful message may not be what it says about
Israel’s nukes but what it conveys about the US-Israel relationship. It
resembles a technological marriage that over decades transformed the nature of
modern warfare in numerous ways. The bulk of the report is really a detailed
survey of Israel’s collaborative role in developing critical technologies—the
research and industrial base that helped generate advanced armaments of all
sorts. Most Americans, myself included, are used to assuming the US
military-industrial complex invents and perfects the dazzling innovations, then
shares some with favored allies like Israel.

That’s not altogether wrong but the IDA report suggests a more meaningful
understanding. The US and Israel are more like a very sophisticated high-tech
partnership that collaborates on the frontiers of physics and other sciences in
order to yield the gee-whiz weaponry that now define modern warfare. Back in
the 1980s, the two nations were sharing and cross-pollinating their defense
research at a very advanced level.

Today we have as a result the “electronic battlefield” and many other
awesome innovations. Tank commanders with small-screen maps that show where
their adversaries are moving. Jet pilots who fire computer-guided bombs. Ships
at sea that launch missiles over the horizon and hit targets 1,000 miles away.

I had to read the report several times before I grasped its deeper meaning.
The language is densely technological and probably beyond anyone (like myself)
who is not a physicist or engineer. The researchers reported on the state of
play in electronic optical systems, plasma physics, laser-guided spacecraft,
obscure communication innovations and many other scientific explorations that
were underway circa 1987.

Finally, it dawned on me. These experts were talking in the 1980s about
technological challenges that were forerunners to the dazzling innovations that
are now standard. I saw some of these new war-fighting devices in the late
1990s when I wrote a short book on the post-Cold War military struggling to
redefine itself when it no longer had the Soviet Union as an enemy (Fortress
America: The American Military and the Consequence of Peace).

While reporting on numerous military bases—land, sea and air—I saw some of
the early attempts at battlefield communications and guidance systems. A lot of
the new stuff didn’t work very well. Soldiers and commanders sometimes had to
put it aside or work around it. Drones at that stage were still on the drawing
boards, known as UAV’s—“unmanned aerial vehicles.”

The Middle East wars became the live-fire testing ground where new systems
were perfected. The consequences of peace were brushed aside by the terror of
9-11. War became America’s continuous preoccupation.


Israel participated importantly in developing groundwork for some of the
wonder weapons and, as the IDA survey makes clear, Israeli physicists or
engineers were sometimes a few steps ahead of their American counterparts. To
be sure, the Israelis were junior partners who brought “technology based on
extrapolations of US equipment and ideas.” But the report also observed: “Much
Israeli fielded electronic warfare and communications [is] ahead of US fielded
equipment.”

On several occasions, the research team spoke of “ingenious” or “Ingeniously
clever” solutions that Israeli technologists have found for mind-bending
problems of advanced physics. The IDA team also suggested opportunities for
American researchers to piggy-back on what Israel had discovered or to team up
with one of their R&D centers. Yale’s Office of Naval Research, IDA
suggested, should collaborate with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Scientists at RAFAEL [another Israeli center] have come up with an
ingenious way of using the properties of a glow discharge plasma to detect
microwave and millimeter waves,” the report said. “The attractiveness of the
project lies in the ability of the discharge to withstand nuclear weapons
effects.”

This observation gave a me a chill because the earnest defense scientists
have yet to find a way for human beings “to withstand nuclear weapons effects.”

It would be good to keep in mind that these extraordinary breakthroughs in
technology have one purpose—fighting wars—and are intended to give still
greater advantage to advanced nations like the US and Israel that dwarf more
primitive adversaries. Many of the new technologies, it is true, will find
commercial applications that improve everyday lives (some already have). Yet it
is also true that our advances in high-tech killing power have not subdued all
the enemies.

They find irregular ways to fight back. They blow the legs off our soldiers.
They plant home-made bombs in crowded restaurants. They recruit children to
serve as their guided missiles. They capture and slaughter innocent bystanders,
while our side merely bombs the villages from high altitude. The victims do not
see our way as pristine or preferable. Their suffering becomes their global
recruiting.

The highly successful partnership of American and Israeli military science
is one more reason it will be most difficult to disentangle from the past and
turn the two countries in new directions, either together or separately. But
many people are beginning to grasp that lopsided wars—contests between
high-tech and primitive forms of destruction—do not necessarily lead to victory
or peace. They have led the United States into more wars.

COMMENT:

 Tehttps://apps.facebook.com/diamonddash/?fb_source=notification&request_ids=830330003681257%2C792802927473742%2C1558697011065724%2C1626643667548634%2C865454456847018%2C955248841160195%2C785243141572664&ref=notif&app_request_type=user_to_user&content=send%3A294118497418489&notif_t=app_requestll
Now the world has to decide whether Friendship with this Israeli inhuman Beings is any longer a necessity for
the better interest  of the world peace or detrimental for the innocent human beings regularly being killed by Israel with the publicly support by US congressional Zionist lawmakers without any remorse.

How can it claim  such friendship good in the better interest  of the World Community of Nations when it is crystal clear it is with
malicious intent that this friendship has started to shape up as best genocide committal entity claimed itself as the most trusted ally of the lone super power. Why should it be called best ally 
only because of Saudi Arab, Eygpt, and Jordon's protection from Iran.

But International Community of nation do not think
so, after the horrible genocide  ISRAEL
committed and then the indicted assassin vowed before election in no
vague term that there would be no Palestinian state so long he is in power as Israel's PM, let there be  no doubt in anybody’s mind as to how brutish a person the indicted assassin and genocide criminal
 is..

 In addition,
Republican Party's sinister aims and objectives with regard to the Existence of
the Muslims in Palestine, that too with the undaunted help of US congressional
Zionist Lawmakers led by Mitch MacConel and Boehner from the very
beginning  after the traitor Senator
Leiberman.Retired.

 Moreover, these
uncouth ZIONISTS are now pressuring the US President to side with them in the
elimination of two state solution of Palestine. To the Zionist leader of
Israel and US lawmakers The President very clearly made it clear that US would
not buzz an inch from the previous position.

This may be the latest fact but if it does not materialize
within this August’2015.  Then all
understanding with Israel and US should be locked up forever. This is because a
donkey does not move to work without a hard kick is given to it on its butts. whether
the donkey is of Israeli or of US congress.

Leaving this issue at this point, waiting for further
development on the irresponsible entity that the super powers reared a vicious
snake to be at the throat of the Muslims calling it as the best and trusted
ally in Mid East. And see action taken to get the snake out from around the neck of
the Muslims to assure Community of the world that its friendship is not at all vicious as that of Israel.

For whatever reason it was done the result of Muslims
calling West and the EU their best friends and most trusted ally in time of bad
and happy days surly do not deserve it for whatever reason, but should not have
been done to grab the natural resources that was distributed by GOD himself.

The result of such endeavor would never be good, happy
relaxing and enjoyable except death and digging graves on both side. Less or
more death is out of the question. Better draw a red line to stop this hide
& seek and back stabbing or dribbling with the dispute till the Palestinian
surrenders.

In that case, see the final say of the Almighty. Nuke would
wash away In front of the people those who don’t bother death as they are more
volatile than nuke bombs and arms and ammunition. When Muslims unites then what?

World would be divided in two camps and English formula divide and would be redundant. As such formula no more is active in India. Israel would be better off not to wake up the MUSLIMS
because getting  Muslims after Israel would be horrible and disastrous for its livelihood..