Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Critics want Israel to admit, abolish its nuclear program

The nation, widely believed to rank fifth in atomic weaponry, doesn't
need the bomb, some say.
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent
Published January 19, 2004
In the new Broadway play Golda's Balcony, Israeli Prime Minister Golda
Meir grapples with a monumental decision: whether to use nuclear
weapons against Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Mideast War.
The story of an Israeli politician might seem unlikely fodder for an
American stage hit. Even more surprising is that Golda's Balcony deals
so openly with a weapons program never officially acknowledged to
exist.
In one of the world's worst-kept secrets, Israel has become a nuclear
giant. It is estimated to have as many as 200 weapons, an arsenal that
ranks it fifth among nuclear powers and dwarfs the programs of India,
Pakistan and North Korea.
Though warning of the danger from other countries, Israel is the only
nation that has ever brought the Mideast to the brink of nuclear war.
Yet it has maintained a policy of "deliberate ambiguity" about its own
nuclear capabilities even as it bombed an Iraqi reactor in 1981 and
pressured other countries to disarm.
Now Israel itself is under pressure to come clean about its program
and take steps to disband it.
"I don't think that since 1973, there has been any threat that
justifies a nuclear program," says Zeev Maoz, a visiting Israeli
professor at the University of Michigan.
Whatever threat Iraq once posed vanished with the fall of Saddam
Hussein. Libya, another longtime enemy, is voluntarily abandoning its
weapons of mass destruction. And Iran, perhaps the biggest current
threat to Israel, is allowing international inspectors greater access
to its nuclear facilities, which it maintains are for peaceful
purposes.
But if outsiders see little reason for Israel to maintain a nuclear
stockpile, that is not the way Israelis see it. Polls show most regard
nuclear weapons as a safeguard against attack by a hostile Muslim
nation.
"The Israelis were not the first country to get the atomic bomb, but
they'll probably be the last ones to give it up," says John Pike,
director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C., research
organization.
Israel's nuclear program undoubtedly has had a deterrent effect. The
Jewish state has not fought a major war since 1973, when Meir
considered using nuclear weapons as Syrian troops advanced from the
north and Egyptian forces moved from the south. The threat of a
nuclear Armageddon scared not only those countries, but also the
United States, which agreed to give Israel conventional weapons to
stave off defeat.
Arab nations "know they cannot win a war with Israel because of
Israel's nuclear deterrence," Pike says. "They can only push the
Israelis so far before they are pushed back with atomic bombs."
But Israel's nuclear program has also raised the danger level in the
Middle East by fueling an arms race, other experts note.
"While Iraq and Iran have their own reasons to develop nuclear
weapons, certainly Israel was a factor in their decision to launch
their nuclear programs," Maoz says. "And it certainly was a major
factor in launching Syrian weapons of mass destruction, not nuclear
but chemical and biological weapons."
Israel's nuclear project has also been thorny for its closest ally,
the United States. Other countries, especially Arab ones, accuse
America of hypocrisy in tolerating Israel's buildup while condemning
Libya, Iran and Iraq for their activities in the nuclear realm.
Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb, says charges of a double
standard are legally "inappropriate" because Israel is not a party to
the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits members to the
peaceful use of nuclear energy.
"Israel did not sign the NPT so it does not have to comply with its
obligations to do anything," says Cohen, senior research fellow at the
University of Maryland. "But in the broader political sense, look,
what can the United States do? From early on, the United States
understood Israel is not going to give up nuclear weapons."
By the time of the Nixon administration, Washington had adopted what
Cohen calls a policy of "don't ask, don't tell" about the nuclear
program. That has allowed Israel, which gets $3-billion a year in U.S.
aid, to avoid the economic sanctions imposed on other countries
engaged in activities leading to the spread of nuclear arms.
"Are you making an atom bomb?'
Israel's original nuclear partner was not America but France.
In the 1950s, the two countries had a common adversary: Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Israel saw the rise of Nasser and his
Arab nationalist movement as a threat to its existence. France,
meanwhile, faced a Nasser-aided rebellion in its North African colony
of Algeria.
In 1956, Nasser stunned the world when he nationalized the Suez Canal
with Soviet support. France and Israel agreed to team up with Britain
to overthrow the Egyptian leader and take back the canal. After a
meeting near Paris to finalize the plan, Israeli leaders approached
the French about assisting with a nuclear program.
"Of the four countries which at that time had a nuclear capacity - the
United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France - only
France was willing to help us," Shimon Peres, then Israel's defense
minister, said in the 2001 documentary The Bomb in the Basement.
The Suez invasion was a disaster for the French and British, who were
forced to withdraw under international pressure. The crisis drew Egypt
closer to the Soviet Union, and France, alarmed by growing Soviet
influence in the region, agreed that French engineers would help
Israel develop a nuclear deterrent.
In early 1958, ground was broken for a reactor at Dimona, in the Negev
Desert in southern Israel. Despite claims it was a textile plant,
photos taken by American U-2 spy planes "identified the site as a
probable reactor complex," Col. Warner D. Farr wrote in a history of
the project. "The concentration of Frenchmen was also impossible to
hide from ground observers."
In 1960, then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion acknowledged existence
of the reactor, but said it would be used "exclusively for peaceful
purposes." He agreed to allow regular inspections by Americans,
although they were stymied by brickedup elevator doors and other
obstacles. (Inspections ended altogether in 1969.)
John F. Kennedy apparently was the last U.S. president to directly
challenge Israel about its true intentions at Dimona.
"Are you making an atom bomb?" he asked Peres.
"Mr. President, I can promise you one thing," Peres hedged, as he
recalled in the 2001 documentary. "Israel will not be the first to
introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East."
By the time of the 1967 Mideast War, Israel had two bombs and went on
its first nuclear alert. But the real crisis came in 1973, when Egypt
and Syria launched a surprise attack on the Yom Kippur holiday.
Before tensions eased, the Soviet Union reportedly sent nuclear
submarines to the region, America went on worldwide nuclear alert and
Israel assembled 13 atomic bombs. The United States began an emergency
airlift of conventional weapons to Israel because - as then-Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger purportedly told Egypt - the Israelis were
close to "going nuclear."
The 1973 war had a lasting consequence: "Thus started the subtle,
opaque use of the Israeli bomb to ensure that the United States kept
its pledge to maintain Israel's conventional weapons edge over its
foes," Farr writes.
By now, France had stopped supplying Israel with uranium from its
African colonies. Israel and South Africa began a collaboration, with
Israel providing technology and South Africa, the uranium.
On Sept. 22, 1979, an American satellite detected an intense flash of
light near the southern tip of Africa. The cause was never officially
determined, but it was widely believed to be a joint Israeli-South
African test of an atomic bomb. If true, it may have been the only
time Israel violated its purported pledge to the United States not to
test nuclear weapons.
Veil over the program is slowly teased aside
The full extent of Israel's program was revealed in 1986, when
London's Sunday Times published an interview with Mordecai Vanunu, a
former nuclear technician at Dimona. Before he was laid off, Vanunu
had taken dozens of color photographs of the facility and amassed
other evidence showing Israel had at least 100 weapons, far more than
previously thought.
"There should no longer be any doubt that Israel is ... a fully
fledged nuclear weapons state," one expert told the paper.
Israel did not deny the Sunday Times' report, but accused Vanunu of
compromising national security. An undercover female Mossad agent
lured him to Rome, where he was drugged, arrested and flown back to
Israel to stand trial. Imprisoned since then - much of the time in
solitary confinement - he is due to be released in April.
Although the nuclear program officially remains secret, Israel in
recent years has become a bit more open. It allowed Cohen's Israel and
the Bomb to be published in Hebrew, and let the newspaper Yediot
Ahronot print declassified documents from Vanunu's trial.
Cohen thinks the "don't ask, don't tell" policy is anachronistic in
light of all that has been revealed about the program. Israel, along
with the United States, should find some way to "acknowledge and
legitimize" Israel's nuclear weapons status while being accountable
for it at home and abroad.
"The world, including the Arabs, should accept Israel's nuclear status
as France's nuclear status is accepted," Cohen says. "Even after
regional peace, Israel should maintain some form of nuclear
capability."
But, he adds, Libya's recent actions could signal a profound and
positive change in the way the world views weapons of mass
destruction. To encourage general disarmament, he says, Israel should
sign the 1972 treaty against the development of biological weapons.
"Israel can contribute to the devaluation and status of other weapons
systems," Cohen says. "Biological weapons are perhaps the most
symbolic of these, potentially the most threatening, and those about
which the public is most ignorant.... Contributing to the
reinforcement of the taboo on biological weapons would be a proper
response to the devaluation of WMDs."
- Times researchers Cathy Wos and Kitty Bennett contributed to this
report.
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/19/Worldandnation/Critics_want_Israel_t.shtml

 organization.
Parole sante!
-Stefano