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ANALYSIS: Revelations about Israel’s atomic activities and nuclear arsenal shatter its strategic coyness and poke a finger at US hypocrisy, writes MARY FITZGERALD
IT HAS long been considered the Middle East’s worst-kept secret. Wreathed in a self-styled policy of “ambiguity” or “opacity”, Israel’s nuclear capability has been the source of decades of speculation. But the carefully cultivated secrecy was dealt a blow yesterday when a report in a British newspaper cited previously classified papers, unearthed by American academic Sasha Polakow-Suransky, which the paper says provide the first official documentary proof of the existence of Israeli nuclear arms.
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Peter Hounam, the journalist who worked on the Vanunu story for the Sunday Times , watched the fallout from yesterday’s report with interest. “This blows the concept of ambiguity out of the water,” he told The Irish Times . “How can the West now allow Israel the leeway it has had up to this point?”
Hounam, who dealt with claims of Israeli co-operation with apartheid South Africa in a book he wrote on the latter’s nuclear capabilities, says the disclosures raise several questions. “If they can sell to a pariah state like that, who else have they been dealing with? Once a country develops nuclear weapons clandestinely, all bets are off.”
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But the nod-and-wink attitudes towards Israel’s nuclear arsenal are coming under unprecedented pres... >>>