Ex-US President Jimmy Carter declares "Israel has 150 or more" nuclear weapons

[BoyBach]

Ex-US President Jimmy Carter has said Israel has at least 150 atomic weapons in its arsenal.

The Israelis have never confirmed they have nuclear weapons, but this has been widely assumed since a scientist leaked details in the 1980s.

Mr Carter made his comments on Israel's weapons at a press conference at the annual literary Hay Festival in Wales.

He also described Israeli treatment of Palestinians as "one of the greatest human rights crimes on earth".

Mr Carter gave the figure for the Israeli nuclear arsenal in response to a question on US policy on a possible nuclear-armed Iran, arguing that any country newly armed with atomic weapons faced overwhelming odds.

"The US has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union (sic) has about the same; Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more," he said.

"We have a phalanx of enormous capabilities, not only of weaponry but also of rockets to deliver every one of those missiles on a pinpoint accuracy target."

Most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country's Dimona nuclear reactor.

The US, a key ally of Israel, has in general followed the country's policy of "nuclear ambiguity", neither confirming or denying the existence of its assumed arsenal.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert included Israel among a list of nuclear states in comments in December 2006, a week after US Defence Secretary Robert Gates used a similar form of words during a Senate hearing.

Former Israeli military intelligence chief Aharon Zeevi-Farkash told Reuters news agency he considered Mr Carter's comments "irresponsible".

"The problem is that there are those who can use these statements when it comes to discussing the international effort to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons," he said.

'Imprisonment'

During the press briefing, Mr Carter expressed his support for Israel as a country, but criticised its domestic and foreign policy.

"One of the greatest human rights crimes on earth is the starvation and imprisonment of 1.6m Palestinians," he said.

The former US president cited statistics which he said showed the nutritional intake of some Palestinian children was below that of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as saying the European position on Israel could be best described as "supine".

Mr Carter, awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, brokered the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state.

In April he controversially held talks in the Syrian capital Damascus with Khaled Meshaal, leader of the militant Palestinian movement Hamas.

The former US president's Carter Center was unavailable for further comment.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7420573.stm


I find the response by Aharon Zeevi-Farkash to be particularly, er... insightful. :rolleyes:

[leekohler]

I always thought it was a fact that Israel had nukes. I thought we armed them decades ago. I never even thought about it, I just assumed.

[mkrishnan]

The problem with it is that Israel's actions in this regard are in every respect what we'd call "rogue state" or "pariah" behavior were any other country doing it. So the West, and the US in particular, needs Israel's secrecy more than Israel does, in order to save face while still trying to persecute other countries that pursue nuclear armament...

So yes, everyone has known that Israel has nuclear weapons for many years, but no, no one generally talks about it.

[hulugu]

The problem with it is that Israel's actions in this regard are in every respect what we'd call "rogue state" or "pariah" behavior were any other country doing it. So the West, and the US in particular, needs Israel's secrecy more than Israel does, in order to save face while still trying to persecute other countries that pursue nuclear armament...

So yes, everyone has known that Israel has nuclear weapons for many years, but no, no one generally talks about it.


There was a 1999 DIA estimate that the Israelis could have 60-80 nuclear weapons. This was based on previous estimates (including information from Edward Teller) and on the capability of the Dimona reactor. So, Carter's estimation might have been high, but within the bounds of possibility.

Link. (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/)
Also, from the FAS article:

On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps.

Both the scale of the project and the secrecy involved made the construction of Dimona a massive undertaking. A new intelligence agency, the Office of Science Liasons,(LEKEM) was created to provide security and intelligence for the project. At the height construction, some 1,500 Israelis some French workers were employed building Dimona. To maintain secrecy, French customs officials were told that the largest of the reactor components, such as the reactor tank, were part of a desalinization plant bound for Latin America. In addition, after buying heavy water from Norway on the condition that it not be transferred to a third country, the French Air Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the substance to Israel.

Trouble arose in May 1960, when France began to pressure Israel to make the project public and to submit to international inspections of the site, threatening to withhold the reactor fuel unless they did. President de Gaulle was concerned that the inevitable scandal following any revelations about French assistance with the project, especially the chemical reprocessing plant, would have negative repercussions for France's international position, already on shaky ground because of its war in Algeria.

At a subsequent meeting with Ben-Gurion, de Gaulle offered to sell Israel fighter aircraft in exchange for stopping work on the reprocessing plant, and came away from the meeting convinced that the matter was closed. It was not. Over the next few months, Israel worked out a compromise. France would supply the uranium and components already placed on order and would not insist on international inspections. In return, Israel would assure France that they had no intention of making atomic weapons, would not reprocess any plutonium, and would reveal the existence of the reactor, which would be completed without French assistance. In reality, not much changed - French contractors finished work on the reactor and reprocessing plant, uranium fuel was delivered and the reactor went critical in 1964.

The United States first became aware of Dimona's existence after U-2 overflights in 1958 captured the facility's construction, but it was not identified as a nuclear site until two years later. The complex was variously explained as a textile plant, an agricultural station, and a metallurgical research facility, until David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1960 that Dimona complex was a nuclear research center built for "peaceful purposes."

There followed two decades in which the United States, through a combination of benign neglect, erroneous analysis, and successful Israeli deception, failed to discern first the details of Israel's nuclear program. As early as 8 December 1960, the CIA issued a report outlining Dimona's implications for nuclear proliferation, and the CIA station in Tel Aviv had determined by the mid-1960s that the Israeli nuclear weapons program was an established and irreversible fact.

Does this pattern seem familiar?

Link. (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/)

[Queso]

Considering it's a well-documented fact that Israel gave South Africa the bomb in the Apartheid years I don't regard this as new information at all. We saw the South African test flashes from satellites, and De Klerk admits where the help came from in his autobiography.

[hulugu]

Considering it's a well-documented fact that Israel gave South Africa the bomb in the Apartheid years I don't regard this as new information at all. We saw the South African test flashes from satellites, and De Klerk admits where the help came from in his autobiography.

Well, being able to build a bomb and actually having a bomb (or a few dozen) are two different things, though closely related. For example, I would think that Japan would be able to assemble their own weapons rather quickly if circumstances dictated.
That said, the whole thing is a public secret, a system the Israelis certainly like to keep and the US obliges.

[takao]

Well, being able to build a bomb and actually having a bomb (or a few dozen) are two different things, though closely related. For example, I would think that Japan would be able to assemble their own weapons rather quickly if circumstances dictated.


true that ... and japan is by far not the only country ... the netherlands or germany with their high uranium enrichment capacity come to mind
germany actually even has experimental reactors running on weapon grade uranium


That said, the whole thing is a public secret, a system the Israelis certainly like to keep and the US obliges.

as long as they are allied the US won't care what their allies do .. just like the nuclear weapons in pakistan turned 'uninteresting' by magic ;)

[iJohnHenry]

Except for shelf life problems, how many do they really "need".

One for each country that wants to push them into the Mediterranean.

[skunk]

I'm afraid it wasn't only the French who were selling heavy water to Israel:
Britain secretly sold Israel a key ingredient for its nuclear programme in 1958, according to official documents obtained by BBC News.
Papers in the British National Archives show a deal was done to export 20 tonnes of heavy water for about £1.5m.

This was vital for plutonium production at the top-secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel's Negev desert.

No "peaceful use only" condition was placed on its use. Officials said imposing one would be "over zealous".

Ministers in Harold Macmillan's government were unaware of the deal. It was also kept secret from the US.

In one of the documents Foreign Office official Donald Cape concluded: "On the whole I would prefer not to mention this to the Americans."http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4743987.stm

BTW, Jimmy Carter talks a lot of sense.

[és:]

It's no secret that they have many, many more than that.

We have Mordechai Vanunu to thank for that, for which he spent over a decade in solitary confinement.

[hulugu]

Except for shelf life problems, how many do they really "need".

One for each country that wants to push them into the Mediterranean.

Well, to a certain extent, the IAF is the primary delivery vehicle, so in the event that a nuclear attack was necessary, the Israelis would want some redundancy.

Also, we're not sure of the yield of these weapons, some could be tactical and some could be the strategic nukes for destroying a city. Hard to tell without more specific information, which if known would probably come with a visit from Mossad.

[skunk]

The Israelis were testing in South Africa using missiles, so I doubt that the IAF is the primary delivery system. Besides which it is well-known that they have German submarines in the Gulf armed with nuclear cruise missiles, so massive redundancy is not essential.

[iJohnHenry]

I'm afraid it wasn't only the French who were selling heavy water to Israel.

Maybe it was atonement for this sad event?

In a House of Commons debate on July 20, 1939, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, had to admit that a 'Division of Destroyers' supported by five smaller launches was being employed to ascertain that those who had escaped Hitler did not escape the British capture as they approached Palestine [PRO House of Commons Debates, July 20, 1939]

The ships had been authorized to open fire at or into any ship that was suspected of having illegal immigrants on board and that did not obey the warning to stand by.

On the very first day of World War II, on September 1, 1939, while German dive bombers rained death on Warsaw and a dozen other Polish cities, His Majesty's ship Lorna opened fire on a rickety overcrowded refugee ship, Tiger Hill, as she approached the Palestine Coast to unload her cargo of misery, 1417 survivors.

It did not heed the order to turn back toward Germany.

The encounter between HMS Lorna and the Tiger Hill ended with a victory for the Royal Navy.

The first two persons killed by British bullets during World War II were not Germans but Jewish escapees from Europe.

[Work Cited: Perl, William R. The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy of Genocide. New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989]

To be fair, both Havana and Miami turned one particular ship back to face the Holocaust.

[Ugg]

There was a 1999 DIA estimate that the Israelis could have 60-80 nuclear weapons. This was based on previous estimates (including information from Edward Teller) and on the capability of the Dimona reactor. So, Carter's estimation might have been high, but within the bounds of possibility.



As President of the United States, Carter was probably well advised about how many nukes Israel had. I find it impossible to believe that the US government doesn't have intimate knowledge of Israel's military capabilities.


It's good that Carter is using his waning years to support the Palestinians.

[skunk]

Maybe it was atonement for this sad event?I doubt it. The British were committed by their mandate in Palestine to preventing large-scale unregulated immigration.

[mactastic]

There was a 1999 DIA estimate that the Israelis could have 60-80 nuclear weapons. This was based on previous estimates (including information from Edward Teller) and on the capability of the Dimona reactor. So, Carter's estimation might have been high, but within the bounds of possibility.

Link. (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/)
Also, from the FAS article:



Does this pattern seem familiar?
Indeed, if Israel were replaced by Iran, and France replaced with Pakistan, we'd have an entire DC pundit class Brodering themselves in a rush to have someone else's kids dying to fix the problem.

Well, being able to build a bomb and actually having a bomb (or a few dozen) are two different things, though closely related.
That depends on who you ask. For a time there, Herr Bush was quite insistent that "nuclear weapons program related activities" were sufficient justification for invading Iraq.

[hulugu]

As President of the United States, Carter was probably well advised about how many nukes Israel had. I find it impossible to believe that the US government doesn't have intimate knowledge of Israel's military capabilities.


It's good that Carter is using his waning years to support the Palestinians.

The Israelis know how to play the intelligence game, they have a very good CI arm and a lobby in Washington. We don't know if the DIA estimate is intentionally low, middle, or high. I'd guess that the DIA estimate is somewhere in the middle and Carter's is higher, but there's no specific information out there, AFAIK.

Indeed, if Israel were replaced by Iran, and France replaced with Pakistan, we'd have an entire DC pundit class Brodering themselves in a rush to someone else's kids dying to fix the problem.


That depends on who you ask. For a time there, Herr Bush was quite insistent that "nuclear weapons program related activities" were sufficient justification for invading Iraq.

Exactly.

[Lord Blackadder]

This isn't really news, though it is something we rarely hear about.

The fact that it never comes up is especially convenient in light of recent developments in Iran, at least for the Bush administration.

[mactastic]

Exactly.
And looky here!
Iran is still withholding critical information that could determine whether it is trying to make nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a restricted report.

Iran not allowing inspections of facilities suspected to be for nuclear weapons development. Expect the hawks among us to seize on this information and use it as a rationale for attacking Iran -- while Israel also hides their facilities from inspection and refuses to admit they have a weapons program -- and no one suggests that we must attack them. I wonder why that could be?