Israel’s matches

Following the recent nuclear deal Iran and world powers, the next logical step to reduce proliferation risks in the Middle East would be to focus on regional security challenges arising out of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme.
The international community must put pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to revisit Israel’s long-standing policy of ‘deliberate nuclear ambiguity.’
After five decades of hypocritical silence, now the United States has also accepted that Israel does indeed possess nuclear weapons. Entering the age of nuclear terror, Israel’s security establishment cannot continue its policy of neither confirming nor denying its nuclear status. With an arsenal of more than 300 weapons and strong delivery capabilities, Israel has already replaced the UK as the fifth largest nuclear power in the world. Israel’s secret nuclear programme now rivals China and France in terms of its size.
Since the early 1960s, governments in Tel Aviv have maintained an official policy of nuclear opacity. In 1963, Shimon Peres assured that Israel would not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons in the region. Most historians are of the view that the policy of neither acknowledging nor denying the existence of nuclear weapons was adopted after a meeting between then Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and US President Richard Nixon in 1969, in which Israel agreed not to unveil its nuclear strength as a quid pro quo for easing of US pressure on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Due to its secretive policy, most of the information about Israel’s nuclear programme has been gathered from the evidence provided by whistle-blowers and defected Israeli nuclear scientists. Many years ago, former International Atomic Energy Agency head Hans Blix made it public that, “Israel has about 200 weapons, and beating around the bush does not change very much – they are part of the nuclear landscape.”
Israel’s nuclear project was originally conceived in the shadows of the Holocaust and as a means to provide the “ultimate security assurance against annihilation”. Shimon Peres once said that if Israel succeeded in acquiring nuclear capability, no Jews would be slaughtered like lambs anymore. This perception was also bolstered when Israel was forced by the US to withdraw its troops from Egyptian territory during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and Ernst David Bergmann were the principal architects of the nuclear policy and they maintained utmost control over the defence establishment for almost two decades. From the very outset, the process of expanding the nuclear arsenal was very rapid and by the time of the Yom Kippur War, Israel possessed more than a dozen nuclear bombs. Golda Meir further intensified the nuclear efforts.
According to the distinguished US journalist Seymour Hersh, an Israeli scientist secretly gave photographic evidence of Israel possessing more than 100 thermonuclear weapons to the US in 1981. Today, the Israeli nuclear arsenal is believed to include both artillery delivered enhanced radiation neutron bombs and intercontinental range thermonuclear weapons. Israel’s strategic nuclear deterrent is based on a three-branched nuclear capability: strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-based missiles.
The purpose of having this ‘triad’ of delivery systems is to reduce the possibility of an enemy’s attack on all of a country’s nuclear forces and ensure a credible threat of a ‘second strike’. Israel’s nuclear research and production activities are scattered across the country, with a nuclear reactor at Dimona used to produce plutonium, nuclear storage bases at Eilabun near the Sea of Galilee and the national weapons testing laboratory at Soreq. Despite repeated efforts, Israel has never allowed the IAEA to inspect these nuclear facilities.
In addition, the US policy of acquiescence in Israel’s nuclear programme has provided an impetus to Iraq, Syria, Iran and other Arab nations to explore the possibility of nuclear weapons – universally acknowledged as a threat to human survival on this planet.
There is no strong evidence to suggest that Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal helped increase its security or bring stability to the region. Rather, it has been a destabilising force. In fact, Israeli governments have repeatedly made threats of a nuclear attack on Arab countries in order to further Israel’s negative ambitions in the Middle East.
Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, is often quoted as saying, “Arabs may have the oil but we have the matches.” Israel’s ambitions have even gone far beyond the Middle East. In 1983, and again in 2003, Israel even offered to join hands with India to attack Pakistani nuclear facilities.
Israel’s nuclear status gave Saddam Hussein a strong incentive to pursue a nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s and early 1990s. Israel has always refused to ratify the NPT, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Israel’s refusal to join these treaties has not only undermined the global non-proliferation regime, its worst consequences have appeared in the form of mass proliferation of biological and chemical weapons in Egypt, Syria and Iraq with the purpose to offset Israel’s military dominance in the region.
Israel’s possession of chemical and biological weapons has seriously undermined the moral authority of the US stance, which requires Iran to comply with the NPT and international law.
The Israeli nuclear weapons system reinforces the prospect that any future wars in the region could escalate into a regional or global nuclear cataclysm. None of Israel’s adversary countries has nuclear capability so the country has not even a deterrence justification to maintain its fastest growing nuclear arsenal.
Over the past three decades, the UN General Assembly has passed many resolutions supporting the idea of a NWFZ in the Middle East. Keeping in view the highly volatile geopolitical situation emerging in the Middle East, the international community cannot wait for another three decades to take substantial steps towards achieving this aim.
Email: rizwanasghar5@unm.edu