Our next Nuclear Club Member is Israel:

Israel personifies what is wrong with the Club and its Members.

It managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan with the help of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, they include today’s staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.

Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974 is the world’s sixth most powerful nuclear state.

Israel’s nuclear-weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967.

Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls amimut, meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has nuclear weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal. For decades, however, that other Middle Eastern nations have feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.

The pretense of ignorance about Israeli bombs does not wash anymore.

It’s policy of ambiguity is both “outdated and childish.” Living a lie as it has few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons know how and materials.

The secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear weapons is “obsolete and fraying around the edges. Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye.  How can we then expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won’t come clean?

Israel’s nuclear-weapons project would never have got off the ground, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, driven by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad. Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris sold material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.

Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny—and occasional disapprobation—applied to the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

The British were kept out of the loop, along with the Americans, who were also kept in the dark by both Israel and France. However the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. The US policy of silence continues to this day, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding.

“Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that will happen, before Israel goes under.”

This Quote serves as a historical counterpoint to today’s drawn-out struggle over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

All of this would sent a sent a shiver up our backs.

In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo.

Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.

When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report titled “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” it included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—but not Israel. The 61-page report relegated Israel’s nuclear arms to a footnote that suggested that Israel’s arsenal was a “perception.”

For Israel’s neighbors, this perception is more important than reality.

Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa on September 2004 that “the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons”

Considering who is now represented the violent element of Islam these days this Fatwa would have to view with a pinch of salt.  The possibility exists more than ever that Iran has nuclear facilities for military purposes, which it hasn’t declared to the IAEA. The IAEA has found no evidence for this, but the possibility cannot be completely ruled out. That being so, the ongoing demands that Iran suspend these enrichment facilities is a denial of its “inalienable right” under Article IV(1) of the NPT to engage in nuclear activities for peaceful purposes.

The significance of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not that Iran would become a threat to Israel and the US, but that Israel and the US would no longer contemplate attacking Iran.

Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons of self-defense — a state that possesses nuclear weapons doesn’t get attacked by other states.

Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America’s behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.

If it is admitted that Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it’s very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that. President Barack Obama made clear that this four-decade-old U.S. policy would persist at his first White House press conference in 2009, “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said, as though Israel’s established status as a nuclear-weapons state was only a matter of rumor and conjecture.

Instead:

In January 1992, Israel’s Technion University procured two “parallel” computers capable of reaching supercomputer speeds from the U.K. company Meiko Scientific Ltd.. The sale effectively circumvented U.S.- and Japanese-imposed restrictions for countries that had not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). But in November 1994, the United States approved the sale of nine supercomputers to Israel: two from Cray Research, five from IBM and two from Silicon Graphics. (The speeds of the nine computers ranged from 1,071 to 6,796 MTOPS.) The end-users–Technion University, Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute–all have links to Israel’s nuclear and missile programs. U.S. officials opposed to the sales were concerned that Israel would get a boost in computing power to work on a major engineering problem: shrinking thermonuclear warheads to fit on long-range missiles.

Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War not will they save Israel.

If you don’t believe any of the above have a look at this:    http://youtu.be/F04-Zzoij8Y

The last two posts to come in this series will address the two big players: Russia and the USA.

From what I have learned so far the Nuclear Club is full of gangsters. Everyone puts his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear program.

We all know that there is no future for the Jews-only- Nuclear or Not  State in Palestine; they may have to try somewhere else before the whole region is nuked. 

Israel will not solve its conflict with unilateral declarations of statehood.

It will have to reach a mutual compromise, in which a demilitarized Palestinian state becomes one with Jewish State and say goodbye to its War Heads.( See Previous Post)