Will Israel attack Iran nuke sites a Question?
New U.S. Negev Site is part of a Nuke Umbrella,
But Israel’s had nuclear weapons
since Mid-Sixties,
Spying on Foes & Friends has always Been Universal!
Everyone knows best friend can become worst Enemies!
Israel bombed spy ship USS Liberty in international Waters,
To stop U.S. from hearing tank chatter orders to go into Syria!
Everyone spies on everybody, so this isn’t some new Revelation!
December 22, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
I first issued the history of Israel’s nuclear bomb development in 2001 in our first Prophecy Updates some 31 years after I retired from the USAF Branch of the NSA, but due to requests in 2004, I placed it in our Blogs. Since the same subject came up again in the excerpt from the Jerusalem Post on December 12, 2008, I am placing it before the two excerpts on the U.S. Umbrella protection and spying.
Begin 2004 Updated History of the Development of Israeli Nuclear Weapons
The Forty-Eight Year History of Nuclear Development in Israel!
I have recently received queries, from scanners of our web, for an updated outline of Israel’s historical nuclear development. Israel has maintained two nuclear reactors since 1960. The Nahal Soreq reactor has been used for peaceful nuclear pursuits, while the one at Dimona has been used for nuclear weapon production. The United States has walked a tightrope to avoid association with the production of nuclear weapons at Dimona, but has supplied enriched uranium for the Nahal Soreq facility. My interest has always been focused historically on the Dimona Site. This was ElBaradei’s second visit to Israel. In 1998 he met with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and visited the smaller research facility at Nahal Soreq. But he is not allowed to visit the Dimona Site.
1956 – Israel asked France to build a nuclear reactor in return for its cooperation in the 1956 recovery of the Suez from its takeover by Egypt.
1957 – The French began to build an atomic reactor at Dimona in the Negev.
1960 – The 24 megawatt reactor was completed, supposedly for the purpose of generating commercial power.
After the French left, the Israelis jacked it up to 150 megawatts in order to build atomic bombs.
1960 – Israel got a small nuclear reactor from the United States as a cover for the Dimona atomic bomb project. It was not to be used in the production of nuclear weapons. It was placed at Nahal Soreq, and has been running on enriched uranium supplied by the United States since its installation. Nahal Soreq is located southwest of Jerusalem. In 1978 the United States Congress passed a law forbidding the provision of nuclear fuel to countries which have nuclear facilities not monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Nahal Soreq reactor is monitored by the IAEA, but the Dimona reactor is not. The Dimona reactor produces plutonium for Israel’s nuclear weapons. The Israeli government has refused to return any of the enriched uranium stores it received from the U.S. before 1978, and is continuing to use them to fire the Nahal Soreq reactor.
1964 – The first atomic bomb was completed. I will not discuss where, or how, it was tested.
1967 – Egyptian overflights of Dimona in May caused Israel to launch pre-emptive strikes in June against her Arab neighbors because of the fear of three pronged air strikes against her nuclear facility, and the Six Day War began. Israel had a few atomic bombs at that time, but did not use them.
1968 – About 200 tons of yellowcake (crude uranium) was smuggled into Israel in December off a Liberian tanker. Israel continued to use its enriched U.S supplied uranium for its Nahal Soreq reactor.
(It was not from Liberia, but I will not reveal what country supplied it, only that it was not the United States)
1969 – Israel developed its first hydrogen bomb. I will not discuss how, or where, it was tested.
1973 – Israel was attacked by its Islamic neighbors, but does not use its numerous nuclear weapons.
2004 – Israel has at least 200 nuclear warheads. Many are mounted on Jericho missiles in the Negev wilderness. These missiles are capable of reaching all targets in the Islamic kingdoms of the Middle East.
Israel also has more than enough chemical and biological warheads to launch against any nation that launches the same against her. I do not believe Israel will launch chemical, biological, or nuclear warheads unless they are first launched against her. If the armies of Islam are able to drive her into the Negev without launching any of the aforementioned types of warheads against her, and will stop their advance north of Beersheba, I do not believe that Israel will launch her warheads against them.
End 2004 Updated History of the Development of Israel’s Nuclear Weapons
Begin Excerpt 1 from Middle East On Line
Bush’s Parting Gift to Israel
In accepting that it must rely on a US shield, Israel may have answered the Middle East’s biggest question of 2008: will it launch a go-it-alone strike against Iran’s presumed nuclear weapons program? Notes
By Jonathan Cook.
December 20, 2008
Almost unnoticed, Israel and the White House signed a deal over the summer to station an early-warning missile radar system, staffed with US military personnel, in Israel’s Negev desert. The media here described the Joint Tactical Ground Station, which brings Israel under the US protective umbrella against missile attack, as a “parting gift” from President Bush as he prepared to leave office.
The siting of what is likely to become America’s first permanent base on Israeli soil was apparently not easily agreed by local defense officials. Aware of the country’s vulnerability to missile strikes, they have been trying to develop their own defenses – so far without success – against the varying threats posed by Palestinian Qassam rockets, Hizbullah’s Katyushas, and Iran and Syria’s more sophisticated arsenal.
In finally accepting that it must rely on the US shield, Israel may have answered the Middle East’s biggest question of 2008: will it launch a go-it-alone strike against Iran’s presumed nuclear weapons program?
The local media reported that the early-warning station would limit Israel’s freedom to attack Iran since it would be the prime target for a retaliatory strike, endangering the lives of US personnel. Or as the Haaretz newspaper noted, Israeli officials viewed the radar system “as a signal of Washington’s opposition to an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program”.
Although ostensibly the warm relations between Israel and the US are unchanged, in reality recent events are forcing a reluctant Israel to submit to the increasingly smothering embrace of Washington.
Tel Aviv has long seen itself as a military ally of the US, largely sharing and assisting in the realization of Washington’s strategic objectives.
But it has also prized a degree of independence, especially the right to pursue its own agenda in the Middle East.
For some time, the key point of difference between the two has been over the benefits of “stability.” US planners have promoted regional calm as a way of maintaining American control over the flow of oil. In practice, this has meant keeping the Arab peoples, and Arab nationalism, in check by bolstering reliable dictators.
In contrast, Israel has preferred instability, believing that weak and fractious neighbours can be more easily manipulated. A series of invasions of Lebanon to accentuate ethnic divisions there and the fueling of civil war in the occupied Palestinian territories have been the template for Israel’s wider regional vision.
The implicit tension in the Israeli-US alliance surfaced with the ascendance under President George W. Bush of the neocons, who argued that Washington’s agenda should be synonymous with Israel’s. The US occupation and dismemberment of Iraq was the apotheosis of the White House’s application of the Israeli doctrine.
The neocons’ partial fall from grace began with Israel’s failure to crush Hizbullah in Lebanon more than two years ago. All the evidence suggests that both Israel and the neocons regarded Hizbullah’s defeat as the necessary prelude to a US attack on Tehran. Israel’s loss of nerve during the month-long war – attributed by critics like the former defense minister, Moshe Arens, to the general softening and feminisation of Israeli society – proved the country’s once-celebrated martial talents were on the decline.
In the war’s immediate wake, there was much discussion in Israel about how such a high-profile failure might damage the country’s standing in the eyes of its US sponsor. Penance arrived in the form of the exculpations of the Winograd post-mortem – and with it the inevitable undoing of Ehud Olmert as prime minister. Washington’s stables, meanwhile, were cleaned out less ostentatiously.
But where does this leave Israel? Certainly not friendless in Washington, as cheerleaders like AIPAC and the fawning of US presidential candidates amply demonstrate. But the relationship is changing: it looks increasingly as though Israel is turning from US ally to protectorate.
The consequences are already visible in the buckling of Israel’s commitment to launch a unilateral attack on Iran. Months of bellicose talk have been mostly stilled. A few believe this is the quiet before the storm of a joint US and Israeli strike. More likely it is the sign of an Israeli-fueled war agenda running out of steam.
Washington, already overstretched in the Middle East and facing concerted opposition to its policies from China and Russia, seems resigned to living with an Iranian nuclear bomb. In the new climate that means Israel will have to accept that it is no longer the only bully on the Middle East block. Israel is on the verge of its very own regional Cold War.
As in the earlier Cold War, this one will be played out through alliances and proxies. But there the similarity ends. Iran is emerging as a regional superpower, quickly developing the financial and military clout to sponsor other actors in the region, most obviously Hamas and Hizbullah.
Israel, on the other hand, is losing ground – quite literally, as the radar base reveals. It can no longer impose its own agenda or build alliances on its own terms. Its strength is becoming increasingly, and transparently, dependent on US approval.
The most immediate and tangible effects will be felt by the Palestinians, though their plight is not likely to let up any time soon. Just as before, Israel needs a long-term solution to the Palestinian problem, but cannot concede on the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
Now, however, it no longer has the luxury of biding its time as it dispossesses the Palestinians. It needs to find a solution before an Iranian bomb – and an ever-more confident Hamas and Hizbullah – force a settlement on Palestine not to its liking.
Israel is therefore engaging in a frenzy of West Bank settlement building – up six times on a year ago – not seen since Oslo. It only appears paradoxical that, just as Israel’s leadership is intoning the end of a Greater Israel, the most influential and optimistic supporters of a two-state solution on both sides – including Sari Nusseibeh and Shlomo Ben Ami – have been reading the last rites of Palestinian statehood.
This disillusionment, it might be expected, would provoke a new re solution towards a one-state
solution among Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the Palestinian leadership’s growing threats that it might adopt a one-state campaign are little more than that: blackmail designed to galvanize Israeli public opinion behind two states.
Instead of a fledgling state, however, Israel is creating a series of holding pens for the Palestinians – or “warehouses,” as the Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper has referred to them – on the last vestiges of the occupied territories.
For Halper, warehousing means containing the Palestinians at minimal economic and political cost to Israel as it steals more territory.
But is the warehousing of the Palestinians intended by Israel to be the equivalent of storing unwanted books? Or, to continue this disturbing metaphor, are the Palestinians being warehoused so that at a later date they can be given away – or, worse still, pulped?
The answer again suggests Israel’s growing dependence on the US. Washington has for some time been strong-arming the Sunni Arab world, especially loyal regimes like Egypt and Jordan, against Shia Iran. With its back to the wall, Israel appears willing to use this leverage to its own advantage.
Its leaders are increasingly thinking of “peace” terms that, passing over the heads of the Palestinians, will be directed at their neighbours in Jordan and Egypt. A regional solution requires a further entrenchment of the physical and political divisions between the two “halves” of the occupied territories, with control over the Palestinian parts of the West Bank handed to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt.
It is a sign of the terminal loss of faith in their leaders and Israeli good faith that the latest poll of Palestinians shows 42 percent want their government-in-waiting, the Palestinian Authority, dismantled. More than a quarter are ready to abandon the dream of independent nationhood, preferring instead the establishment of a joint state with Jordan.
Palestine’s fate, it seems, rests on the resolve of the Arab world. It is not a reassuring prospect.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. A version of this article originally appeared in Adbusters Magazine.
Begin Article 2 from the Jerusalem Post
‘US spies on Israel to gain info on its atomic capabilities’
December 12, 2008
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
The United States routinely attempts to gather in formation
on Israel’s assumed atomic arsenal and secret government deliberations, a new official history of Israel’s intelligence services, reviewed by Reuters, says.
While espionage by allies on their friends is not uncommon, a new Israeli state-sponsored publication acknowledges it openly. Bilateral ties have been especially touchy in this regard since a Jewish US Navy analyst, Jonathan Pollard, was jailed for life in the US for treason in 1987 for passing classified documents to Israel.
The book “Masterpiece: An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Israeli Intelligence,” claims American spy agencies use technologies like electronic eavesdropping, and specially trained staff located in the US embassy in Tel Aviv, for “methodical intelligence gathering.”
“The United States has been after Israel’s non-conventional capabilities and what goes on at the decision-making echelons,” says the book in a chapter on counter-espionage written by Barak Ben-Zur, a retired Shin Bet officer.
Asked about the assertions, the US embassy spokesman said only: “We don’t comment on intelligence matters.”
Israel is widely believed to have been armed with nuclear weapons since the late 1960s, but a policy of “strategic ambiguity” has prevented state officials in the know to confirm or deny the claims.
While successive US administrations have accepted this reticence, Israel’s so-called “bomb in the basement” has been a worry for Washington – especially during the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when fighting inflamed the wider Cold War.
Declassified Pentagon documents published in a 2004 book about then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld estimated that Israel had 80 nuclear warheads. Last May, former US President Jimmy Carter put the number of Israeli bombs at around 150. The estimates on Israel’s nuclear arsenal range from about 80 to more than 200, as do estimates on its launching capabilities, which apart from ballistic missiles may or may not include special custom-designed torpedoes.
The issue has taken on new relevance recently given Western fears that Iran’s nuclear program is an attempt at acquiring a bomb; despite Teheran’s insistent denial, Israel’s policy has been not to allow any Middle Eastern state to acquire nukes. Some analysts believe Israel should instead “take thebomb out of the basement and create an overt nuclear deterrence against Iran.
Ben-Zur declined to give Reuters operational details on how the United States might be conducting its espionage on Israel. But he described the effort as largely benign, given the closeness of defense ties between Israel and Washington.
“At the end of the day, the United States does not want to be surprised,” he said. “Even by us.”
Due out later this month, “Masterpiece” is published by the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center and includes prefaces by chiefs of Israel’s military intelligence, the domestic Shin Bet and the Mossad spy service active abroad.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more detailed information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
You may use material originated by this site. However, if you wish to use any quoted copyrighted material from this site, which did not originate at this site, for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner
from which we extracted it.