Jonathan Cook
The National
NAZARETH // Israel faces unprecedented pressure to abandon its official policy of "ambiguity" on its possession of nuclear weapons as the international community meets at the United Nations in New York this week to consider banning such arsenals from the Middle East.
Israel’s equivocal stance on its atomic status was shattered by reports on Monday that it offered to sell nuclear-armed Jericho missiles to South Africa’s apartheid regime in 1975.
The revelations are certain to embarrass Israel given its long-standing opposition to signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, arguing instead that it is a "responsible power" that would never misuse nuclear weapons technologies if it acquired them.
Reports of Israel’s nuclear dealings with apartheid South Africa will also energise Egyptian demands at the UN non-proliferation review conference that Israel – as the only atomic power in the region – be required to sign the treaty.
Israeli officials are already said to be discomfited by Washington’s decision this month to agree to a statement with other UN Security Council members calling for the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear arms.
Oversight of Israel’s programme is also due to be debated at a meeting of the UN’s nuclear monitor, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna next month.
The administration of the US president, Barack Obama, is reported to have held high-level discussions with Israel at the weekend to persuade it to consent to proposals for a 2012 conference to outlaw weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.
Israel refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty when it was introduced in 1970, a few years after it developed its first warhead, with help from Britain and France.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s current president and the mastermind behind its nuclear programme, formulated the policy of ambiguity, in which Israel asserts only that it will "not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East".
That stance – and a promise not to conduct nuclear tests – was accepted by the US administration of Richard Nixon in 1969, recently released documents have shown.
Revelations over the years have made it increasingly difficult for the international community to turn a blind eye to Israel’s arsenal.
Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona nuclear energy plant in Negev, provided photographic evidence and detailed descriptions of the country’s weapons programme in 1986. Today the Israeli arsenal is estimated at more than 200 warheads.
In 2006, Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister, let slip Israel’s nuclear status during an interview on German television when he listed "America, France, Israel and Russia" as countries with nuclear arms.
Even more damaging confirmation was provided this week by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which published documents unearthed for a new book – The Unspoken Alliance, by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a US historian – on relations between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime.
The top-secret papers reveal that in 1975 Mr Peres, then Israel’s defence minister, met his South African counterpart, PW Botha, to discuss selling the regime nuclear-armed missiles. The deal fell through partly because South Africa could not afford the weapons.
Israel, Mr Polakow-Suransky said, had fought to prevent declassification of the documents.
Despite publication by The Guardian of a photographed agreement bearing the date and the signatures of both Mr Peres and Botha, Mr Peres’s office issued a statement on Monday denying the report.
Israel’s increasingly transparent nuclear status is likely to undermine US efforts both to impose sanctions on Iran and to damp down a wider potential nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
This month the United States surprised Israeli officials by failing to keep Israel’s nuclear programme off the agenda of the IAEA’s next meeting, on June 7. The issue has only ever been discussed twice before, in 1988 and 1991.
At this week’s UN review conference, Egypt has proposed that the 189 states that have signed the treaty, including the US, pledge not to transfer nuclear equipment, information, material or professional help to Israel until it too signs.
Reuven Pedatzur, an Israeli defence analyst, warned recently in Haaretz that there was a danger that the Egyptian proposal might be adopted by the US, or that it might be used as a stick to browbeat a recalcitrant Israel into accepting greater limitations on its arsenal. He suggested ending what he called the "ridiculous fiction" of the ambiguity policy.
Emily Landau, an arms control expert at Tel Aviv University, however, said those who believed that Israel should be more transparent were misguided. Ending ambiguity, she said, would eventually lead to calls for Israel’s total and complete disarmament.
Three other states – India, Pakistan and North Korea – are known to have nuclear weapons but are not subject to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
- foreign.desk@thenational.ae
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