Israel’s Nuclear Weapons: The Open Secret
Showing posts with label Nuclear Weapons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nuclear Weapons. Show all posts
No sanctions on Israel was the real ‘Historic Mistake’
Dimona…mostly underground
… by Jim W. Dean with Press TV, Tehran
Early Dimona nuclear bomb core model – photo credit..Mordecai Vanunu
Netanyahu and his Congressional puppets are correct that the world is facing a historic mistake. They just have it upside down.
We would never be where we are now if the world had imposed sanctions on Israel for its long-running and huge weapons of mass destruction programs.
The West thus ended up being a major proliferator itself in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary.
This has been an insult to literally all the people of the world, and the responsibility primarily of the West, who aided and abetted in the Israeli nuclear programs.
The French displayed their long habit of knowing no shame when they made the outrageous statement on their visit to Israel that nuclear non-proliferation was a top foreign policy issue for them.
Perhaps Mr. Hollande and his foreign minister would like to have a town hall meeting with some experts that Veterans Today could put together to lay out in detail how France was a nuclear proliferator when they began their own nuclear weapons programs, partnering with the Israelis after the 1948 war.
The bookend for that outrageous denial is that we know they have been working on the Saudi nuke program for over ten years, with Israel assisting in the wings. They somewhat copied Dimona with an all underground facility.
We have put the sanctions on the wrong people. The “protectors of freedom” betrayed us, but there is change in the air.
The world sat back during the last P5+1 talks and watched the former French colonial power get colonized by Israel. The French in effect gave Israel, which is not a member of the NPT, a seat at the P5+1 table.They gave the biggest WMD threat in the Mideast a veto over that last meeting, buying more time for the US Congress to get more sanctions passed, disenfranchising all the rest of us. If France has become an Israeli spy, can we take action? Should we?
___________________________________
France’s Hollande – ‘Kissing the ring’
I think France should be held in contempt for this act, and for their nuclear work with the Saudis. Why have the international public forums been silent on this when they must have known, also? They make a mockery of Western Jurisprudence, which perhaps is its due. But that is not the fault of the people, but their corrupt leaders.
So here we sit on the eve of the talks, having endured Israel’s full-scale attack on what is literally a critically important peace process. The attack on Syria is out of the question now with the chemical weapons agreement flowing along smoothly.
If Obama had gone forward with the attack, he would have wrecked his presidency and set the Mideast afire. Treason here played a role in leading up to it, and that has been dealt with quietly.
On Sunday, Americans were humiliated to see the Israeli settler terrorist, Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett, get red carpet treatment from CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He got ten minutes to role out his propaganda pitch, which I suffered through, lie after lie, until he got to his close with the BIG LIE.Naftali is a Zionist supremacist, who thinks the rest of us are so stupid that we don’t remember that everything Israel has ever said about Iran’s nuclear energy program proved to be dead wrong.
________________________________
Naftali Bennett
But in Zioland, a perfect record at lying is never viewed as creating a credibility problem.
Bennett had the Zionist chutzpah to claim that the danger of Iran being allowed to have any reprocessed uranium is that at some time in the future they could decide to ‘break out,’ meaning build a bomb – are you all sitting down? – in six weeks!
I swear that he actually said this.
Dear Naftali, I picked up that you guys had switch from your six-‘month’ breakout spiel propaganda of earlier in the year, and just changed it to six ‘weeks.’ Yes, I remembered.
You know who runs the media over here, don’t you Mr. Bennett? Maybe you are stupid, or lying, but you did not fool us.
There is some good news. Despite the huffing and puffing of Israel’s shills in Congress, both Obama and Lavrov did a tag team match on Netanyahu’s last-ditch propaganda campaign using the ‘historic mistake’ pitch.
The mood is cautiously optimistic for the new Iran talks on Wednesday. The Israeli lobby got some lip service over the past two weeks but they are not running the show.
As for France, I still think the P5+1 should become the P4+1 by kicking France out. She has enough to deal with at home and brings no prestige, good judgment or common sense to the table.
France will be remembered as openly working as a threat against all the rest of us. I hope Iran does not give France a single oil concession because of this treachery. Is France shaking down the other group members as in “give me some money to be good?” Nothing would surprise me. Israel is surely going to ask for a lot. It always does.
VT’s nuclear expert – Clinton Bastin
But Israel and the Saudis are the number one suspects in the Iran embassy bombing in Beirut.
We did not miss the signal being sent by both that although they did not get their Syria war, that if they don’t get their Iran war, they will just have to pick a new target.
The Al-Nusrats already did their ‘we’re coming to your neighborhood’ press conference last week, threatening to carry the war to the West if they are defeated in Syria.
That is what those innocent people in Beirut died for. They were messengers for what other cities could look like if ruthless Israel teams up with the ruthless Saudi Arabia to really go into the Western mayhem business.
I am looking forward to when the Iran issue is finally put to bed, to moving on to doing the post-WWII Japan treatment on Israel, demilitarizing the country. The Israelis should not be allowed to own weapons. They are just too irresponsible.
Defending Israel’s American Financed Underground Nuke Arsenal
by Gordon Duff and Press TV
—
In February 2013, Grant Smith of the Middle East Policy Institute and Anti-War.Com published a story attacking Walter Pincus of the Washington Post for accusing the Army Corps of Engineers of supporting Israel’s nuclear program.
Smith’s proof of the innocence of Israel and the Army Corps of Engineers and his indictment of Pincus for an anti-Israel story is cited here:
“Pincus did not respond to an immediate email request for citations of USACE publications detailing “facilities for handling nuclear weapons, ” but a January 4, 2013 Freedom of Information Act request to USACE Humphreys Engineer Support Center in Alexandria requesting documents summarizing “its role in building nuclear weapons handling facilities in Israel” was swiftly answered.
USACE’s response was unusually comprehensive. (PDF) “This office is responsible for administering requests involving USACE Headquarters. The USACE Europe District is the office responsible for projects involving Israel. I have coordinated with the Europe District and have been informed that none of the facilities that USACE has been involved with were nuclear weapons handling facilities; therefore I will not be requesting that a document search be conducted.”
Grant Smith’s career as a journalist has been based on debunking government denials. In fact, it is harder to catch the Department of Defense actually telling the truth. Everything we now know as fact, the kidnappings and renditions, the torture, NSA spying, and, most recently, claims of Assad’s use of Sarin in Syria was “official truth” at one time.
Suddenly, a standard government denial outweighs a classified source Walter Pincus of the Washington Post had to push past “fact checkers,” a legal department and a dozen editors to get published at one of the most conservative media outlets in the world.
Did we just learn, not just that the DOD is funding Israel’s nuclear program but that independent investigative journalists may well have a role in protecting these dangerous and illegal programs?
WHO IS WHAT?
Smith’s article is curious. It is nearly impossible to see it as other than “cheer leading” for Israel and a poorly researched cover up. The theme of the article is hardly “anti-war,” quite the opposite and provides extensive cover for Israel’s childish denials of the nuclear capabilities it continually threatens the world with.
Veterans Today had received its own information about these facilities, multiple underground bunkers, nuclear-hardened, intended to provide command and control and needed support for Israel’s strategic command, their “nuclear command.”
Our own investigation showed the facilities to provide direct command and control for nuclear forces and, in one case, include hardened facilities for unspecified “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that included materials handling equipment exclusively used to deploy nuclear weapons.
WASHINGTON POST
Veterans Today had initially broken the story based on Pentagon sources. However, Walter Pincus, of theWashington Post, in November 2012 wrote the following:
“Over the years, the Corps has built underground hangers for Israeli fighter-bombers, facilities for handling nuclear weapons (though Israel does not admit having such weapons), command centers, training bases, intelligence facilities and simulators, according to Corps publications.”
For those who are unaware of such things, any information the US has regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal is highly classified. The US effort to follow Israel’s weapons developments is handled through our embassy in Tel Aviv. It is the primary job of our Attaché at the embassy to monitor this.
Colonel James B. Hanke, US Army Special Forces (ret) had been our attaché under Ambassador Pinkerton. Hanke oversaw us intelligence gathering inside Israel and was tasked with monitoring their nuclear capabilities.
“Gordy, we used sensors of all kinds, we tracked everything we could going in and out of Israel. Though Margo and I lived there for years, often had Netanyahu over for tea, it was our job and the primary job of all our defense attaches to protect US interests.”
Policies during the Clinton era that put “America first” ended with the Bush (43) presidency.
Thus, when the Army Corps of Engineers began building huge underground facilities, 5 in total, in Israel, those intelligence officers remaining from the “America first” era were shocked.
You see, there were no provision made for inspection of these facilities once they were turned over. Moreover, as Israel is a major nuclear power, it would be inconceivable that a “strategic command center” would not control “strategic weapons.”
However, the leaked classified information that Pincus would have used and never could have provided sources for out of journalistic ethics, had “shopped” this very real scandal to other publications. Only Veterans Today and the Washington Post printed it.
SMITH GETS IT RIGHT ALSO
To make this all even more theatrical and confusion, Grant Smith very rightly cites a 2006 Walter Pincus storydefending Steve Rosen and Keith Weismann of AIPAC, the Israel lobby organization, against spying charges.
These charges were later dropped on the basis of “national security.”
Pincus defends Rosen and Weisman’s acquisition and transfer to Israel of nuclear secrets as “freedom of the press,” quoting several supporting sources, all of which are AIPAC controlled.
Veterans Today editor, Gwyneth Todd, while a member of the National Security Council under Bush (43), met with FBI agents and cooperated in FBI surveillance under the orders of Condoleezza Rice, her direct superior.
A much larger espionage ring including top Bush White House insiders was discovered and volumes of evidence were accumulated including hour after hour of tape recorded confessions.
According to Todd, now in hiding in Australia after an assassination attempt by top Bush defense officials, “these idiots couldn’t brag enough. At one Washington party, XXXXXX (top Bush security advisor) handed a pile of papers to an AIPAC employee, openly stating they were nuclear secrets. Paul Wolfowitz was standing next to me. The FBI recorded the whole thing.”
Smith, historically a strong critic of AIPAC, burns Pincus, rightly so, for a pitiful 2006 story using biased sources to defend Israeli spying on the US.
Here, in 2013, however, we find Grant Smith doing almost exactly what he has exposed Pincus for and, ironically, does so in the very same story. Are we not supposed to notice?
Smith’s position for analysis is that Israel uses press assets like Pincus who publish stories on US aid to Israel’s nuclear programs to cover up even worse Israeli abuses.
“Hinting that the U.S. government has an ongoing official—though deeply secret—role in helping Israel develop and deploy nuclear weapons is a line periodically pushed by Israel lobby partisans when uncomfortable facts about questionable funding flows from the U.S. or illicitmaterial and technology diversions arise.”
Our own analysis is different than Smiths. US complicity in taxpayer funding for Israel’s “ambiguous” nuclear program is, as we see it, a “red line.”
This is something that can end funding to Israel and evidence of these underground facilities exits, though highly classified.
Moreover, America’s willingness to build “Cheyenne mountain” type facilities, not just defensive but a nuclear hardened “war room,” a command and control facility in response to an Iranian nuclear threat even Smith himself has always admitted was imaginary, is a fraud of the highest order.
What is telling is Smith’s use of materials, an unclassified document received through Freedom of Information, that would and could never adequately address something at this security level.
Simply put, when the US spends billions to build underground facilities and makes no provision as to how they are used and simply gives them to a government that has waged aggressive war against its neighbors, a nuclear power that issues threats constantly, far more than North Korea, it should be assumed all of these facilities are nuclear facilities.
Then again, there are the classified sources that confirmed weapons storage bays, nuclear operations centers and more.
What Smith never mentioned is what, exactly, these facilities are being built for if not to store and deploy nuclear weapons?
If the US believes, as they stated in the document Smith relies on, that Israel would never use them for “nuclear purposes,” then how is the US government assuring that?
America continually demands to examine every facility in Syria and Iran but not Israel.
Do we simply believe Israel? Nobody else does.
Were Smith to be right to the extent his curiosity has allowed, he would still be wrong. It is obvious the US is building massive strategic capabilities in Israel without consulting congress or the American people.
These are, minimally, a threat to the region and the world.
Even if reports requested were “believable,” they aren’t comprehensively so. Even if these facilities weren’t directly tied to nuclear missile silos, as high level Department of Defense sources have leaked, they could be and certainly would be.
Israel never promised they wouldn’t. We never asked to check.
Nobody asked anything, we were simply too busy shoveling dirt over the problem.
“Pincus did not respond to an immediate email request for citations of USACE publications detailing “facilities for handling nuclear weapons, ” but a January 4, 2013 Freedom of Information Act request to USACE Humphreys Engineer Support Center in Alexandria requesting documents summarizing “its role in building nuclear weapons handling facilities in Israel” was swiftly answered.
USACE’s response was unusually comprehensive. (PDF) “This office is responsible for administering requests involving USACE Headquarters. The USACE Europe District is the office responsible for projects involving Israel. I have coordinated with the Europe District and have been informed that none of the facilities that USACE has been involved with were nuclear weapons handling facilities; therefore I will not be requesting that a document search be conducted.”
“Over the years, the Corps has built underground hangers for Israeli fighter-bombers, facilities for handling nuclear weapons (though Israel does not admit having such weapons), command centers, training bases, intelligence facilities and simulators, according to Corps publications.”
“Gordy, we used sensors of all kinds, we tracked everything we could going in and out of Israel. Though Margo and I lived there for years, often had Netanyahu over for tea, it was our job and the primary job of all our defense attaches to protect US interests.”
“Hinting that the U.S. government has an ongoing official—though deeply secret—role in helping Israel develop and deploy nuclear weapons is a line periodically pushed by Israel lobby partisans when uncomfortable facts about questionable funding flows from the U.S. or illicitmaterial and technology diversions arise.”
Israel Hides Nukes Behind “Ambiguity” Wall
Israel’s leaders will be back home, hiding behind what Israel calls its “ambiguity wall”, a metaphorical entity which hides at least 80 Israeli nuclear war heads, plus the material to build hundreds more.
by James M Wall
Natanz Nuclear Facility
This week’s Geneva nuclear table talks pit Iran against the Big Five Security Council members, plus Germany.
Iran sits alone at the table, seeking release from its “sanctions jail” incarceration from its jailers, the Big Five plus one nations.
Israel will not be in the room, even though the region’s self-proclaimed “only democracy”, is Iran’s chief accuser in these talks.
Israel’s leaders will be back home, hiding behind what Israel calls its “ambiguity wall”, a metaphorical entity which hides at least 80 Israeli nuclear war heads, plus the material to build hundreds more.
The ambiguity wall has protected Israel’s growing nuclear arsenal from the world’s eyes since the 1950s. In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician working in Dimona, breached the wall when he leaked the country’s nuclear secrets to a British newspaper.
Vanunu said Israel had at least 100 nuclear weapons. He was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents in Rome and quickly convicted of espionage and treason. He served a jail term of 18 years, 11 of which were in solitary confinement.
Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. In the back, a satellite image of Israeli nuclear facility and reactors, Dimona.
After his release in 2004, Vanunu was forbidden to leave the state of Israel or speak with journalists. Born in Marrakech, Morocco, to a Sephardi rabbi, Vanunu learned the hard way that it is not nice to talk about what goes on behind Israel’s “ambiguity wall”.
The wall continues to be accepted as “ambiguious” by world media and governments, thanks to the powerful influence of the United States, Israel’s big brother protector and financial sugar daddy. Thanks to big brother, the talks in Geneva are proceeding as though Iran’s major accuser is not needed in the nuclear table talks.
Iran, sitting as the “accused” in Geneva, does not put its nuclear facilities behind an “ambiguity” wall. The BBC offers a close look at Iran’s various nuclear production sites. This report relies on Iran’s open stance regarding its program, in contrast to Israel’s lack of transparency.
Iran resumed uranium enrichment work at Natanz in July 2004, after a halt during negotiations with leading European powers over its program.
It announced in September 2007 that it had installed 3,000 centrifuges, the machines that do the enrichment. In 2010, Iran told the IAEA Natanz would be the venue for new enrichment facilities – construction of which would start around March 2011.
This is the facility at the heart of Iran’s dispute with the United Nations Security Council.
The Council is concerned because the technology used for producing fuel for nuclear power can be used to enrich the uranium to a much higher level to produce a nuclear explosion.
Of course fuel produced for nuclear power can be used to produce a nuclear explosion. There is no secret about this reality. Iran wants what every developed nation wants, a developed nuclear power system, and the option to build stronger, more lethal, stuff.
Were it not for a desire to compete for military power among nations like the Big Five, plus Germany, all of whom are well armed with nuclear weapons, the world would have moved decades ago to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
They have not, so we are left with the larger powers working hard to limit nuclear arms to those who have already crossed into nuclear arms territory. Once into that territory, nations are asked to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel, of course, has never signed the treaty, nor has it been pressured to do so.
Meanwhile, in Geneva, The Guardian reports the not-yet-public opening proposal from Iran to the peace talks:
The Iranian delegation to international talks in Geneva has presented proposals which it claims will end the longstanding deadlock over its nuclear programme.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (R) speaks with his Swiss counterpart Didier Burkhalter during a meeting on the sideline of nuclear talks on October 16, 2013 in Geneva (Pool/AFP, Martial Trezzini)
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, gave an hour-long PowerPoint presentation of the proposals, entitled “Closing an unnecessary crisis: Opening new horizons”, to senior diplomats from the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China at the Palace of Nations in Geneva on Tuesday.The presentation was not made public, but it is believed to lay out a timetable for a confidence-building deal that would place limits on Iran’s nuclear program in return for relief from sanctions and international recognition of the country’s right to enrich uranium.
A recent story in the Los Angeles Times, published September 15, 2013, demonstrated that Israel’s media protection had begun to slip.
Israel has 80 nuclear warheads and the potential to double that number, according to a new report by U.S. experts.
In the Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, recently published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, proliferation experts Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris write that Israel stopped production of nuclear warheads in 2004.
But the country has enough fissile material for an additional 115 to 190 warheads, according to the report, meaning it could as much as double its arsenal.
Previous estimates have been higher but the new figures agree with the 2013 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute yearbook on armament and international security. The yearbook estimated 50 of Israel’s nuclear warheads were for medium-range ballistic missiles and 30 were for for bombs carried by aircraft, according to a report in the Guardian.
The Times story included the usual boiler plate caveat required in covering Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
Although widely assumed a nuclear power, Israel has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons or capabilities and continues to maintain its decades-old “strategic ambiguity” policy on the matter, neither confirming nor denying foreign reports on the issue.
Foreign Policy carried a report September 9, that on the chemical weapons front, Israel does not have clean hands.
Syria’s reported use of chemical weapons is threatening to turn the civil war there into a wider conflict. But the Bashar al-Assad government may not be the only one in the region with a nerve gas stockpile. A newly discovered CIA document indicates that Israel likely built up a chemical arsenal of its own.
It is almost universally believed in intelligence circles here in Washington, that Israel possesses a stockpile of several hundred fission nuclear weapons, and perhaps even some high-yield thermonuclear weapons. Analysts believe the Israeli government built the nuclear stockpile in the 1960s and 1970s as a hedge against the remote possibility that the armies of its Arab neighbors could someday overwhelm the Israeli military. But nuclear weapons are not the only weapon of mass destruction that Israel has constructed.
Reports have circulated in arms control circles for almost 20 years that Israel secretly manufactured a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons to complement its nuclear arsenal. Much of the attention has been focused on the research and development work being conducted at the Israeli government’s secretive Israel Institute for Biological Research at Ness Ziona, located 20 kilometers south of Tel Aviv.
But little, if any, hard evidence has ever been published to indicate that Israel possesses a stockpile of chemical or biological weapons. This secret 1983 CIA intelligence estimate may be the strongest indication yet.
According to the document, American spy satellites uncovered in 1982 “a probable CW [chemical weapon] nerve agent production facility and a storage facility… at the Dimona Sensitive Storage Area in the Negev Desert. Other CW production is believed to exist within a well-developed Israeli chemical industry.”
Meanwhile, as the Geneva talks proceed, President Obama appears to be ready for the U.S. and Iran to work toward more cordial relations. That telephone call the President shared with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has begun to pay dividends.
This has not been well received in Saudi Arabia, one of the few remaining Middle Eastern countries still friendly with Israel. Iran’s Fars News Agency reported the Saudis response to the improved Washington-Teheran relationship:
Saudi officials have reportedly become deeply upset and anxious over the Iranians’ success during President Hassan Rouhani’s recent visit to New York and the possible start of rapprochement between Tehran and Washington, and are seeking a way to sabotage the trend, a source said.
“The Saudi officials are highly distressed over this rapprochement and have held a meeting on September 24 in the presence of President of the Royal Court Khalid al-Tuwaijri, Commander of the National Guard Mutaib bin Abdullah, Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and National Security Council Secretary and Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan,” an informed source close to the Saudi Royal family told FNA on Sunday.
“At the meeting the relations between Iran and the US and the settlement of Iran’s nuclear issue with the Group 5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) came under study and Iran’s growing chances of success on this path were assessed to be much dangerous to Saudi Arabia’s national security,” the source added.
The source said that the Saudi officials have decided to use all their diplomatic and intelligence capabilities and possibilities as well as their lobbies in the US to blockade a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and Bandar bin Sultan was assigned to study possible ways of stirring tension between Iran and the US.
“The meeting also decided that any plan developed in this regard should be coordinated with the Israeli lobbies, which are also angry at the positive atmosphere created between Iran and the US,” the source concluded.
The times they really “are a-changin’” when Israel’s U.S. lobby forces are forced to make common cause with those of Saudi Arabia.
James Wall blogs at Wallwritings.
Related Interview: Tide of peace leaving Israel behind: Micheal Jones
Related articles:
Israel and the South African
Nuclear Bomb Documents
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/israel_south_african_nuclear_bomb_documents.html
Natanz Nuclear Facility
Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. In the back, a satellite image of Israeli nuclear facility and reactors, Dimona.
The Iranian delegation to international talks in Geneva has presented proposals which it claims will end the longstanding deadlock over its nuclear programme.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (R) speaks with his Swiss counterpart Didier Burkhalter during a meeting on the sideline of nuclear talks on October 16, 2013 in Geneva (Pool/AFP, Martial Trezzini)
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, gave an hour-long PowerPoint presentation of the proposals, entitled “Closing an unnecessary crisis: Opening new horizons”, to senior diplomats from the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China at the Palace of Nations in Geneva on Tuesday.The presentation was not made public, but it is believed to lay out a timetable for a confidence-building deal that would place limits on Iran’s nuclear program in return for relief from sanctions and international recognition of the country’s right to enrich uranium.
Israel has 80 nuclear warheads and the potential to double that number, according to a new report by U.S. experts.
In the Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, recently published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, proliferation experts Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris write that Israel stopped production of nuclear warheads in 2004.
But the country has enough fissile material for an additional 115 to 190 warheads, according to the report, meaning it could as much as double its arsenal.
Previous estimates have been higher but the new figures agree with the 2013 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute yearbook on armament and international security. The yearbook estimated 50 of Israel’s nuclear warheads were for medium-range ballistic missiles and 30 were for for bombs carried by aircraft, according to a report in the Guardian.
Although widely assumed a nuclear power, Israel has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons or capabilities and continues to maintain its decades-old “strategic ambiguity” policy on the matter, neither confirming nor denying foreign reports on the issue.
Syria’s reported use of chemical weapons is threatening to turn the civil war there into a wider conflict. But the Bashar al-Assad government may not be the only one in the region with a nerve gas stockpile. A newly discovered CIA document indicates that Israel likely built up a chemical arsenal of its own.
It is almost universally believed in intelligence circles here in Washington, that Israel possesses a stockpile of several hundred fission nuclear weapons, and perhaps even some high-yield thermonuclear weapons. Analysts believe the Israeli government built the nuclear stockpile in the 1960s and 1970s as a hedge against the remote possibility that the armies of its Arab neighbors could someday overwhelm the Israeli military. But nuclear weapons are not the only weapon of mass destruction that Israel has constructed.
Reports have circulated in arms control circles for almost 20 years that Israel secretly manufactured a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons to complement its nuclear arsenal. Much of the attention has been focused on the research and development work being conducted at the Israeli government’s secretive Israel Institute for Biological Research at Ness Ziona, located 20 kilometers south of Tel Aviv.
But little, if any, hard evidence has ever been published to indicate that Israel possesses a stockpile of chemical or biological weapons. This secret 1983 CIA intelligence estimate may be the strongest indication yet.
According to the document, American spy satellites uncovered in 1982 “a probable CW [chemical weapon] nerve agent production facility and a storage facility… at the Dimona Sensitive Storage Area in the Negev Desert. Other CW production is believed to exist within a well-developed Israeli chemical industry.”
Saudi officials have reportedly become deeply upset and anxious over the Iranians’ success during President Hassan Rouhani’s recent visit to New York and the possible start of rapprochement between Tehran and Washington, and are seeking a way to sabotage the trend, a source said.
“The Saudi officials are highly distressed over this rapprochement and have held a meeting on September 24 in the presence of President of the Royal Court Khalid al-Tuwaijri, Commander of the National Guard Mutaib bin Abdullah, Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and National Security Council Secretary and Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan,” an informed source close to the Saudi Royal family told FNA on Sunday.
“At the meeting the relations between Iran and the US and the settlement of Iran’s nuclear issue with the Group 5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) came under study and Iran’s growing chances of success on this path were assessed to be much dangerous to Saudi Arabia’s national security,” the source added.
The source said that the Saudi officials have decided to use all their diplomatic and intelligence capabilities and possibilities as well as their lobbies in the US to blockade a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and Bandar bin Sultan was assigned to study possible ways of stirring tension between Iran and the US.
“The meeting also decided that any plan developed in this regard should be coordinated with the Israeli lobbies, which are also angry at the positive atmosphere created between Iran and the US,” the source concluded.
Related Interview: Tide of peace leaving Israel behind: Micheal Jones
Israel and the South African
Nuclear Bomb Documents
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/israel_south_african_nuclear_bomb_documents.html
Disarm Israel of nuclear weapons – an Israeli breaks a taboo
So much energy and propaganda has been invested by Israel and its stooges and pimps around the world regarding the supposed danger posed by Iran’s nuclear programme and the need to bomb Iran that two very obvious options have been ignored – deliberately.
However, one Israeli academic has plucked up the courage to spell them out: a nuclear-free Middle East – in effect, Israel’s nuclear disarmament, since Israel is the only state in the Middle East bristling with nuclear weapons – and ending the occupation.
In an opinion piece in the Israeli news website Ynet, Yuval Eylon, faculty member at the Open University’s Department of Philosophy, says:
Is there anyone out there listening?
Israel’s Nuclear Bid on Seaports
manus manum lavat-one hand washes the other
by Roy Tov
Nuclear News
A few days ago, on June 25, 2013, the National Security Archive published an article entitled The Israel-Argentina Yellowcake Connection, describing “Previously Secret Documents Show That Canadian Intelligence Discovered That Israel Purchased Yellowcake from Argentines during 1963-1964.” It doesn’t contain groundbreaking news, but it provides official references to Israel’s nuclear program.
The main points of interest were that Argentina sold 80 metric tons of uranium oxide to Israel and that the USA was unaware “that the original French design for Dimona included a large underground reprocessing facility (Machon 2) was one of Israel’s deepest nuclear secrets, which Mordecai Vanunu later revealed.” The reprocessing unit is key for the production of plutonium.
Dimona in the 1960′s by National Security Archive
Picture taken from main road, which is open to the public
The Whistleblower of Dimona: Israel, Vanunu, and the Bomb
Picture taken from main road, which is open to the public
The Whistleblower of Dimona: Israel, Vanunu, and the Bomb
The official article doesn’t mention how the mineral arrived to Israel. This operation included two strategic assets of Israel: Zim* and the Port of Haifa.
One hand washes the other
Foreign idioms abound in Hebrew; even Acadian ones can be found.** Yet, one must be careful, their meanings often get awry; cultural boundaries can be granite-solid. “One hand washes the other” entered Hebrew, but it is used to denote a corruption ring, more often than not businesses agreeing on illegitimate practices
for their mutual profit.
for their mutual profit.
This is the key for understanding Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu dramatic announcement of Israel’s largest bid ever. On July 3, he announced: “The age of seaport monopoly is over – and no strike will stop it.” That was after declaring an international bid for the construction of two private seaports in Haifa and Ashdod, next to the actual ports managed by the Histadrut (National Labor Federation). The construction of each port is evaluated at more than $1 billion.
“We began with ‘open skies’ and now are moving towards ‘open seas’ and it brings great tidings,” Netanyahu said, referring to the recent strike of Israeli airlines after Israel signed an agreement with the European Union on a policy allowing free competition among companies.
“I want to tell my friends in the Histadrut – it’s over, no more. It cannot be that 2,000 people will paralyze the State. We’re bringing more traffic and we’ll not stop. I say that the age of seaport monopoly is over,” Netanyahu added, not bothering to explain why his words were just demagogy.
It is true that he is destroying the workers union monopoly, but he is replacing it with a tightly controlled oligopoly. Bids in Israel tend to be “sewn-bids,” bids that are designed to meet the offer of the favored winner. The Minister of Transport—also present at the event—said that the first stage of the bid is open to all while only seven companies would advance to the final stage. Each port would be built by a different one.
Unsurprisingly, the Hebrew media already reported that the expected winners are American and Chinese corporations. “One hand washes the other” is the principle working here. Zim, the Israeli shipping company, has agreements around the world with ports’ operators, including with the expected winners. The bid is not free, but an expansion of current businesses.
A related player is Spain, which a few months ago signed a multi-billion agreement with Israel on the development of transport infrastructure (see Spain Joins Israel’s Gas Alliance). Together with China, and France Spain would compete for the creation of a $4 billion high-speed railway between the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, which will ran parallel to the Trans-Israel Pipeline.+
“Is this an article?”
The subtitle of this final section reflects what many readers may be thinking at this stage. Which ports have Zim agreements with? What is the trade volume? These and similar questions are legitimate, yet difficult to answer. Israel loves to hide strategic assets.
One of the strangest events in Zim history was the sinking of its Mineral Dampier ship in the China Sea in 1995 after a collision with Hanjin Madras, another cargo ship. If in Israel at the time, one could not ignore the event. For over a month, the attempt to retrieve the sailors’ bodies was on the headlines.
Yet, if one tries to find reports about an Israeli ship accident in the China Sea, the results would be disappointing. Zim operated the Mineral Dampier under Liberian flag. The best information on the accident appears in the COURT OF APPEAL, ENGLAND & WALES, filed under The Hanjin Madras – vs – The Mineral Dampier. Can one guess that?
The rescue attempts were public, but little else was published. Persistent rumors at the time claimed that Israel was attempting also to rescue a “highly sensitive” cargo. Was it uranium oxide? Who was the intended recipient? Which country next to the China Sea needs “yellowcake?”
Yes, this is an article. In this Orwellian world, where democracies spy on their citizens while hiding their actions this is what free people can find: lies, manipulations and sewn-bids.
———
* Zim (pronounced Tsim) is a strategic shipping company. More than that, it is Israel’s lifeline. It brings wheat and oil from the US: Israel doesn’t produce enough food to feed its citizens and has no significant amounts of oil. The list goes on with every strategic product imaginable; secret cargo destined for special industries is Zim’s norm. For example, Dow Chemical‘s Syltherm 800—described in The Cross of Bethlehem—for the nuclear plant in Dimona is brought from Senegal by this company. Zim is strategically placed for this role, with a fleet of about a hundred vessels, 13 of them state-of-the-art high-TEU ships. They serve 180 ports of call around the world, with agents in 145 countries.
That is not all. What are the factual boundaries of Israel’s nuclear strike capabilities? The answer is in Six Million Ships.
—for the nuclear plant in Dimona is brought from Senegal by this company. Zim is strategically placed for this role, with a fleet of about a hundred vessels, 13 of them state-of-the-art high-TEU ships. They serve 180 ports of call around the world, with agents in 145 countries.That is not all. What are the factual boundaries of Israel’s nuclear strike capabilities? The answer is in Six Million Ships.
** The phrase “overstepped threshold” (“askupa nidreset”) is a mix of Acadian and Hebrew, it denotes somebody being exploited.
+ Between 1967 and the overthrow of the Iranian Shah, the Trans-Israel pipeline, running between Eilat and Ashkelon, was used to transport crude oil from Iran to Europe. Since 2003, Russia uses it to supply Asian markets. Tankers from Novorossiysk deliver their oil in Ashkelon and then the oil is reloaded onto tankers in Eilat for shipment to Asia. This route is shorter than the traditional one around Africa and cheaper than via the Suez Canal. The planned high-speed railway will run 350km between Beersheba, and the port of Eilat, completing the railway access between the Mediterranean and Red Sea ports of Israel. In 2005, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline connecting Azerbaijan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea was inaugurated. The pipeline can be used for transshipment of Azerbaijani oil via the Trans-Israel pipeline. The oil is then transported to Eastern Asia, similarly to what is now being done by the Russians. Israel desperately needs Azerbaijani oil and Azerbaijan depends on Israel for expanding its oil markets. Despite historical and cultural links, Iran cannot help Azerbaijan in this, mainly due to the ongoing Western sanctions on Iranian oil operations (see Azerbaijan-Israel: A Shia—Jewish Alliance). Israel’s high-speed railway is not intended for the transportation of tourists to its Red Sea resort town—Eilat—but for the transport of industrial products and for backing the oil and gas transmission networks.
Trans-Israel Pipeline