Yes, Virginia, Israel Has Its Own Nukes

By Cernig

Cheryl Rofer, an expert in non-proliferation and nuclear weapons, goes where the mainstream media fears to tread in recent news stories about Clinton's offer of a nuclear umbrella or Israel's attack on Syria:

Israel has nuclear weapons. That is the sentence that cannot be uttered in international relations. The silence distorts much, perhaps most, of our discussion about the Middle East.

...current stories in the MSM are devoid of any mention of Israel�s nukes... But Israel�s nuclear weapons are as much a part of the calculation of international politics as are those of India and Pakistan, or the United States and Russia.

This context is particularly acute for Israel�s neighbors, who recently declared that they would remove themselves from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if Israel openly declared its possession of nuclear weapons and the United Nations Security Council did nothing about it. This, of course, is one of the reasons that the United States prefers to continue the pretense.

She has this to say about Clinton's threats of imminent nuclear destruction:

�Massive retaliation� was the description of what the United States would do if Russia attacked with nuclear-tipped missiles. Or vice versa. [Clinton] made that explicit in her later words. She also proposed that the United States offer a �nuclear umbrella� to other states in the Middle East that might feel intimidated by an Iranian nuclear arsenal.

But Iran is a long way from a nuclear arsenal, and Israel is quite capable of its own nuclear retaliation. And I might point out that long before Iran would launch a nuclear attack on Israel with its still-in-a-hypothetical-future arsenal, we might just consider a diplomatic approach to the problem.

Israel, of course, has a real nuclear arsenal. Who needs a �nuclear umbrella� from whom in the Middle East today, in 2008?

Actually, most of the other states in the Middle East would like someone to offer an umbrella against Israel's nukes, not Iran's currently-imaginary ones. That's why the major Arab states have all said they will pursue nuclear power programs and why every single Arab state backed Egypt's September call at the IAEA to seek universal compliance with the NPT and "avoid double standards" in the Middle East.