Israel launched massive attacks in Iran last week, claiming that Tehran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. The pretext for the attack was Iranian officials’ statement about being willing to ‘wipe Israel off the face of the earth’. Aggressive language that Israeli officials believe, along with Iran’s nuclear program, presents an existence-threatening one. Nevertheless, the setting of the charges against Iran raises a question that has never been answered for several decades: what about Israel’s nuclear weapons too?
Israel is also considered to be the only country in the world that actually possesses nuclear weapons, but does not officially recognize it. Following estimates given by international institutions that involve disarmament issues, Israel owns approximately 90 nuclear warheads. This makes it one of the nine nuclear-weapons states, along with the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and North Korea. In addition, as per experts, Israel also possesses sufficient stocks of fissile materials which allow it to add another 200-300, if required.
Israel started to work on developing nuclear weapons of its own soon after the state was formed in 1948. In as early as 1957, a secret deal was struck with France to set up a nuclear centre within the town of Dimona in the Negev Desert. It involved the building there of a reactor and a buried facility for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The cooperation with France was kept in complete secrecy. Even America’s own allies, Israel, did not learn of the building until 1960, when US intelligence agencies spotted a strange object on satellite imagery. In the following years, Washington sent inspectors to Dimona, but they could not get the big picture.
Though in possession of nuclear weapons, Israel never tested or used them openly. However, it has supposedly been placed on full alert during periods of tension, such as the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1979, an American satellite detected a double flash characteristic of a nuclear explosion in the South Atlantic. Though no open confirmation was made, American intelligence suspected that it might have been an Israeli-South African test.
Israel neither confirms nor refuses nuclear weapon closeness. It is termed as propounded ‘nuclear ambivalence’ or ‘nuclear opacity’. In 1969, it is argued by some, Washington and Israel reached an implicit agreement: Washington would not ask Tel Aviv to give up nuclear weapons if the latter would not declare publicly their presence or unleash their use. Nevertheless, within the context of today’s assault on Iran, Israel’s doctrine of ‘nuclear opacity’ is now coming in for a new round of condemnation. Why should one country have dozens of nuclear warheads and not inform international institutions about it, but another gets attacked before its programme has even been finished?
