Among the more absurd aspects of U.S. foreign policy is the persistent refusal to confirm that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, even as U.S. officials threaten and even attack other countries for allegedly harboring the intent to build a single bomb, hypocrisy that Sam Husseini dissects.
By Sam Husseini
Retired Gen. (and former CIA Director) David Petraeus – who despite recent scandals is (according to CNN) still advising the White House – was asked at a recent Aspen Institute event about Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal and replied “I can’t comment.”
This seems to be part of long-standing U.S. and Israeli government policy not to confirm the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal. This policy has apparently taken the form of official gag orders on the issue, as Grant F. Smith, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, has noted.
A photograph of a control room at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant in the 1980s. (Photograph taken by nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who was later kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel as punishment for revealing its secret nuclear arsenal.)
It’s particularly absurd that someone like Petraeus, who presumes to engage in tough straight talk and allegedly shows bravery, is incapable of saying that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal.
Similarly, Philip Gordon, former special White House assistant on the Middle East and now at the Council on Foreign Relations, was recently asked on C-Span if it “isn’t time for the U.S. to stop officially pretending that it doesn’t know whether Israel has nuclear weapons?”
Gordon replied that there’s not a lot of doubt about the “the existence of a nuclear weapons capability in Israel,” but that a U.S. acknowledgement of that fact would be irrelevant. For instance, he argued that “Iranian nuclear aspiration is driven significantly by their insecurity” resulting from U.S. actions in the region, not Israel’s nuclear weapons. (Transcript below)
What’s perhaps most remarkable about Gordon’s response is that it shows U.S. officials being more willing to point to U.S. government actions as a destabilizing factor in…