Israel’s US Funding Rests on Nuclear Secrecy

TMO 

The United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France and Germany (known as the  P5+1) have a meeting scheduled in Geneva on October 15 and 16 to hear new, concrete proposals from Iran designed to assure the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. In return, Iran would get some relief from economic sanctions, reports Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. He then wonders, “Behind closed doors, do the P5+1 acknowledge Israel has nuclear weapons?”

Victor Gilinsky and Henry Sokolski in the New York Times similarly note: “While the world endlessly discusses Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the likelihood that it will succeed in developing an atomic arsenal, hardly anyone in the United States ever mentions Israel’s nuclear weapons. Obama, like his predecessors, pretends that he doesn’t know anything about them.”

If this October 15 meeting would bring up the subject of Israel’s leaking nuclear reactor and Israel’s stockpile of atomic weapons, it will be a happy birthday for Mordechai Vanunu, who lives under permanent house arrest in Israel. He turns 59 on October 13.

Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, worked from 1977-1985 at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, an Israeli facility that develops and manufactures nuclear weapons. Just before he was fired (for advocating Palestinian rights), Vanunu secretly took 57 photographs of the Dimona facility in 1985.

On October 5, 1986, the British newspaper The Sunday Times ran the story with photos on its front page under the headline: “Revealed: the secrets of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.” In this interview with Peter Hounam, Vanunu gave detailed descriptions of lithium-6 separation required for the production of tritium, an essential ingredient of fusion-boosted fission  bombs. Vanunu described the plutonium processing used, giving a production rate of about 30 kg per year, and stated that Israel used about 4 kg per weapon. From this information it was estimated that Israel had sufficient plutonium for about 150 nuclear weapons.

With the help of a female secret agent, the Mossad kidnapped Vanunu, who was subsequently imprisoned for 18 years in Israel, 11 years of which he spent in solitary confinement. But it was too late to stop the press. The world now already knew that Israel possesses nuclear weapons.

Upon his release in 2004, Vanunu immediately began speaking to the media despite being ordered by Shin Bet not to talk to any foreigners. He has been re-arrested several times since then. Vanunu continues to call for Israel’s nuclear disarmament, and for its dismantlement as a Jewish state.

In July 2004 he warned the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat that the Dimona reactor endangers millions with its radioactive pollution. Vanunu advised the Jordanian government to prepare for possible leaks from the reactor, since the reactor operates mainly when “the wind blows toward Jordan.”

But by then, this was already old news. On February 6, 2000 the London Sunday Times had quoted Professor Uzi Even, formerly a senior scientist at the reactor, saying, “The Dimona reactor is old and dangerous; It should be closed.” Another scientist, who was not named, stated that the structure of the reactor has been damaged as the result of radiation and is now “vulnerable and dangerous.”
Furthermore, Dimona’s buried nuclear waste has resulted in skyrocketing cancer rates in Palestinian and Bedouin villages near Southern Hebron and Negev. The leaking reactor in Dimona has now been active without any foreign inspection for 50 years.

However, closing Dimona wouldn’t stop Israeli nukes, said Dr. Daniel Rohrlich, a research physicist at Tel Aviv University.

“In August, 1998, Israel joined an international initiative to cut off production of nuclear materials, i.e., plutonium and enriched uranium… But Israel only pretended to join… One day, a treaty to cut off production of fissionable materials will be ready for signing, and Israel will have to decide whether or not to go along. Signing a cutoff treaty would oblige Israel to demonstrate that it does not produce fissionable materials. If Israel is unwilling to open the Dimona reactor to international inspection, it has another option: to close and dismantle the reactor once and for all.

“It does not need the reactor. Israel already has enough fissionable material for hundreds of nuclear bombs. Over the decades, the reactor has produced hundreds of kilograms of plutonium. A cutoff would not affect this supply. Since the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years, this plutonium would remain at Israel’s disposal for thousands of years,” said Rohrlich.

Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post, “Back in the 1960s, Israel apparently hid the nuclear weapons program being carried on at its Negev Nuclear Research Center (NNRC) at Dimona. It deceived not only the international community but also its close U.S. ally. It repeatedly pledged “it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the area.”

In early 1966, at the time of a U.S. sale of F-4 fighter-bombers to Israel, the Johnson administration insisted that Israel reaffirm that pledge. “Foreign Minister Abba Eban told Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that Israel did not intend to build nuclear weapons, ‘so we will not use your aircraft to carry weapons we haven’t got and hope we will never have,’” according to the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XVIII.

“America is locked into covering up Israeli nuclear bombs because of a 1969 agreement between President Richard M. Nixon and Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir,” write Victor Gilinsky and Henry Sokolski in the New York Times.

“If Washington wants negotiations over weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East to work — or even just to avoid making America appear ridiculous — Mr. Obama should begin by being candid. He cannot expect the countries participating in a conference to take America seriously if the White House continues to pretend that we don’t know whether Israel has nuclear weapons, or for that matter whether Egypt and Israel have chemical or biological ones.”

So why is Israel so hesitant to admit its capabilities, which have long been public?

By not acknowledging possession of nuclear weapons, Israel avoids a US legal prohibition on funding countries which proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Open possession of nuclear weapon capabilities would prevent Israel from receiving over $2 billion each year in military and other aid from United States’ taxpayers.

Iraq’s Radiation: Not Going Away

By Karin Friedemann, The Muslim Observer

A depleted Uranium shell

According to Al Jazeera, the Pentagon used more than 300 tons of depleted uranium in Iraq in 1991. In 2003, the US military used more than 1,000 tons. In 2010, depleted uranium contamination was reported to be the highest on record, yet by 2012 continuing documentation has still not resulted in any action by the US or any other responsible party towards environmental clean-up.

An April 13, 2012 article by Karlos Zurutuza published by Global Research quotes hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi saying:

“At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone. It’s all too shameful for them.”

Relief organizations such as LIFE for Relief and Development escorted several US Congressmen on a tour of Iraqi hospitals in 2002, which often had no electricity nor sterile equipment, where women too weak from hunger to give birth had to receive C-sections by candlelight without anesthetic on beds without sheets. The horror show often reached its climax when the baby was born looking grotesque. When the sympathetic Congresspeople spoke up, the US government arrested relief workers and peace activists from several organizations for the crime of breaking US sanctions.

Back then, there was already documentation of Iraqi babies being born with bizarre deformations such as hands growing out of shoulders without arms, which were also found to occur in the offspring of US veterans who had served in Iraq. None of this came as a surprise to the US Army.

In a report published in 1990, before Operation Desert Storm, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) reported that:

“Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer,” and

“Aerosol DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects.”

None of this is new information, but a recent photo circulated on Facebook shows infant deformations in Iraq that are so horrific that I was asked to stop “traumatizing” my friends after I posted the photo.

Many babies born dead in Iraq today do not even resemble a human being. My Facebook friend told me she doesn’t want to see it and doesn’t want to think about it ever again. This was the first time she had ever heard of this problem.

My outrage, if fully expressed, would be a howling scream filling every corner of the earth. How dare anyone do this to women? Or refuse to care? How come, after over 20 years, no one is working to fix this problem? I have lost so many friends over the years, trying to educate them, and yet our popular culture continues to condemn Nazi Germans as the worst people who ever lived, because they went about their normal lives, oblivious to the atrocities of their government. The Nazis are accused of having performed scientific experiments on humans. Yet when I spoke up in college German history class, saying, “You ask, ‘How could they?’ How could you?” I just received a roomful of blank stares.

After WWII, the victorious party (America) took responsibility for rebuilding the defeated party (Germany). This was considered vital for preserving the world economy. Projected temperature for Wednesday in Baghdad is 103 degrees. Before we discuss universal health care for Americans, we need to discuss the clean-up of Iraq.

The radioactivity situation in Iraq is much worse than in Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each atomic bomb created a huge blast that killed over 100,000 people within eight weeks, one third of them dying within one day. Infants conceived within that eight week period were found with birth defects but no genetic damage was discovered after the blasts.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, an exhaustive Japanese study, published in English in 1981 claims that most of the radioactive debris was carried off in the mushroom cloud and not embedded in the earth. By contrast, the relatively low-level radiation caused by the use of depleted uranium artillery and tanks has become part of the air, rain and dust, sickening the Iraqi people without killing them immediately. Because the victims die one at a time, there are no headline news stories. Yet even in the early 1990’s there were reports of farmers’ fields strewn with bullets where nothing would grow, and children dying after playing with bullet casings. Relief organizations’ concerns were casually dismissed by Hillary Clinton at a meeting during her husband’s presidency. Like Madeleine Albright, she felt that the deaths of Iraqi children were “worth it.”

The way the US treats Iraqi people is worse than they treated the Black slaves, who at least were considered useful. The US has intentionally destroyed the future of more than one country. This is why getting our government to make the reparations necessary for a true peace will be difficult. The good news is that we now have Facebook, Twitter, and alternative news websites to bring the horrible news to people’s bedrooms and living rooms. In the 1990’s, political activists had to rely on subscription-only email lists and photocopied flyers. We now have the technology to go beyond preaching to the choir.

Many of us are exhausted from the relentlessness of international news reports of evil in the world. After subjecting ourselves to twenty or more years of sleepless nights, some of us are ready to say, “I tried,” and hand the heavy responsibility of knowledge to the next generation. Yet, our children cannot save the world without our guidance.

The problem of radioactive contamination is not going to go away by itself. Those who are interested in scientific experiments should embrace the very real challenge of cleaning up Iraq’s depleted uranium. It’s something no human generation has ever had to do before, and will require some very smart thinking individuals to come up with a plan.