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Does Israel have the bomb or not? Olmert: Yes, we do.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: December 17th, 2006
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=15archi...
For decades, Israel coyly has refused to confirm or deny what, since 1986, the whole world has known for sure: that is that the Jewish state is the one country in the Middle East that has a well-developed, nuclear arsenal. It was 20 years ago that Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev Desert, informed Britain's Sunday Times about the weapons program, leading "defense analysts to rank the country as the [world's] sixth largest nuclear power." Vanunu was jailed for 18 years for revealing state secrets. Israel calls its refusal to deny or confirm the existence of its nuclear arms its "nuclear ambiguity" policy. Why? Explains the Times (U.K.): "For many years, Israel was the only country outside the five declared nuclear powers to have built an atomic weapon ... It wanted its enemies in the region to know that it had nuclear capability if threatened. But it also wanted to keep the existence secret so that it did not fall [a]foul of international action designed to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, particularly strict U.S. laws which could have jeopardized billions of dollars in annual aid." The Jerusalem Post notes that "Nuclear ambiguity was a comfortable arrangement for both Israeli and U.S. administrations, designed to allow Israel to get on with whatever it was doing ... without too much international pressure, and [to allow] the U.S. to not seem too hypocritical by not demanding its Middle East ally sign the [Non-proliferation Treaty]. Ambiguity might have worked for four decades, but ... it is now hopelessly outdated."
Note: The media has been quite reluctant to discuss these issues openly. Could it be they fear people might question the amount of U.S. aid? Israel's population is 6.5 million. Official U.S. yearly foreign aid to Israel has been about $2.5 to 3.0 billion for many years. If you do the math, U.S. taxpayers are giving every man, woman, and child in Israel about $400/year -- over ten times the per capita rate paid to any other country. That's quite a yearly gift! A Christian Science Monitor article says if all forms of aid are considered, the figures are even higher.
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