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Eli Lake, in the Wash-Times, here"...President Obama's efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons threaten to expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel's nuclear weapons from international scrutiny, former and current U.S. and Israeli officials and nuclear specialists say.
Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, speaking Tuesday at a U.N. meeting on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), said Israel should join the treaty, which would require Israel to declare and relinquish its nuclear arsenal. "Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, ... remains a fundamental objective of the United States," Ms. Gottemoeller told the meeting, according to Reuters. She declined to say, however, whether the Obama administration would press Israel to join the treaty. ...
Iranian leaders have long complained about being subjected to a double standard that allows non-NPT members India and Pakistan, as well as Israel, to maintain and even increase their nuclear arsenals but sanctions Tehran, an NPT member, for not cooperating fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog. ..."What the Israelis sense, rightly, is that Obama wants to do something new on Iran and this may very well involve doing something new about Israel's program," said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington think tank.
Bruce Riedel, a former senior director for the Middle East and South Asia on the White House National Security Council, said, "If you're really serious about a deal with Iran, Israel has to come out of the closet. A policy based on fiction and double standards is bound to fail sooner or later. What's remarkable is that it's lasted so long." Mr. Riedel headed the Obama administration's review of strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan but does not hold a permanent administration position and has returned to private life as a scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser for the George W. Bush administration, said that administration resisted international efforts to pressure Israel on the nuclear front. "We did not want to accept any operational language that would put Israel at a disadvantage and raise the question of whether Israel was a nuclear power," he said. "That was not a discussion that we thought was helpful. We allowed very general statements about the goal of a nuclear-free Middle East as long that language was hortatory." ....
Mr. Netanyahu, whose meeting with Mr. Obama on May 18 will be the first since both took office, raised the issue of the nuclear understanding during a previous tenure as prime minister. Israeli journalists and officials said Mr. Netanyahu asked for a reaffirmation and clarification of the Nixon-Meir understanding in 1998 at Wye River, where the U.S. mediated an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr. Netanyahu wanted a personal commitment from President Clinton because of concerns about a treaty that Mr. Clinton supported to bar production of fissile materials that can be used to make weapons. ....The Bush administration largely dropped the treaty in its first term and reopened negotiations in its second term with a proposal that did not include verification.
The Obama agenda
Mr. Obama has made nuclear disarmament a bigger priority in part to undercut Iran's and North Korea's rationale for proliferation. His administration has begun negotiations with Russia on a new treaty to reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals. ......David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank, said such a treaty would be the first step toward limiting the Israeli nuclear program. "The question is how much of a priority is
this for the Obama administration?" he said. John R. Bolton, a former U.N. ambassador and undersecretary of state, said Israel was right to be concerned. "If I were the Israeli government, I would be very worried about the Obama administration's attitude on their nuclear deterrent," he said. "You can barely raise the subject of nuclear weapons in the Middle East without someone saying: 'What about Israel?' If Israel's opponents put it on the table, it is entirely possible Obama will pick it up."
Posted by G, Z, & or B at 6:44 PM
Wed, 05/06/2009 - 7:31pm
Andrew Sullivan wonders “why can’t Israel just declare that it’s a nuclear power?" Good question. I’ve never had much problem with Israel having a nuclear arsenal myself -- if I were Israeli, I’d want one too. Nor am I surprised that they don’t want their neighbors to follow suit, because that’s basically been our position too. The United States would clearly prefer to be the only country with nuclear weapons; the problem is that it’s difficult-to-impossible to maintain a nuclear monopoly in perpetuity without fighting a lot of preventive wars. And the same goes for Israel too.
As for Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity -- “we will not be first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but we will not be second” -- it was probably an effective ploy for awhile. It was easier for some Arab governments to live with the asymmetry if Israel wasn’t bragging about it, and it allowed the U.S. and the Europeans to turn a blind eye to the problem in various non-proliferation forums. See Sullivan's follow up here. But this polite fiction lost its hexing power some time ago, and now it just looks disingenuous. More importantly, refusing to come clean isn’t affecting anyone’s calculations today, and certainly not in the places that matter most (like Tehran).
There is a substantial literature addressing Sullivan’s original question, and a good place to start is Shai Feldman’s Israeli Nuclear Deterrence (Columbia University Press, 1981). Its core argument was straightforward:
1) nuclear deterrence works, especially for the protection of a state’s core territory;
2) other governments in the region understand this, and there’s every reason to believe deterrence would work in the Middle East;
3) Israel should openly declare its nuclear capability and adopt an explicit policy of deterrence; and
4) relying more heavily on deterrence would reduce the importance of strategic depth and facilitate Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories as part of a regional peace agreement.
Note that Feldman was writing back when Iraq and Syria were still Soviet client states, when there was no peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, and when Israel’s economy was much smaller. Of course, that was also before there were half a million Israelis living outside the 1967 borders.
Today, one could argue that the Israeli government could reassure its citizens about a possible “existential” threat from Iran by advertising its own far more impressive nuclear capability and reminding its that any Iranian attack on Israel would be an act of national suicide. The problem, of course, is that calling attention to Israel’s existing arsenal weakens the case for opposing Iran’s nuclear programs. And that might be part of the answer to Sullivan’s query: Israel can’t declare that it is a nuclear weapons state when it’s trying to convince the rest of the world that it's totally illegitimate for Iran to become one too.
For a history of Israel’s nuclear program, check out Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb. And for a qualified defense of Israel’s policy of ambiguity, see Ze’ev Maoz, “The Mixed Blessing of Israel’s Nuclear Policy,” in the Fall 2003 issue of International Security.
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