A group of Democrats in the United States Congress have called on the State Department to break the US government’s longstanding silence on Israel’s nuclear capabilities.
In a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Democrats pointed to the US-Israel war on Iran as the reason more clarity is urgently needed.
While Israel is believed to have possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s, it maintains “a policy of nuclear opacity, never officially confirming the existence of its nuclear weapons program and arsenal”, according to the Washington, DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Isreal started “smuggling” uranium out of the USA in the 60s with several US agencies knowing the uranium went missing and where it went. The USA is well aware of the existence of isreals nuclear weapons.
Israel also partnered with France on development, and then with South Africa to obtain more Uranium in exchange for sharing technology with SA.
Perhaps an oversimplification, but SA is only country to disarm themselves of nukes because the apartheid government was so racist they would rather disarm then allow nuclear weapons to be controlled by a black people as apartheid ended.
Anyway, always weird to me that Israel gets an open pass to ignore the nuclear non proliferation treaty since LBJ was president. I think Kennedy was the last administration to push back on Israel significantly in this area.
Is it to see how many nukes they have and then give them more?
The United States officially acknowledging Israel’s nuclear weapons program, would throw up a lot of legal hurdles that Israel would like to avoid, such as legally preventing America from providing them weapons.
Do I think Trump would abide by those? No, but it’s still an important step in planning for future administration’s Israel policy, or rather, forcing their hands in future policy decisions.
Ding ding ding!
Was halfway through writing basically this, but you already said it.
Yep, if we formally recognize that Israel has nukes, well, we’d have to break a bunch of our laws to keep sending them weapons, various forms of monetary aid.
Symington Ammendment would trigger no more military or economic aid, as Israel is not a signator to the NPT.
Glenn Ammendment could potentially be argued / interpreted to block financial aid to Israel.
Granted, there are a morass of other subsequent laws built upon the idea that Israel doesn’t have nukes, that could be argued to still be in effect… the Republicans and Trump very obviously believe in whatever they want right now is legal because we said so, so…
Yeah, not like, guaranteed to work by any means, but it would make a lot of Republicans eat a lot shit, very publically.
Course, it would probably also make a significant number of Democrats also eat a lot of shit, very publically.
Perhaps ironically you could call this a ‘nuclear option’, sigh.
Oh we should definitely send them more nukes. Ones that are armed, hot, and coming in at break neck speed
Finally, some good news!
A group of Democrats…
Never mind. It’ll go nowhere.
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