Different strokes...
WHERE MONEY TALKS
| What is it? Bush says "leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the US and other free nations". But, obviously, the condition does not apply to India, Pakistan and "" most crucial in its impact on the world's most volatile region "" Israel. |
| Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre were not fantasizing in The Fifth Horseman when they described how quickly the Israelis can fit plutonium cores into high-explosive cladding. "Their separation was a stratagem," say the authors. "Since an atomic bomb only existed when these two halves were assembled, Israel had always been able to maintain publicly that she had not introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East." |
| The plea that democracies but not dictatorships can have bombs will not wash for Pakistan is hardly a democracy. The argument against a nuclear arms race is equally irrelevant for Israel's bomb was the only reason for the Arab quest for an "Islamic" equaliser. |
| The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the American Central Intelligence Agency and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have always known of Israel's clandestine nuclear programme. |
| But details did not become public until 1986 when Mordechai Vanunu, a worker at Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor, told a British newspaper that it produced 40 kg of weapons grade plutonium annually and that Israel had between 100 and 200 nuclear devices. |
| Vanunu was kidnapped, bundled back to Israel, tried for treason and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment. All being well, this forgotten prisoner of the world's nuclear conscience should be released this year. |
| The West allowed Israel to pass off Dimona, which the French built in the Negev desert as reward for Israel's invasion of Egypt during the 1956 Anglo-French Suez adventure, as a textile plant, agricultural facility and meteorological station. |
| Now, with Iraq vanquished, Libya earning kudos from the IAEA and the European foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, applauding Iran's efforts to dispel concerns about its nuclear programme, Israel is West Asia's only nuclear power. |
| It also has an array of medium-range missiles (the Jericho series) for delivery. Reports claim that Israel went on nuclear alert during the six-day war in 1967. More alarmingly, fearing defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it apparently produced 13 20-kiloton atomic bombs. |
| But like the proverbial monkey, successive American administrations will see, hear or speak nothing about this danger to the peace. The studies that the US Congress commissions on "the acquisition by foreign countries during the preceding six months of dual-use technology useful for the development or production of weapons of mass destruction" never mention Israel. Nor does Israel figure in the US National Air and Space Intelligence Centre's list of 18 countries that are capable of presenting a ballistic and cruise missile threat. |
| No wonder Libya's Muammar Gaddafi complains that "America speaks about Tarhunah, but not about Dimona. It speaks about Libya making chemical weapons while it knows that the Israelis have chemical and biological weapons and nuclear bombs and it doesn't speak about them at all." Tarhunah is Libya's chemical weapons plant near Tripoli. |
| Bush is also pressuring the IAEA to declare Iran in "material breach" of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty though the Iranians, who insist that their programme is solely geared to producing electricity from atomic power, have signed an international protocol permitting UN inspectors to carry out snap checks. Ironically, it was the Americans who sold Iran's reactor to the former Shah. They began objecting to its use only after the Shah was overthrown. |
| The original moving justification that only the bomb would ensure that Jews "shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter" has become meaningless for two reasons. |
| First, with Egypt and Jordan in America's pocket, the hapless Palestinians with their crude homemade weapons and expendable lives are Israel's only adversary. Second, Israel has shown that its conventional forces can contain and defeat any conceivable combination of Arab armies. |
| But if Israel's weapons of mass destruction are militarily redundant, such a potent symbol of power serves a political purpose that also creates its own imbalance. The Israeli arsenal makes its neighbours feel permanently insecure. Hence, Colin Powell's plea for talks to create conditions "where no (West Asian) nation would have a need for any weapons of mass destruction." Stability demands a balanced power equation. |
| The IAEA chief, Mohammed ElBaradei, also calls for peace talks and disarmament. "My fear is that, without such a dialogue, there will be continued incentives for the region's countries to develop weapons of mass destruction to match the Israeli arsenal." The strategic review Saudi Arabia has ordered and Oman's complaints to the IAEA have revived fears of an Arab bomb. |
| Bush cannot afford to ignore this danger as he prepares to tackle the perceived threat of North Korea's bomb. West Asia is far more explosive than South or East Asia. |
| Meanwhile, no one remembers any longer that all NPT signatories, including the US, are bound by Article VI which demands "general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control" and calls on the US, UK, Russia, China and France "to make progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally with the ultimate aim of eliminating those weapons." |
| Peace is at stake in West Asia. The threat to US credibility is global. |