Some members of Congress are finally calling attention to Israel’s illegal nuclear weapons program:
A group of House Democrats is urging the Trump administration to publicly acknowledge Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons program, a move that would abandon decades of U.S. policy but confirm what has been an open secret among intelligence officials since the late 1960s.
In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio obtained by The Washington Post, more than two dozen lawmakers, led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (Texas), say Washington’s silence on the program is indefensible amid the war in Iran and the acute threat of military escalation.
It is appropriate and long overdue for our elected officials to speak openly about this issue. Israel never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and over the decades it has developed a significant nuclear arsenal. One fairly recent estimate from the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation puts the size of their arsenal at around 90 nuclear weapons with the material to build a hundred to two hundred more. Meanwhile, our government has chosen not to talk about it and pretends that Israel doesn’t have a rogue nuclear arsenal when all informed people know that they do.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal has always been the elephant in the room in the debate over Iran’s nuclear program. The Israeli government has been hyping the threat from Iran’s program for most of my life while they have been sitting on the only nuclear arsenal in the region. Their leaders have painted Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat when they have had their own nuclear deterrent to protect them all along.
Obsessing over the remote possibility that Iran might one day have a few nuclear weapons was the perfect distraction from Israel’s rogue nuclear weapons program. U.S. leaders have chosen to play along with this charade. That has horribly distorted America’s Iran policy for decades. The current war is the latest, most catastrophic result. The very least that our government can do now is acknowledge the reality that Israel is the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East.
Even if Iran did build a small arsenal of its own (which it hasn’t done and wasn’t doing when the U.S. and Israel attacked), Israel would have nothing to fear from it because of their much larger arsenal. The real concern about Iran’s proliferation was that an Iranian arsenal could limit the ability of other states to strike Iran at will. The “danger” from Iran’s nuclear program was that it might provide Iran with an effective means to deter foreign attacks.
In one sense, acknowledging Israel’s arsenal won’t change very much in the near term. No one expects the U.S. to penalize Israel for having an illegal nuclear weapons program. But it would make it more difficult for U.S. and Israeli officials to pretend that Iran’s nuclear program is some intolerable threat that must be destroyed no matter the cost. It would shine another light on the absurdity of waging a war ostensibly to “prevent” Iranian proliferation alongside a government that has amassed such a large rogue nuclear arsenal of its own. The next time that hawks start screeching about the need to “defend” Israel from some new imaginary threat, the public acknowledgment that they have their own nuclear weapons should make it harder for the hawks to sell another war of aggression in the region.
I applaud the House members for sending this letter. No doubt Rubio will either ignore it or denounce them for having the temerity to ask the question, but it will put the administration on the defensive. Simply by broaching the topic in public, these House members are making an important contribution to our foreign policy debates.