19th March 2009

Nukes and Israel

posted in conversation |

To be totally blunt, I haven’t given much thought to “the problem of Israel.” I don’t think about it, I don’t particularly want to think about it, I don’t have much of an opinion on it. I know that there are reasons the US supports Israel. But this should have some interesting fallout. The US Army has revealed that Israel has nuclear weapons. Generally, it’s been handled like gay people in the military; the US doesn’t ask Israel, and Israel doesn’t tell the US if it has nukes. Which has left us in an ambiguous Schroedinger’s Missile state.

However, with release of this report, the US military has confirmed that they do have nuclear weapons, which puts US aid to Israel in jeopardy:

Prohibits most U.S. assistance to any country found trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards. President Jimmy Carter found Pakistan in violation of the Symington amendment in 1979 because of Islamabad’s clandestine construction of a uranium enrichment plant. U.S. aid to Islamabad was possible between 1982 and 1990 only through the use of presidential waivers.

That’s from armscontrol.org, and it covers how we kept aid flowing to Pakistan (and other countries listed on that page) through the use of presidential waivers.

I’m positive that President Obama will do the waiver thing for Israel. I’m not sure how else it’ll play out. It might be interesting for the future of our countries though.

Man, this sucks. I should stick to family stories :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 8:41 am and is filed under conversation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  1. 1 On May 16th, 2009, SAHD Dad said:

    **This is actually a “Post Script,” but I wanted you to see it before you read the rest of the comment. I seem to have ended up in something of a rant, and this wasn’t even vaguely my intention. I left the post alone simply to have my voice heard. Sorry. PPS:I really do like your blog (that’s why I linked to it), you just happened to push too of my hottest buttons: Legal Issues; and Israel.**

    While I think your “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” analogy is close, I think it misses an important distinction. The difference is that in the military the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy means just that: “Don’t ask.” When it comes to nukes, however, the US is absolutely constantly on the looked for anything even remotely related to nuclear enrichment or weaponry. And I’m not so sure that this information was really kept all that quiet; at least not for the last 30 years. The Israelis certainly didn’t go around telling everyone they had nukes, but anyone who was even slightly interested in the topic either knew a fair amount about their program or they were living in a cave on a mountain in Tibet.

    In any event, the crux of the matter is this: The law “Prohibits most U.S. assistance to any country found trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.”

    This law is only broken if two things occur:

    1)First, the country in question has to be “trafficking” in the forbidden products; this simply means buying and/or selling such products. The problem here is that the US military merely confirmed that Israel does, in fact, have nuclear weapons. This is hardly an allegation of trafficking.

    2) Second, the trafficking mentioned must be “outside of international safeguards.” So…a country does have the right to traffic in these forbidden technologies or equipment so long as they are not”outside of international safeguards.”

    So we’re left with an announcement from the military which changes absolutely nothing. They made no allegations of trafficking at all, and certainly not of trafficking outside of international law.

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