In the previous article we announced that we wanted to delve deeper into the issue of Tel Aviv’s nuclear power, and right on time today we have the opportunity. But first let’s take stock of the current situation.
Reading the newspapers, listening to the news, we hear about Israeli raids against Tehran, responses on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. After a night like this, new raids by Israel and new responses from Iran with missiles in the opposite direction. Iran’s nuclear headquarters was hit on one side with hundreds of deaths, and 13 Israelis were killed in Iranian raids on the other, perhaps more. Mutual accusations, mutual threats, proud unilateral statements by Mr. Donald Trump, or #47 or The King (as he is variously called today in the U.S.A.) that “thanks to his intervention there will be peace.” It would be laughable if the situation were not serious, indeed tragic, if people were not really dying, if the peace of #47 were not an “U.S. extravagance,” as, in fact, it is, which makes the U.S not great, but even smaller and smaller.
We feel that now, after these attacks and counterattacks, everyone wants to take cover, everyone wants to avert the escalation, everyone wants to avoid an expansion of the conflict, everyone wants to avoid Israel’s recourse to nuclear weapons, and Iran’s recourse to a dirty bomb. But no one is proposing the only sensible thing. And what this sensible thing is, we will see in a moment.
In the meantime, let’s analyze the situation objectively. Israel, according to it, began bombing Iran because it was about to develop its atomic weapon, it had reached a good point in enriching uranium, using many centrifuges with which it had concentrated the material and was close to having enough enriched uranium to have the critical mass necessary to realize its nuclear prototype. On the other hand, Tel Aviv supposed, perhaps rightly, that Iran was doing all this to attack Israel. And we all agree and are convinced that Iran should not possess nuclear weapons, like no one else in that area. However, one fundamental thing escapes us and no one explains it to us: why Iran has been strenuously committed for years and years, investing huge sums, antagonizing the United States, Israel and their allies, to develop this blessed (or should I say cursed) atomic bomb. Are conventional weapons not enough for Iran? Why does Iran really want the nuclear bomb?
Good question!
The answer is simple, obvious, but largely underestimated: Iran wants the atomic bomb because Israel has it. Iran wants it to compensate for the strategic gap with its arch enemy. Simple.
But are we sure that Israel really has nuclear weapons? Officially, the government of the Jewish State has always denied it and, in fact, if you search on all the websites that talk about this topic, Israel as a nuclear power is always cited with a question mark.
However, if we look carefully, we find that in 1958, with the help of France, Israel set up a nuclear installation about 10 kilometers from the town of Dimona, in the southern Negev desert, but this site was officially built to house a “simple” nuclear reactor, one of those that are used to produce normal electrical energy, enough to power a plant to desalinate the brackish water of the nearby lake, the famous Dead Sea, so as to be able to “make the Negev desert bloom – according to propaganda”. The problem is that the desert after so many years is still a desert, and there are certainly flowers, but not many more than the many that, especially in the northern part, bloomed naturally already forty years ago at certain times of the year. Rather, it should be noted that the environment, in the part of the desert where the reactor is located, instead of being improved is threatened, because in the area accidents of various kinds often occur; furthermore, the site was chosen as a landfill area to dispose of waste from large cities such as Tel Aviv, or is the scene of military and missile exercises. However, it cannot be denied that along with the negative aspects there are also the positive ones of the various kibbutzim that produce agricultural products with advanced and innovative techniques.
What have certainly flourished there at the “Negev Nuclear Research Center” are the nuclear weapons of the state of Israel. But officially, no one knows nor should they know anything about them. Along with many clues and verbal statements, there is no concrete evidence. The Israeli government refuses to provide any confirmation (or denial), nor does it bother to release statements. The thing is suspicious, and as our most Machiavellian of politicians, Italian Christian Democrat Mr. Giulio Andreotti, taught us: “it is perhaps a sin to suspect, but often you are right”. The United States, which in the 60s was the first to suspect and wanted to see clearly, flew over the site several times with its U-2 spy planes to analyze air samples and identify any excess radioactive elements, so when they detected them, they had the site inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which Israel was forced to accept, on the condition that visits to the sites were carried out by appointment and by inspectors of its own choosing. Needless to say, these inspections turned out to be a farce and were eventually interrupted, and that the ambiguity about the Israeli nuclear program remained, indeed it became much more suspicious, if one may say so.
In 1986, the British newspaper Sunday Times finally had proof, thanks to the verbal testimony of an insider, of a secret plan to build the nuclear armament of the state of Israel at that same Dimona plant. At that time, it was an arsenal of more than 200 nuclear warheads, with an additional 10 percent of thermonuclear warheads. The tip had come from a technician who had worked at the nuclear site for more than ten years, Mr. Mordechai Vanunu, from an Orthodox Jewish family from Marrakesh in Morocco, who had gradually joined various mixed Islamic-Jewish groups sympathetic to the peaceful coexistence between Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs according to the two-state formula. In addition, or rather the trigger that had triggered Vanunu was his particular aversion to the domination of the state of Israel by the Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of the Mizrahi Jews, the former coming from Europe, more fundamentalist and intransigent towards the Arab Palestinians, the latter from the Middle East and Arab countries, and therefore more accustomed to coexistence and therefore easier to compromise.
Israel, as usual, does not give a damn about international law. When Mr. Vanunu, after the interview given in London, moved to Rome for a holiday with a friend, who under cover collaborated with the Israeli secret services, he was captured by a Mossad commando, drugged and secretly transferred to Israel, where he was imprisoned on charges of espionage and treason. His actual kidnapping lasted until 2004, with episodes of physical and psychological torture, brainwashing, isolation from everything and everyone. Not bad for a country that we all consider the only democratic one in the Middle East! But since then his life has been under probation, unable to have contact with citizens of other countries, apply for visas and travel abroad, give interviews, own cell phones, or connect to the Internet.
Aside from Vanunu’s sad personal story, although the state of Israel neither confirms nor denies possessing the atomic weapon, the evidence and testimonies provided by Vanunu accompanied by documents and photos, confirm that the 220 warheads, including nuclear and thermonuclear, possessed by Israel in 1986 will certainly have increased exponentially today. Hence the question that arises spontaneously: why was Israel allowed to build its atomic weapon in defiance of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the United Stated promoted and France signed in 1992 and provides for “the obligation to negotiate for disarmament” as well as that of not spreading nuclear technologies to countries that do not possess them?
And the question is not so strange, since it is precisely the possession of nuclear weapons that determines in Iran the understandable need to compensate for this imbalance. In fact, Iran would perhaps never have embarked on enormous expenses and geopolitical conflicts to equip itself with nuclear weapons if it had not been to compensate with an equal and opposite deterrence the risk that Israel would deliberately launch a nuclear attack against it (which knowing Israel it is very easy to predict that it can do) without the anticipatory possibility of preventing it and subsequently reacting. The countries of the area should find themselves on a plane of strategic equality: who made the unfortunate choice to allow Israel to be “more equal” than all the others? This choice has proven not only wrong but criminal, because it has determined and is determining for half a century the conflicts that have occurred in the area, including the current one, where the excessive power and impunity of Israel is there for all to see. Whoever made that choice, whoever supported it, whoever pretended not to see, and whoever slept soundly is responsible and must find a solution, today!
There are three options in theory: – stay in the current situation; – allow Iran to compensate for Israel’s nuclear weapon with its own nuclear weapon, which as we have already said at the beginning is unthinkable, given the existing conflict situation, and the unreliability of the Iranian regime (unreliable, however, as much as that of Israel); – make Israel give up its nuclear weapon, which in fact is the only reason why the area is destabilized. Furthermore, the conventional power that Israel possesses far exceeds that of Iran (as the events of recent days demonstrate, with the dominion of the skies, even over the Iranian capital, largely in the hands of the Jewish state).
By the third option, Israel would become a friendlier state towards others if deprived of nuclear deterrence, and Iran would no longer have any justification for creating its own. Any other option would prolong the state of instability and war indefinitely, risking the widening and escalation of the conflict.
