The only weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East are in Israel, a U.S. protectorate. What is not being reported is that, as Israel's hawks fail to  put down the Palestinian uprising, their leader, Ariel Sharon, may well remove the country's nuclear arsenal from its nominal strategy of "last  resort." 

This prospect is raised in the Covert Action quarterly (www.covertactionquarterly.org) by John Steinbach, a nuclear specialist whose  previous work includes the mapping of deadly radiation hazards in the United States. He quotes Israel's former president Ezer Weizman: "The nuclear issue  is gaining momentum [and the] next war will not be conventional." 

From the 1950s, writes Steinbach, "the U.S. was training Israeli nuclear scientists and providing nuclear related technology, including a small 'research' reactor in 1955 under the 'Atoms for Peace' program." It was 
France that built a larger uranium reactor and plutonium reprocessing plant  in the Negev desert, called Dimona. The Israeli's lied [saying] that it was a  'manganese plant,' or a 'textile factory.' 

In return for uranium, Israel supplied South Africa with the technology and  expertise that allowed the White supremacist regime to build the "apartheid bomb." 

[Note: The Sunday Times of London reported on 15 November 1998, that Israel was developing an "ethno-bomb." Their scientists were trying to exploit recent medical advances by identifying a gene carried by Arabs. They intended to create a genetically-modified bacterium or virus that would attack only Arabs, leaving Jews unharmed. ed.] 

In 1979, when U.S. satellite photographs revealed the atmospheric test of a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean off South Africa, Israel's involvement, writes Steinbach, "was quickly whitewashed by a carefully selected scientific panel, kept in the dark about important details." Israeli sources have since revealed "there were actually three tests of miniaturized Israeli nuclear artillery shells." 

It was at Dimona that the heroic Mordechai Vanunu worked as a technician. A supporter of Palestinian rights, Vanunu believed it was his duty to warn the world about the danger Israel posed. In 1986, he smuggled out photographs showing that the plant was producing enough plutonium to make 10 to 12 bombs a year, and that at least 200 miniaturized bombs had been built. 

Vanunu was subsequently lured to Rome from London by Mossad, the Israeli dirty tricks agency. Beaten and drugged, he was kidnapped to Israel, where a secret security court sentenced him to 18 years in prison, 12 of which were spent in solitary confinement, in a cell barely big enough for him to stand. 

[Note: Former Mossad operative, Victor Ostrovsky, also revealed the behind-the-scenes tactics of Israel's spy and assassination agency in his book By Way of Deception. He had to flee the country, and in 1995 an Israeli TV executive publicly called for his assassination. Ostrovsky writes: "To put it as charitably as possible, (Israel) is a country that does not have America's best interests at heart." ed.] 

Steinbach says that, whatever "deterrent effect" the founders of the Israeli nuclear program may have intended, "today, the nuclear arsenal is inextricably linked to and integrated with overall Israeli military and political strategy." 

While Israel has ballistic missiles and bombers capable of reaching Moscow, and has reportedly launched a submarine-based cruise missile, "a staple of the arsenal are neutron bombs [which are] miniaturized thermonuclear bombs designed to maximize deadly gamma radiation while minimizing blast effects and long-term radiation -- in essence designed to kill people while leaving property intact." 

These are the same "limited" nuclear weapons the Reagan administration seriously considered using in Europe and which Ariel Sharon's zealots may use as a "demonstration" that they have no intention of relinquishing the occupied territories. "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches," said Sharon before he became prime minister. Steinbach says such a threat could be used to compel the Bush administration to act exclusively in Israel's favor were it to waver in the face of growing international support for the Intifada. 

Francis Perrin, the former head of the French nuclear weapons program, wrote: "We thought the Israeli Bomb was aimed at the Americans, not to launch it at the Americans, but to say, 'If you don't want to help us in a critical situation [when we] require you to help us ... we will use our nuclear bombs." Israel used this blackmail during the 1973 war with Egypt, forcing U.S. President Richard Nixon to re-supply its badly shaken military. 

[Note: Israel is not the only "shitty little country" (as the French ambassador to England so aptly put it) to thumb its nose at Uncle Sap by threatening to use its nuclear weapons; North Korea has been extracting enormous concessions from the Keystone Kops in Washington by essentially using the same tactics. Meanwhile, not to be outdone by the Israelis and the Koreans, there is talk in Greece about how our own home-grown "statesmen" are threatening to cut off all shipments of worry beads, feta cheese, and ouzo to the United States unless America starts saying nice things about them. ed.] 

The Israeli nuclear threat is seldom raised in this country, in parliament and the media, and is a non-issue in the United States. This is in line with a news agenda on Palestine that is still set by Israel. However, since the election of Sharon, who has presided over massacres of Palestinian civilians since 1953, this may be changing. Television pictures from Gaza and the West Bank ought to leave little doubt that Israel is a terrorist state, with a policy of state murder. 

One of the most impressive critics of his own government I met in Israel more than 25 years ago is Israel Shahak, then professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and the Bergen-Belsen death camp. As Israeli society becomes more and more polarized, Shahak's courage and wisdom endure. Three years ago he said: "The wish for peace, so often assumed as the Israeli aim, is not in my view a principle of Israeli policy, while the wish to extend Israeli domination and influence is." He added this prophecy of which all but one element has so far proved correct: "Israel is preparing for war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking [and is] clearly prepared to use, for the purpose, all means available, including nuclear ones." 

Source. www.johnpilger.com