…Similarly, there has been little coverage of documents from 1969 that were declassified a year ago; these documents show that the United States–at that moment in time–was quietly working to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons and to steer that country towards joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Instead, Israel offered the United States only an ambiguous description of its plans, saying that Israel would not be the first country to introduce weapons to the Middle East, but pursued nuclear weapons in secret and declined to become a member state of the NPT. Israel still is not a member of the NPT, and its unacknowledged nuclear program angers many countries that are members. In fact, the NPT Review Conference recently collapsed without an agreement on a final document, at least partly because a group of countries wanted to begin a long-promised conference on a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East within a set time frame, and the United States and United Kingdom–ÂÂsupporters of Israel, which opposed such a conference–refused to go along.
And it is surprising how little mainstream media coverage there has been about a 1987 Pentagon report, released this spring in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, that confirms that the Pentagon knew many details of Israel’s nuclear program in 1987 and promptly covered them up. (A notable and praiseworthy exception to this lack of interest has been The Nation)… More