The (Nuclear) Bombshells Buried in Those Leaked Docs on Israel
America's leadership is only as sick as their nuclear secrets
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You may have seen the headlines this weekend:
NY Times: Leaked U.S. Intelligence Suggests Israel Is Preparing to Strike Iran
CNN: Leaked documents show US intelligence on Israel’s plans to attack Iran, sources say
As you can see, the first word in both is “Leaked.” So maybe that’s the important part? Or there’s the whole Israel plans to attack Iran stuff.
But the possibility of an Israeli attack (or, to be fair, counter-attack) on Iran has already been leaked from the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Pres. Joe Biden’s face leaked it on Friday.
So is the real story more that there’s a leak in the U.S. military-intelligence complex that funneled two secret U.S. documents to the internets? That seems like a tough case to make, given that the documents reveal little of life-changing importance. Unless we’re all supposed to freak out every time one single person in the U.S. intelligence apparatus — which dramatically overclassifies what we’re allowed to know — decides to share something with the us who paid for it.
But the documents also confirm two things of real importance, that might also have been just as valid as headlines:
TFN: Israel has nuclear weapons.
TFN: The U.S. knows Israel has nuclear weapons.
However, as far as your far-seeing TFN has seen, CNN is one of the few outlets even to mention the nukes angle. In paragraph 8.
So what exactly do the documents say? Nukes are only mentioned in one document, with two references. Here ya go:
The documents in question were published by my former colleague, Ken Klippenstein, serial publisher of secret shit.
And as you can see, the nukes document, from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, treats Israeli nukes as so established that it’s got a form with the heading: Nuclear and Missile.
Yes, Newsfuckers and everyone else has “known” this for years. But imagine how this confirmation would read if we hadn’t been slow-boiled into accepting it:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 — For the first time, a Middle Eastern nation has developed a nuclear arsenal, TFN has learned.
The country, Israel, is ruled by a religious hard-liner who’s been charged with war crimes by an international court, accused by Israeli prosecutors of corruption, overseen a year-long campaign that’s killed tens of thousands of civilians, rigged cell phones and walkie-talkes to explode, and who leads a coalition of religious zealots and political harder-liners.
High-ranking Israeli officials have suggested deploying nuclear weapons offensively against Gaza. Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that everyone in Gaza is a combatant, so an atomic bomb is “one way” Israel could kill a lot of them.
Israeli attacks on its neighbors have been condemned by Republican and Democratic presidents, as well as the United Nations, for more than half a century.
The country’s leaders have long enjoyed the support of powerful American religious zealots who believe their messiah will appear in conjunction with Biblical prophecies about Israel and a fiery armageddon.
Now, that wouldn’t be a fair way of covering it, but that’s the kind of approach American media would take with any nuclear non-Israel country. So why doesn’t Israel get this kind of coverage when U.S. intelligence confirms that (a) Israel has nukes and (b) the U.S. knows it?
For one thing, everyone understands on some level that if they were Israel, they would want nukes, too. Like, a lot of nukes.
Nukeophilia is a really understandable position when you’re pretty much a Jewish island in a sea of antisemitism, in a region where “I hate Jews” is practically an idiom for “Pass the salt.”
But that doesn’t mean U.S. governments of both parties should lie to their people about it.
America is a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. But, reportedly, American presidents of both parties are welcomed at the White House by an Israeli delegation seeking (and getting) a presidential commitment not to push Israel to sign the NPT.
If Americans can handle the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, though, what’s the rationale for American leaders not honestly discussing Israel’s arsenal?
In the past, America didn’t want to hand the U.S.S.R. a rationale for up-arming one of its allies in the region. But the U.S.S.R. knew and also is gone! And, sure, today Israel doesn’t want to give its enemies a casus belli to strike Israel.
On the other hand, having those enemies know about Israel’s nukes turns out to be a pretty effective way of keeping Iran’s activities at the retail rather than wholesale level.
On the other other hand, the UN voted 152 to 5, just two years ago — before Gazapalooza — that Israel should scrap its nuclear arsenal and let the International Atomic Energy Agency oversee Israel’s nuclear sites. Some of those 152 votes no doubt reflect an antisemitic desire to see Israel become not rael, but some of those votes surely reflect the belief that fewer nukes generally = better.
Either way, the refusal of American officials to be straight about this with the people they represent just seems like the toxic culture of national-security secrecy. And knee-jerk deference to Israel, which — in our asymmetric politics of Democrats aching not to be whatever Republicans accuse them of being — has sometimes meant that Republicans are actually tougher on Israel than Democrats are.
For instance, Pres. Barack Obama allowed just one UN resolution to pass criticizing Israel. Pres. George W. Bush let six through. His dad allowed nine. And former Republican Jesus Pres. Ronald Reagan greenlit 21 UN resolutions criticizing Israel.
Reagan’s approved UN resolutions included the one criticizing the Begin Doctrine, which isn’t called that because it means “We will Begin nuking.” It’s named for Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who defended Israel’s pre-emptive 1981 strike on Iraq’s nuclear project that could’ve given Saddam Hussein nukes. Begin asserted Israel’s right to prevent any enemies from getting nuclear capabilities.
Acknowledging Israel’s own capabilities would arguably make it more difficult for American to pursue non-proliferation with a straight face. But even without letting Israel’s atomic cat out of Schrödinger’s lead-lined bag, America’s non-proliferation face is already pretty unstraight.
According to a report last year in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Biden has been especially bad on not-proliferating. There’s his reversal of U.S. policy on reprocessing nuclear fuel: Meaning, America’s now funding companies to spread the tech for extracting plutonium from nuclear waste.
And the U.S. is funding billionaire Bill Gates — because apparently he needs the cash? — to crank out “fast” nuclear reactors. Capable of being retooled to produce…plutonium.
And that’s on top of the U.S. for decades incentivizing dictators to get themselves some nukes so they don’t end up Qaddafied the way Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi got Qaddafied…after giving up his nuclear program.
You can bet North Korea and Iran understand what Qaddafi and Hussein didn’t have, and what happened to them as a result. So as a result of North Korea — understandably — deciding it’s safer to have nukes than to have not, now South Korea is itching to get into the game.
And yes, a rePresident Donald Trump would likely be worse (a qualification Newsfuckers are hereby authorized to append to pretty much any political critique of anyone ever).
Trump, for instance, deployed nuclear-adjacent rhetoric in his clownshow saber-rattling/foreplay with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
And, at a 2019 meeting of the non-proliferation treaty signatories, China proposed a joint statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It was Trump’s people who torpedoed it. (Biden got the statement signed by everyone in 2022.)
For its part, Israel has worked very hard to keep its nukes an official-but-understood secret. When a whistleblower whistleblew Israel’s nuclear secrets, the country sent Mossad to drug him and kidnap him from another country, convicted him in a secret trial, and then tossed him in prison for 18 years (11 of them in solitary).
Eleven years in solitary confinement. That’s almost as long as Trump’s next term in office.
Even national-security veterans are warning America’s long overdue to acknowledge Israel’s nukes. Not doing so is harming us, hampering our already-shitty ability to assess the region’s geopolitics.
Keeping Israel’s nukes an official secret also makes it harder for the U.S. to push non-proliferation generally. And definitely in Israel.
As a result, abetting Israel’s nuclear proliferation may have worsened the current tensions dyings in the region. That’s because, according to nuclear historian Avner Cohen, having nukes gives Netanyahu a “sense of impunity, sense of Israel being so powerful, that it can dictate its own terms in the region and beyond.”
How’s that working out for everyone?
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Evergreen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJAD2csTQ8A
It's been widely known for decades that Israel has nuclear weapons.