US keeps nuclear "don't ask, don't tell" -Israel aide

[EireWarrior]

Link to Article

JERUSALEM, May 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. administration of President Barack Obama will not force Israel to state publicly whether it has nuclear weapons, an Israeli official said on Thursday.

He said Washington would stick to a decades-old U.S. policy of "don't ask, don't tell".

Obama's bid to curb Iran's nuclear programme through diplomacy has stirred speculation that, as part of a regional disarmament regimen, Israel could be asked to come clean on its own secret capabilities.

But a senior Israeli diplomat, speaking after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held his first summit with Obama in Washington this week, said: "This has never happened, nor will it happen with this administration."

That U.S. message had been conveyed, the diplomat said, "on the various levels of our bilateral talks".

Israel is widely believed to have procured the Middle East's only nuclear weapons. It neither confirms nor denies this, under an "ambiguity" policy billed as deterring foes while avoiding the kind of public provocations that can trigger arms races.

Historians say that the Nixon administration forged a tacit policy of not pressing Israel on the matter. The official American reticence angers Iran -- which denies seeking the bomb -- as well as the Arab world. (Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

Is this bullshit or real   :?  "don't ask, don't tell"

[Jenny Lake]

As far as I know this is true, including evading inspections and other forms of accountability.

[Jenny Lake]

In the book Spying On The Bomb, Jeffrey Richelson gives an account, though obscurely, to the origins of the nuclear 'don't ask, don't tell' situation. Chapter 6, entitled "Pariahs" (pages 236-282) deals with Israeli acquisition of the Dimona reactor, which was designed to procure weapons-grade plutonium.

Starting in 1952, Ben-Gurion appointed Ernst David Bergmann (a Russian expelled from Berlin in 1933 who emigrated to Palestine) to head the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Contracts, formal and informal, were set up with France to teach, train, operate and build nukes for Israel. A deal was cut with Norway to provide 'heavy water', exactly as the Nazis had done.

As the Dimona construction progressed, and not hidden from U-2 and other surveillance, the Israelis officially invented cover stories about what was being built-- initially they said "a textile plant" around 1957, changing the story a year later to "a metallurgical facility", and two years after that "a research institution for agricultural and medical isotope applications", the last story here coming through an American physicist named Henry Gomberg from the University of Michigan (public medicine bio-weapon central).

No verified ground channels of intelligence ever occurred during Eisenhowers's admin., but JFK pressed for inspections repeatedly. Israel acquiesced in 1961 to a visit scheduled in May. Two American scientists picked by the AEC were allowed to visit Dimona for 45 minutes. In the future, these visits would take many hours, but were heavily proscribed with rules and prohibitions. Kennedy knew that plutonium recovery could be hidden by a schedule of 'annual' visits and pressed for bi-annual inspection to monitor the reactor's fuel cycle. He was assassinated before making any diplomatic progress. The incoming admin submitted to 'annual' inspection and never challenged the prohibitive management. Richelson says by 1969, the U.S. gave up sending scientists to monitor the program. It was tacitly understood the Israelis had made their weapons, unaccounted for, and got away with it.

[Jenny Lake]

Here's a brief on Ernst David Bergmann, chief of Israels Atomic Energy Commission, and some of his achievements in fluorine chemistry (in the 1930s).
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ICS/booklet/1 ... rgmann.pdf