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Israel’s Worst-Kept Secret

2014年09月28日 | 中東情勢
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives to a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, on June 29, 2014.

Israel’s Worst-Kept Secret

 

 

 

Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.

 

Former CIA Director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted—while serving as a university president—that Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.” Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel’s nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.

 

Authors

Douglas Birch is a writer for the Center for Public Integrity. Full Bio

R. Jeffrey Smith is managing editor for national security at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Full Bio

But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.

 

The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny—and occasional disapprobation—applied to the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

 

But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national-laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the government’s lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region.

 

The U.S. silence is largely unwavering, however. “We would never say flatly that Israel has nuclear weapons,” explained a former senior State Department official who dealt with nuclear issues during the Bush administration. “We would have to couch it in other language, we would have to say ‘we assume’ or ‘we presume that Israel has nuclear weapons,’ or ‘it’s reported’ that they have them,” the former official said, requesting that his name not be used due to the political sensitivity surrounding the topic.

 

President Barack Obama made clear that this four-decade-old U.S. policy would persist at his firstWhite House press conference in 2009, when journalist Helen Thomas asked if he knew of any nations in the Middle East with nuclear arms. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said, as though Israel’s established status as a nuclear-weapons state was only a matter of rumor and conjecture.

 

So wary is Paul Pillar, a former U.S. national-intelligence officer for the Middle East, of making any direct, public reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal that when he wrote an article this month in The National Interest, entitled “Israel’s Widely Suspected Unmentionables,” he referred to warheads as “kumquats” throughout his manuscript.

 

Even Congress has been coy on the subject. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report titled “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” it included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey—but not Israel. The 61-page report relegated Israel’s nuclear arms to a footnote that suggested that Israel’s arsenal was a “perception.”

 

“This report does not take a position on the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons,” the report said. “Although Israel has not officially acknowledged it possesses nuclear weapons, a widespread consensus exists in the region and among experts in the United States that Israel possesses a number of nuclear weapons. For Israel’s neighbors, this perception is more important than reality.”

 

While former White House or cabinet-level officers—such as Gates—have gotten away with more candor, the bureaucracy does not take honesty by junior officials lightly. James Doyle, a veteran nuclear analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently censured, evidently left himself open to punishment by straying minutely from U.S. policy in a February 2013 article published by the British journal Survival.

 

“Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War,” Doyle said in a bitingly critical appraisal of Western nuclear policy, which angered his superiors at the nuclear-weapons lab as well as a Republican staff member of the House Armed Services Committee.

 

Even though three secrecy specialists at the lab concluded the article contained no secrets, more senior officials overruled them and cited an unspecified breach as justification for censuring Doyle and declaring the article classified, after its publication. They docked his pay, searched his home computer, and, eventually, fired him this summer. The lab has said his firing—as opposed to the censure and search—was not related to the article’s content, but Doyle and his lawyer have said they are convinced it was pure punishment for his skepticism about the tenets of nuclear deterrence.

 

Neither Doyle nor his colleagues revealed if the sentence in his article about Israel’s arsenal was the one that provoked officials to nitpick about a security violation, but several independent experts have surmised it was.

 

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the clues lie in the Energy Department’s citation—in a document summarizing the facts behind Doyle’s unsuccessful appeal of his ill treatment—of a classification bulletin numbered “WPN-136.”

 

The full, correct title of that bulletin, according to an Energy Department circular, is “WNP-136, Foreign Nuclear Capabilities.” The classification bulletin itself is not public. But Aftergood said Doyle’s only reference to a sensitive foreign nuclear program was his mention of Israel’s, making it highly probable this was the cudgel the lab used against him. “I’m certain that that’s what it is,” Aftergood said in an interview.

 

The circumstances surrounding Doyle’s censure are among several cases now being examined by Department of Energy (DOE) Inspector General Gregory Friedman, as part of a broader examination of inconsistent classification practices within the department and the national laboratories, several officials said.

 

Doyle’s reference to the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal reflects the consensus intelligence judgment within DOE nuclear weapons-related laboratories, former officials say. But some said they find it so hard to avoid any public reference to the weapons that classification officers periodically hold special briefings about skirting the issue.

 

“It was one of those things that was not obvious,” a former laboratory official said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic. “Especially when there’s so much about it in the open domain.”

 

Israel’s nuclear-weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks nuclear-weapons developments.

 

For decades, however, Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls amimut, meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has these weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal.

 

Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen has written that U.S. adherence to this policy evidently grew out of a September 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. No transcript of the meeting has surfaced, but Cohen said it is clear the two leaders struck a deal: Israel would not test its nuclear weapons or announce it possessed them, while the United States wouldn’t press Israel to give them up or to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and would halt its annual inspections of Dimona, the site of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center.

 

As an outgrowth of the deal, Washington, moreover, would adopt Israel’s secret as its own, eventually acquiescing to a public formulation of Israeli policy that was initially strenuously opposed by top U.S. officials.

 

“Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” the boilerplate Israeli account has long stated. “Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace.” When Nixon’s aides sought assurances that this pledge meant Israel would not actually build any bombs, Israeli officials said the word “introduce” would have a different meaning: It meant the country would not publicly test bombs or admit to possessing them, leaving ample room for its unacknowledged arsenal.

 

“While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession,” then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote in a July 1969 memo to Nixon that summarized Washington’s enduring policy, “what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”

 

Even when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona, provided the first detailed, public account of the program in 1986 and released photos he had snapped there of nuclear-weapons components, both countries refused to shift gears. After being snatched from Italy, Vanunu was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years, mostly in solitary confinement, and subsequently forbidden to travel abroad or deal substantively with foreign journalists. In an email exchange with the Center for Public Integrity, Vanunu indicated that he still faces restrictions but did not elaborate. “You can write me again when I am free, out of Israel,” he said.

 

The avoidance of candor has sometimes extended to private government channels. A former U.S. intelligence official said he recalled being flabbergasted in the 1990s by the absence of any mention of Israel in a classified document purporting to describe all foreign nuclear-weapons programs. He said he complained to colleagues at the time that “we’ve really got a problem if we can’t acknowledge the truth even in classified documents,” and finally won a grudging but spare mention of the country’s weaponry.

 

Gary Samore, who was President Obama’s top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, said the United States has long preferred that Israel hold to its policy of amimut, out of concern that other Middle Eastern nations would feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.

 

“For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative,” he said. “It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.” But when asked point-blank if the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is classified, Samore—who is now at Harvard University—answered: “It doesn’t sound very classified to me—that Israel has nuclear weapons?”

 

The U.S. government’s official silence was broken only by accident, when, in 1979, the CIA released a four-page summary of an intelligence memorandum titled “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.

 

“We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons,” the 1974 report said, citing Israel’s stockpiling of large quantities of uranium, its uranium-enrichment program, and its investment in a costly missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Release of the report triggered a spate of headlines. “CIA said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs,” a New York Times headline declared. “Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974, CIA Study Indicates,” announced The Washington Star.

 

But it stemmed from a goof.

 

John Despres, who was the CIA’s national-intelligence officer for nuclear proliferation at the time, said he was in charge of censoring or “redacting” the secret material from the report prior to its release. But portions he wanted withheld were released, he said in an interview, while sections that were supposed to be released were withheld.

 

“This was a sort of classic case of a bureaucratic screw-up,” said Despres, now retired. “People misinterpreted my instructions.” He said that as far as he knows, no one was disciplined for the mix-up. Moreover, in 2008, when the National Security Archive obtained a copy of the document under the Freedom of Information Act, that judgment remained unexcised.

 

But Washington’s refusal to confirm the obvious in any other way has produced some weird trips down the rabbit hole for those seeking official data about the Israeli arsenal. Bryan Siebert, who was the most senior career executive in charge of guarding DOE’s nuclear-weapons secrets from 1992 to 2002, said he recalls seeing a two-cubic-foot stack at one point of CIA, FBI, Justice, and Energy department documents about Israel’s nuclear program.

 

John Fitzpatrick, who since 2011 has served as director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, confirmed that “aspects” of Israel’s nuclear status are considered secret by the United States. “We know this from classifying authorities at agencies who handle that material,” said Fitzpatrick, who declined to provide more details.

 

Kerry Brodie, director of communications for the Israeli embassy in Washington, similarly said no one there would discuss the subject of the country’s nuclear status. “Unfortunately, we do not have any comment we can share at this point,” she wrote in an email. A former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, was less discrete during a December 2013 conference in Haifa, where he said “Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons” and called the policy of ambiguity “outdated and childish.”

 

Through a spokesman, Robert Gates declined to discuss the issue. But a growing number of U.S. experts agree with Burg.

 

Pillar, for example, wrote in his article this month that the 45-year-old U.S. policy of shielding Israel’s program is seen around the world “as not just a double standard but living a lie. Whatever the United States says about nuclear weapons will always be taken with a grain of salt or with some measure of disdain as long as the United States says nothing about kumquats.”

 

Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who has written about the history of the Israeli program, complained in a recent book that “the pretense of ignorance about Israeli bombs does not wash anymore. … The evident double standard undermines efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.”

 

J. William Leonard, who ran a government-wide declassification effort as President George W. Bush’s director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2008, commented that “in some regards, it undermines the integrity of the classification system when you’re using classification to officially protect a known secret. It can get exceedingly awkward, obviously.”

 

Aftergood said the secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear weapons is “obsolete and fraying around the edges. … It takes an effort to preserve the fiction that this is a secret,” he said. Meanwhile, he added, it can still be abused as an instrument for punishing federal employees such as Doyle for unrelated or politically inspired reasons. “Managers have broad discretion to overlook or forgive a particular infraction,” Aftergood said. “The problem is that discretion can be abused. And some employees get punished severely while others do not.”

 

Dana H. Allin, the editor of Doyle’s article in Survival magazine, said in a recent commentary published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London that “anyone with a passing knowledge of international affairs knows about these weapons.” He called the government’s claim that the article contained secrets “ludicrous” and said Doyle’s ordeal at the hands of the classification authorities was nothing short of Kafkaesque.

 

※出典

【Israel’s Worst-Kept Secret 】

http://goo.gl/bo6bF7

 

 


The 47-year-old nuclear elephant in the room

2014年09月28日 | 中東情勢

 

The 47-year-old nuclear elephant in the room

A growing number of U.S. experts say that feigning ignorance about Israel’s nuclear arsenal creates more trouble than it averts

By Douglas BirchR. Jeffrey Smith

5:00 am, September 16, 2014 Updated: 11:33 am, September 16, 2014

 

Mordechai Vanunu's photograph of what appears to be a mock-up of a nuclear weapon's plutonium core at the Negev Nuclear Research Center at Dimona.

Screenshot/Center for Nonproliferation Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative Youtube

Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Former CIA director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted — while serving as a university president — that Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.” Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel’s nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.

But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.

The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny — and occasional disapprobation — directed at the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the government’s lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region.

The U.S. silence is largely unwavering, however. “We would never say flatly that Israel has nuclear weapons,” explained a former senior State Department official who dealt with nuclear issues during the Bush administration. “We would have to couch it in other language, we would have to say ‘we assume’ or ‘we presume that Israel has nuclear weapons,’ or ‘it’s reported’ that they have them,” the former official said, requesting that his name not be used due to the political sensitivity surrounding the topic.

President Barack Obama made clear that this 4-decade-old U.S. policy would persist at his first White House press conference in 2009, when journalist Helen Thomas asked if he knew of any nations in the Middle East with nuclear arms. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said, as though Israel’s established status as a nuclear weapons state was only a matter of rumor and conjecture.

So wary is Paul Pillar, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for the Middle East, of making any direct, public reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal that when he wrote an article this month in The National Interest, entitled “Israel’s Widely Suspected Unmentionables,” he referred to warheads as “kumquats” throughout his manuscript.

Even Congress has been coy on the subject. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report titled “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” it included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey — but not Israel. The 61-page report relegated Israel’s nuclear arms to a footnote that suggested that Israel’s arsenal was a “perception.”

“This report does not take a position on the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons,” the report said. “Although Israel has not officially acknowledged it possesses nuclear weapons, a widespread consensus exists in the region and among experts in the United States that Israel possesses a number of nuclear weapons. For Israel’s neighbors, this perception is more important than reality.”

While former White House or cabinet-level officers — such as Gates — have gotten away with more candor, the bureaucracy does not take honesty by junior officials lightly. James Doyle, a veteran nuclear analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently censured, evidently left himself open to punishment by straying minutely from U.S. policy in a February 2013 article published by the British journal Survival.

“Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War,” Doyle said in a bitingly critical appraisal of Western nuclear policy, which angered his superiors at the nuclear weapons lab as well as a Republican staff member of the House Armed Services committee.

The February 2013 cover for Survival, the journal affiliated with the International Institute for Strategic Studies which published a controversial article by James Doyle.

Courtesy of the International Institute for Strategic Studies

Even though three secrecy specialists at the lab concluded the article contained no secrets, more senior officials overruled them and cited an unspecified breach as justification for censuring Doyle and declaring it classified, after its publication. They docked his pay, searched his home computer and, eventually, fired him this summer. The lab has said his firing — as opposed to the censure and search — was not related to the article’s content, but Doyle and his lawyer have said they are convinced it was pure punishment for his skepticism about the tenets of nuclear deterrence.

Neither Doyle nor his colleagues revealed if the sentence in his article about Israel’s arsenal was the one that provoked officials to nitpick about a security violation, but several independent experts have surmised it was.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the clues lie in the Energy Department’s citation — in a document summarizing the facts behind Doyle’s unsuccessful appeal of his ill treatment — of a classification bulletin numbered “WPN-136.”

The full, correct title of that bulletin, according to an Energy Department circular, is “WNP-136, Foreign Nuclear Capabilities.” The classification bulletin itself is not public. But Aftergood said Doyle’s only reference to a sensitive foreign nuclear program was his mention of Israel’s, making it highly probable this was the cudgel the lab used against him. “I’m certain that that’s what it is,” Aftergood said in an interview.

The circumstances surrounding Doyle’s censure are among several cases now being examined by Department of Energy (DOE) Inspector General Gregory Friedman, as part of a broader examination of inconsistent classification practices within the department and the national laboratories, several officials said.

Doyle’s reference to the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal reflects the consensus intelligence judgment within DOE nuclear weapons-related laboratories, former officials say. But some said they find it so hard to avoid any public reference to the weapons that classification officers periodically held special briefings about skirting the issue.

“It was one of those things that was not obvious,” a former laboratory official said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic. “Especially when there’s so much about it in the open domain.”

Israel’s nuclear weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks nuclear weapons developments.

For decades, however, Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls “amimut,” meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has these weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal.

An aerial view of the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, Israel.

Wikicommons

Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen has written that U.S. adherence to this policy evidently grew out of a September 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. No transcript of the meeting has surfaced, but Cohen said it is clear the two leaders struck a deal: Israel would not test its nuclear weapons or announce it possessed them, while the United States wouldn’t press Israel to give them up or to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and would halt its annual inspections of Dimona, the site of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center.

As an outgrowth of the deal, Washington, moreover, would adopt Israel’s secret as its own, eventually acquiescing to a public formulation of Israeli policy that was initially strenuously opposed by top U.S. officials.

“Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” the boilerplate Israeli account has long stated. “Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace.” When Nixon’s aides sought assurances this pledge meant Israel would not actually build any bombs, Israeli officials said the word “introduce” would have a different meaning: It meant the country would not publicly test bombs or admit to possessing them, leaving ample room for its unacknowledged arsenal.

“While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession,” then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote in a July 1969 memo to Nixon that summarized Washington’s enduring policy, “what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”

Even when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona, provided the first detasiled, public account of the program in 1986 and released photos he had snapped there of nuclear weapons components, both countries refused to shift gears. After being snatched from Italy, Vanunu was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years, mostly in solitary confinement, and subsequently forbidden to travel abroad or deal substantively with foreign journalists. In an email exchange with the Center for Public Integrity, Vanunu indicated that he still faces restrictions but did not elaborate. “You can write me again when I am free, out of Israel,” he said.

 

A closer look at the Negev Nuclear Research Center

Video created by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

 

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in June of 2004, holding a copy of the original newspaper in which he revealed Israel's nuclear secrets.

Oded Balilty/AP

The avoidance of candor has sometimes extended to private government channels. A former U.S. intelligence official said he recalled being flabbergasted in the 1990’s by the absence of any mention of Israel in a particular highly-classified document purporting to describe all foreign nuclear weapons programs. He said he complained to colleagues at the time that “we’ve really got a problem if we can’t acknowledge the truth even in classified documents,” and finally won a grudging but spare mention of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Gary Samore, who was President Obama’s top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, said the United States has long preferred that Israel hold to its policy of amimut, out of concern that other Middle Eastern nations would feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.

“For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative,” he said. “It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.” But when asked point-blank if the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is classified, Samore — who is now at Harvard University — answered: “It doesn’t sound very classified to me — that Israel has nuclear weapons?”

 The U.S. government’s official silence was broken only by accident, when in 1979, the CIA released a four-page summary of an intelligence memorandum titled “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.

“We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons,” the 1974 report said, citing Israel’s stockpiling of large quantities of uranium, its uranium enrichment program, and its investment in a costly missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Release of the report triggered a spate of headlines. “CIA said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs,” a New York Times headline declared. “Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974, CIA Study Indicates,” announced The Washington Star.

But it stemmed from a goof.

John Despres, who was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for nuclear proliferation at the time, said he was in charge of censoring or “redacting” the secret material from the report prior to its release. But portions he wanted withheld were released, he said in an interview, while sections that were supposed to be released were withheld.

“This was a sort of classic case of a bureaucratic screw-up,” said Despres, now retired. “People misinterpreted my instructions.” He said that as far as he knows, no one was disciplined for the mix-up. Moreover, in 2008, when the National Security Archive obtained a copy of the document under the Freedom of Information Act, that judgment remained unexcised.

But Washington’s refusal to confirm the obvious in any other way has produced some weird trips down the rabbit hole for those seeking official data about the Israeli arsenal. Bryan Siebert, who was the most senior career executive in charge of guarding DOE’s nuclear weapons secrets from 1992 to 2002, said he recalls seeing a two-cubic-foot stack at one point of CIA, FBI, Justice and Energy department documents about Israel’s nuclear program.

But when Siebert filed a FOIA request to DOE for information about the program after his retirement in April 2004, DOE’s official reply — written by David Osias, a former CIA official who was then deputy director for intelligence and analysis at DOE — was that the department “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of information on the requested subject. Such confirmation or denial of the records at issue, would pose a threat to national security.”

John Fitzpatrick, who since 2011 has served as director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, confirmed that “aspects” of Israel’s nuclear status are considered secret by the United States. “We know this from classifying authorities at agencies who handle that material,” said Fitzpatrick, who declined to provide more details.

Kerry Brodie, director of communications for the Israeli embassy in Washington, similarly said no one there would discuss the subject of the country’s nuclear status. “Unfortunately, we do not have any comment we can share at this point,” she wrote in an email. A former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, was less discrete during a December 2013 conference in Haifa, where he said “Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons” and called the policy of ambiguity “outdated and childish.”

Through a spokesman, Robert Gates declined to discuss the issue. But a growing number of U.S. experts agree with Burg.

Pillar, for example, wrote in his article this month that the 45-year old U.S. policy of shielding Israel’s program is seen around the world “as not just a double standard but living a lie. Whatever the United States says about nuclear weapons will always be taken with a grain of salt or with some measure of disdain as long as the United States says nothing about kumquats.”

Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who has written about the history of the Israeli program, complained in a recent book that “the pretense of ignorance about Israeli bombs does not wash anymore. … The evident double standard undermines efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.”

J. William Leonard, who ran a government-wide declassification effort as President George W. Bush’s director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2008, commented that “in some regards, it undermines the integrity of the classification system when you’re using classification to officially protect a known secret. It can get exceedingly awkward, obviously.”

Aftergood said the secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear weapons is “obsolete and fraying around the edges. … It takes an effort to preserve the fiction that this is a secret,” he said. Meanwhile, he added, it can still be abused as an instrument for punishing federal employees such as Doyle for unrelated or politically-inspired reasons. “Managers have broad discretion to overlook or forgive a particular infraction,” Aftergood said. “The problem is that discretion can be abused. And some employees get punished severely while others do not.”

Dana H. Allin, the editor of Doyle’s article in Survival magazine, said in a recent commentary published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London that “anyone with a passing knowledge of international affairs knows about these weapons.” He called the government’s claim that the article contained secrets “ludicrous” and said Doyle’s ordeal at the hands of the classification authorities was nothing short of Kafkaesque.

 

※出典

【The 47-year-old nuclear elephant in the room】

by  Douglas Birch

http://goo.gl/g7lYxJ





Israel's Nuclear Weapons: Widely Suspected Unmentionables

2014年09月28日 | 中東情勢

 

Israel's Nuclear Weapons: Widely Suspected Unmentionables

September 3, 2014

Some things, or possible things, are important enough that we would be foolish to presume or pretend that they do not exist even if we lack any official confirmation or acknowledgment that they in fact exist. One such possible thing is of high importance to security issues in the Middle East. Almost everyone outside of government who writes or speaks about these issues takes as a given that Israel has long had an arsenal of nuclear weapons. No Israeli government, however, has ever said publicly that Israel has such weapons, and neither has the U.S. government, under any administration, said so either.

Let us be very careful in how we discuss this subject. The world is full of widely accepted conventional wisdom, some of which turns out not to be true. After all, we do not know whether Israel has nuclear weapons. So let us not frame a discussion of this subject in terms of assertions of fact. Instead, we can play off the widely held consensus on the subject, discussing implications of the consensus itself and other implications if the consensus happened to be correct.

One disadvantage of this approach is that to adhere scrupulously to the agnostic qualifiers that the approach requires makes for clumsy prose that is uncomfortable to read. A way to cope with this problem is inspired by the late Alfred Kahn, the Cornell economist who served in Jimmy Carter's administration. Kahn is best known for deregulating the airline industry as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. He later was Carter's anti-inflation czar, in which post the blunt-spoken Kahn was once chastised by his political betters at the White House for warning of a possible “depression”. Don't use the word depression, he was told. Kahn complied, but rather than resort to some awkward circumlocution such as “an economic downturn that is more serious than what is customarily called a recession” he started using the term banana as a substitute for the word he was not supposed to utter. When the head of the United Fruit Company complained to him about this negative use of the term, Kahn switched to kumquat as his substitute word whenever he discussed the danger of a depression.

Using both Kahn's technique and his term, in the rest of this essay let kumquats mean “Israel's widely suspected nuclear weapons” or, in its more complete form, “Israel's widely suspected nuclear weapons—so widely and strongly suspected that just about everyone who says anything about related topics takes them as a given, even though we cannot say for certain that they exist.”

Kumquats are not just a subject of conventional wisdom. They have been carefully addressed by serious historians and political scientists and have been taken into account in countless analyses of security problems in the Middle East. They also routinely figure into global rundowns of nuclear weapons arsenals, such as from the Ploughshares Fund or the Arms Control Association, with Israel listed alongside the eight declared nuclear weapons states. The Arms Control Association's inventory estimates the number of kumquats at between 75 and 200. Most other estimates are similar; a more detailed examination of kumquats and associated Israeli military forces that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists twelve years ago used the same range. The fullest understanding of the kumquat program can be found in the writings of the foremost historian of that program, Avner Cohen, including in his most recent book, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb.

Cohen and co-author Marvin Miller argued in an article four years ago that the policy of non-acknowledgment of kumquats has outlived whatever usefulness it had for Israel, and that Israel should change that policy. According to these authors, the policy was grounded in an understanding that Golda Meir and Richard Nixon reached in 1969, by which the United States would not make a public issue out of kumquats as long as Israel did not acknowledge their existence. Cohen and Miller contend that being more transparent about this capability would enable Israel to demonstrate that it is a responsible nuclear power, to participate in arms control endeavors that are in Israel's interests, and to diminish one of the grounds for the international community to treat Israel as an outlaw pariah state. Greater transparency also would facilitate useful discussion and debate among Israelis themselves of issues related to ownership of kumquats, such as questions of safety, command and control, and identification of circumstances in which the kumquats might ever be used.

From a U.S. point of view, the policy of not saying anything publicly about kumquats has also long outlived whatever usefulness it may have had, for the reasons Cohen and Miller offer as well as for others. The very fact that there is now such a broad and strong consensus about the existence of kumquats, which was not yet the case in 1969, is one reason. Moreover, keeping any mention of kumquats out of bounds inhibits full and fruitful discussion about Israel's security, with the Israelis themselves as well as among American politicians and policy-makers. Anyone who professes to have high concern about Israel's security—which includes almost every American politician—ought to favor uninhibited and fully informed discussion of the subject.

Arms control also is at least as important to U.S. interests as to Israel's, at both regional and global levels. Regionally, proposals for a Middle East nuclear-weapons-free zone (or in some variants, a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone) are worth discussing, however much realization of such a goal will depend on resolution of political conflicts that will determine the willingness of regional states to give up whatever weapons they currently have. Any such discussion will be a feckless charade, however, as long as neither Israel nor the United States will say anything about kumquats.

That the United States is so out of step on this subject with the rest of the world is taken by the rest of the world as one more example of double standards that the United States applies to shield Israel. Even further, it is taken as not just a double standard but living a lie. Whatever the United States says about nuclear weapons will always be taken with a grain of salt or with some measure of disdain as long as the United States says nothing about kumquats.

The issue of Iran's nuclear program, negotiations on which will be coming to a climax this fall, is highly germane to this problem. We have the spectacle of the government of Israel being by far the most energetic rabble-rouser on the subject of a possible Iranian nuclear weapon, to the extent of repeatedly threatening to attack Iran militarily. Some might call this irony; others would call it chutzpah. Anyone would be entitled to say that any state that not only refuses to become a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) or to subject any of its nuclear activities to any kind of international inspection or control but also already possesses kumquats or their equivalents has no standing to conduct such agitation about Iran, which is a party to the NPT, has already subjected its nuclear activities to an unprecedented degree of intrusive inspection, and is in the process of negotiating an agreement to place even further limits on its nuclear program to ensure it stays peaceful.

The need for full and well-informed discussion of Israel's security will play into any debate in the United States about a completed nuclear agreement with Iran. Fully taking into account kumquats—which, as noted above, private scholars and nongovernmental organizations estimate to number in the dozens or scores—also underscores how misplaced is the preoccupation with an Iranian "breakout" or feared rush to build one or even a few bombs. Whatever the United States may or may not say on the subject, it is safe to assume that Iranian leaders believe that kumquats really do exist, and probably in the numbers that private experts estimate.

The U.S. refusal to discuss this subject has other, less direct, distorting and stifling effects on discourse in the United States about Middle Eastern security issues. When the U.S. government takes a posture such as this, it has damaging trickle-down effects, not necessarily visible to the public, on the broader discourse. Then there is the sheer silliness of the posture. With such a broad and strong consensus about kumquats and all the extensive discussion that has already taken place about them elsewhere, clearly the official U.S. posture serves no purpose in safeguarding U.S. security interests. It is only a legacy of a policy constructed to deal with a situation U.S. policy-makers faced 45 years ago.

The U.S. posture appears to outsiders inconsistent not only with the broader consensus but also with some of the United States' own public revelations. Six years ago the U.S. government released a redacted and declassified version of an intelligence estimate from 1974 about prospects for nuclear proliferation, in which the lead judgment about Israel was “We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons.” The kumquat program has since had, of course, 40 years to progress from wherever it may have been in 1974.

Within the past couple of weeks the U.S. government has publicly released another pertinent set of previously classified material: about 100 pages of documents from internal U.S. government deliberations about the kumquat problem in 1968 and 1969, spanning the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The documents make interesting reading, although so far the the press has given almost no attention to them apart from an article in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. A strong refrain, spanning both U.S. administrations, running through these deliberations was that any Israeli development of nuclear weapons would be a major negative for U.S. interests. As one interagency assessment put it, “The disadvantages to U.S. global interests are such that a major U.S. effort to induce Israel not to produce nuclear weapons is justified.” U.S. policy-makers faced several complications in trying to achieve this objective, however, including the already-emerging problem of Israeli colonization of territory conquered in the Six Day War less than two years earlier. An interagency study group described this part of the quandary this way:

"Use of leverage on the NPT/nuclear issue may seriously detract from our capability to influence Israel on the settlement issue. On the other hand, if we decide to defer using pressure on the nuclear question so as to preserve leverage on a possible peace settlement, we must ask how long we are prepared to do this in the face of Israel's rapidly advancing program, and the knowledge that, the longer we put off making Israel feel the seriousness of our purpose, the harder it will be to arrest Israel's program."

Another complication was the fear that using the most obvious source of U.S. leverage over Israel—arms supplies, with shipment of F-4 Phantom jets being the top Israeli interest at the time—would only make the Israelis more determined than ever to push ahead with the development of nuclear weapons. The State Department in particular argued this point, and was generally in favor of relying only on persuasion rather than leverage to try to slow down the Israeli program. The Department of Defense favored taking a harder line and using the arms spigot as a tool of leverage without fear of endangering Israel's conventional advantage over its neighbors, noting that “for the present Israel's military superiority is complete.” The documents do not take us to the end of this interagency debate or to whatever Nixon and Meir said to each other in private. But in effect the outcome was a passive don't ask, don't tell approach.

Even at that early stage the kumquat program, like the colonization program, involved a lack of Israeli cooperation with the United States. Israel already was playing the verbal game of saying it would not be the first state to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East. The declassified documents record repeated U.S. efforts to get Israel to state that not “introducing” weapons meant not producing or stockpiling them. The Israelis refused to do so and instead suggested that as long as weapons were neither tested or announced they would not have been “introduced.”

The timing of declassification of government documents can reflect many different and mostly mundane factors, such as when someone happened to submit a Freedom of Information Act request and how fast the wheels of the bureaucratic review process turn. It would be nice to think or at least to hope, however, that this latest release of documents signals a willingness by the current U.S. administration to take a step away from shielding Israeli activities that, even more now than when the policy-makers of 1969 were deliberating, involve significant “disadvantages to U.S. global interests.”  

 

※出典

【Israel's Nuclear Weapons: Widely Suspected Unmentionables】

by  Paul R. Pillar

http://goo.gl/e00UqD





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