Ever since 1963, the official Israeli policy regarding the possibility (!) that it has nuclear weapons has been– as Shimon Peres first said that year– that “we shall not be the ones to introduce nuclear weapons into the area.”
(Yossi Melman gives some background to that utterance, in this article about the recent incident in which Ehud Olmert –intentionally or otherwise– clearly implied that Israel is indeed a nuclear-weapons power.)
Of course, it all depends what the meaning of the word “introduce” is, doesn’t it?
US policymakers, who for those past 43 years, have been terrified of finding out– or, more to the point, terrified of publicly acknowledging— what the actual status of Israel’s nuclear-weapons program is, have spent all of those 43 years studiously avoiding ever trying to find out what “introduce” means.
Basically, though, does the Peres utterance mean, “We shan’t be the first to acquire nukes?” or does it mean, “We shan’t be the first to use ’em?”
No-one in Washington DC ever wanted to ask.
I have just scanned and uploaded a copy of my Summer 1988 article Israel’s Nuclear Game: The U.S. Stake, which explores some of these issues. You can find it:
here. (It’s a 1.1 MB PDF file, so you might want to wait till you’re on a fast link before downloading?)
… Anyway, back in the 1950s, the Israelis enjoyed close nuclear cooperation with France, which gave their buddy Peres most of the technology he needed. Later, they had continuing technical coordination in this field with both the Shah’s Iran and with apartheid-era South Africa (which may well have helped the Israelis test a nuclear “device” over the South Atlantic back in 1979.)
I wonder what kind of information one might be able to get from South Africa, these days, about the nature of that cooperation?? What I do see from this simple chronology of South Africa’s nuclear program, is that in September 1989,
- At a meeting of his senior political aides and advisors, President F.W. de Klerk declares that in order to end South Africa’s isolation from the international community, both the political system of apartheid and the nuclear weapons program must be dismantled.
So the two deeply transgressive and violent policies were thereafter abandoned in tandem…
Contrast that with this second great Shimon Peres quote, this time from 1998: “We have built a nuclear option, not in order to have a Hiroshima, but to have an Oslo.” (source: here, at footnote 110.)
I note, first of all, that the always halfhearted peace “process” that Peres engaged in in Oslo with the PLO never got anywhere… So now, Israel still has both its near-permanent occupation of Palestine plus its nuclear weapons… Plus, I note that the difference in the two situations was basically that South Africa came under huge international pressure to end both apartheid and its nuclear-weapons program.
Whereas Israel– ?
And finally here: an estimate fromJane’s Intelligence Review in 1997 estimating the size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal at a whopping “>400 deliverable thermonuclear weapons” (same source as the last one, at footnote 172.)
yes, this Israeli fascination with nuclear weapons is puzzling…it’s not as if the president of some leading Mideast power, with its own nuclear ambitions, is threatening to “wipe out” Israel…or is it?
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-12-12T173514Z_01_L1213060_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAN-HOLOCAUST.xml&WTmodLoc=IntNewsHome_C2_worldNews-3
Mao once said that he only needed “six bombs.” Any number greater than that, the Chinese thought, represented overkill and a complete waste of otherwise scarce resources at the time. I think China has more than six bombs now, but I can’t imagine they feel the need for anything like the numbers some have mentioned — perhaps accurately — for Israel. America’s hysterical arsenals, of course, beg the question of any form of sanity breaking out any time soon in the fevered schizophrenic brain of the Lunatic Leviathan. Six bombs ought to serve well enough for any country. How high does anyone suppose the radioactive rubble needs to bounce?
As for the insidious “one word, one meaning” fallacy, it would seem that the notorious infelicity uttered by a former President of the United States has now both ridiculed and enshrined it at the same time. Meaning exists in people, not in words; and as Orwell pointed out, the most general of our words will never receive anything but implacable resistance to a single definition because otherwise the people who most abuse these ambiguous words would have to give them up in favor of what somebody else says they mean. Think of “democracy” and “religion,” etc., and then try to locate “the” meaning upon which all warring parties will agree.
So of course words depend for their meaning on people and purposes. If we focus on people and their purposes, then we avoid the unwarranted assumption that the words people use somehow have an existential meaning apart and unto themselves: namely, “the” meaning. One would suppose that an educated populace would have long since accepted this linguistic fact instead of, as Professor I. A. Richards said, indulging “our bad habit of treating most things we read or hear as though of course we knew what they meant and, conversely, of writing as though no one but a fool could possibly mistake our meaning.”
The Israeli government quite obviously wishes to remain ambiguous on the subject of nuclear weapons. Iran obviously feels entitled to the same use of ambiguity for its own purposes. If Israel wanted to dispell any of this studied ambiguity, then it could easily do so by submitting to internationally verifiable inspections, treaties, U.N. resolutions, and so forth — as Iran does but as the United States and Israel do not.
Ambrose Bierce called peace “a period of cheating between periods of fighting.” Therefore, if we prefer Iraq’s or Iran’s suspected “cheating” to fighting with these countries about mythological WMD, ties to Al Qaida, etc., then we should “mean” cheating when “say” peace and learn to live with the ambiguity rather than, as Deputy Dubya Bush said, “clarify things” through “a demonstration of force by one side.” We can all now see how “clear” such American and Israeli demonstrations have made things.
I don’t have much personal reading knowledge of the various monotheistic manuscripts, but I think one or several or all of them contain a story about a guy who brings the roof down on his own head, so to speak. It seems to me that any use of nuclear weapons by anyone in the world, especially in the Bedlam of monotheism’s bloody birthplace, would illustrate that story probably for the last time.
“When I joined I took an oath. In that oath I swore to protect the Constitution of the United States. I didn’t swear to build democracies in countries on the other side of the world under the guise of “national security.” I didn’t join the military to be part of an Orwellian (“1984″) war machine that is in an obligatory war against whoever the state deems the enemy to be so that the populace can be controlled and riled up in a pro-nationalistic frenzy to support any new and oppressive law that will be the key to destroying the enemy. Example given – the Patriot Act. So aptly named, and totally against all that the constitution stands for. President Bush used the reactionary nature of our society to bring our country together and to infuse into the national psyche a need to give up their little-used rights in the hope to make our nation a little safer. The same scare tactics he used to win elections. He drones on and on about how America and the world would be a less safe place if we weren’t killing Iraqis, and that we’d have to fight the terrorists at home if we weren’t abroad. In our modern day emotive society this strategy (or strategery?) works, or had worked, up until last month’s elections.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/martin-p1.html
Dear Helena,
I don’t want to nag, and you know I wrote about this under your Namibia Option, Part 1 blog (did we ever get Part 2?) but just to add a little update on the question of the place of “huge international pressure” in our struggle. Neither do I mean to minimise the international pressure, which we certainly spent a very long time and a lot of effort to get under way, as Anti-Apartheid and using many other institutions of solidarity.
But the relative place of the “international pressure” vis-a-vis mass struggle inside the country, the armed struggle inside and outside, and the role of the Cubans in particular, is something we continue to dispute, because the weight that you put on one or the other has implications for present policy.
For example, Moeletsi Mbeki, a pundit and by the way the President’s brother, spoke at the 21st Anniversary seminar of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) last week. He said we as the liberation movement only had “soft power” while the West had “hard power”. He dished out a diagram. His bottom line was that COSATU should petition the Congressional black caucus as well as the Oppenheimers and the Ruperts (monopoly capitalists). It was a reformist sermon on the idea of “soft power” and the necessity of the weak to lobby the strong, taking his version of the liberation struggle as a model.
In the audience were Cubans who told me that General Leopoldo Cintra Frias is coming to SA (he may already be here) for the inauguration of a memorial wall in a special Freedom Park on Saturday, December 16. I may even get to see this General myself. He is the Zhukov of our southern African anti-fascist struggle. What we have is two living traditions, competing. One is reformist. The other one believes in the primacy of our own agency in our own liberation. Each one relies on its different interpretation of our history.
I don’t agree with Michael Murry and George Orwell that meaning exists in people and not in words. This is a false dichotomy. Meaning exists between people. It is social and it develops as human history. Meaning has to be ground out in dialogue and rendered material. The trouble with the “meaning of ‘introduce'” is only that it was insufficiently interrogated.
Dominic, I largely take your point re the relative contributions, in the ending of apartheid, made by the internal (and regional) pressures and the pressure of global isolation. Certainly, without the internal and regional anti-apartheid movements the international pressures wouldn’t have worked. Indeed, they would not even have existed!
However, once the “global community” (or whatever) did start to bring pressure to bear on the SA securocrats they probably helped hastened the end of the system a little earlier than it might otherwise have ended?
I think the ANC’s international diplomacy was brilliant.
Also, Dominic, do you have any great leads from there re good info on the Israel-SA nuclear cooperation?
“I note, first of all, that the always hafhearted peace “process” that Peres engaged in in Oslo with the PLO never got anywhere.”
Ah yes, so half-hearted that Yitzak Rabin gave his life, Shimon Peres gave away an election, and Bill Clinton risked an entire legacy on bringing peace to the middle east and a state for Palestinians.
But Helena’s attitude is a good illustration of why many politicians, either in Israel or America, don’t see benefits in sticking their neck out for Palestinians. For all the talk of the “occupation” being the root of the problem. Those politicians who have tried (mightily, despite Helena’s cavalier and arrogant dismissal) have had very little upside to show for it. They just get spit in their face from the Palestinian side, and then suffer the consequences at home.
Helena,
I don’t have anything on Israel-SA nuclear collaboration. Or on nuclear anything, except that Koeberg broke down this year causing big problems in Cape Town. Or on Israel-SA collaboration of any kind, in detail.
The nuclear history is not prominently in the public realm here. I wouldn’t know where to look. It’s acknowledged, and generally accepted, that SA got help from Israel with its bomb. That’s how I have always taken it, but you never know. One day you could wake up and they are all denying it again.
The general SA-Israeli collaboration likewise. What still seems to happen is the use of South African Zionists in the Israeli armed forces. I live in quite a Jewish area with plenty of Zionists among them. I don’t like to think of it much. You could be queuing in the Supermarket behind somebody who has just flown in from a couple of weeks of house-bulldozing, and not know it.
You could be queuing in the Supermarket behind somebody who has just flown in from a couple of weeks of house-bulldozing, and not know it.
Right Dominic. Just think how they feel knowing that there might be a Commie covering their back!
Re: Joshua, “don’t see benefits in sticking their neck out for the Palestinians”
Well, how does the trite story go? To mangle the prose like a collectively punished West Bank apartment : When something is wrong,and one doesn’t stick one’s neck out on behalf of someone currently, visibly oppressed , futilely or not, when they came to oppress me, there were no necks brave enough to stick themselves out for me.
Its not about benefit, Joshua. Its about individual beliefs about right and wrong, and about the manifestation of personal morality and integrity as best as one is humanly able. So long as Israel, the nuclear armed hegemonic occupier, which is certainly under no credible existential threat, “spits At” Res 242 with the support the U.S. veto and submission of the rest of the world, its up to individuals to keep pissing in the wind until the inexorable winds of change change direction and carry that call for justice to the ears, hearts, minds and wallets of those spitters, and spits their venom right back in their face. And thence to Africa, to China, to our to our neighbours, to our hearts command.
Or you could just go home and wait. Somebody’s coming, rest assured.
I blogged:
General Leopoldo “Polo” Cintra Frias prefers not to be compared with Marshall Zhukov, the victor over the Nazi fascists, because Zhukov, although a military genius in the same class as Napoleon Bonaparte, expended an enormous number of casualties in his campaigns.
General Cintra Frias is the kind of general who prefers to save life. He says that one must bear in mind when giving orders that people may be killed (on both sides). Perhaps this is the reason why SADF officers in the army that he defeated at Cuito Cuanavale would not afterwards acknowledge their defeat, because their own casualties were not great, and why even such a person as Moeletsi Mbeki, speaking recently at the COSATU 21st Anniversary celebration, could repeat the myth that our side in the struggle “did not have hard power”.
General Cintra Frias engaged the SADF at Cuito Cuanavale and at the same time brought a strong column from the west to the Namibian border, with an air force of 40 MiGs, stationed at a base that had been prepared beforehand. These moves completely closed down the tactical and strategic options available to the SADF and left Namibia (which the old South African regime was occupying illegally) in hazard. This was the end for the SADF and for the SA apartheid regime. Cintra Frias’ 1988 campaign, with relatively few casualties, secured the freedom of three countries: Angola, Namibia and South Africa.
Minister Ronnie Kasrils would rather compare comrade Cintra Frias with General Vo Nguyen Giap, who defeated both the French and the US forces in the liberation of Vietnam. But maybe this Cuban general is in a class of his own, after all.
General Cintra Frias will address the people assembled at Freedom Park, Salvokop, Pretoria, tomorrow at 10h30 according to the schedule. The Sikhumbuto Wall will be inaugurated, with the names of the many Cubans who did give their lives for our liberation recorded on it.
General Cintra Frias also said that the apartheid regime in the final stages threatened to use nuclear weapons against the Cubans. But, he said, they could have started such a thing but they could not know where it was going to end. In other words, as I understood him, the Cubans ignored this threat and called the nuclear bluff.
Which is evidence for the widely held view that nuclear weapons are useless as war-fighting instruments. The threat is terrible but only as a threat. In the event of the threat being disregarded, the pressure returns back upon the side that is threatening, in a politically devastating form.
“nuclear weapons are useless as war-fighting instruments”
This is especially true in the kind of low-intensity asymmetrical warfare that appears likely to characterize the 21st century. Witness the unfolding defeat of the US military in Iraq.