| Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. How Israel deceived the United States about its nuclear weapons program Trump last month ordered U.S. forces to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, joining Israeli attacks — the culmination of two decades of concern about Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The exposure of Iran's program in 2002 led to a long cat-and-mouse game of negotiations and inspections, resulting in a 2015 international agreement later spurned by Trump as inadequate. We thought the moment was right to remind readers that if Iran has followed a playbook of nuclear deception, it was written by Israel. Jerusalem, too, deceived American officials about its intentions. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, decided in the mid-1950s that Israel needed a nuclear weapon as an insurance policy against its Arab neighbors. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel secretly acquired the technology and material to build nuclear weapons, frequently misleading the U.S. government (and other governments). When U.S. intelligence discovered a secret nuclear facility deep in the desert late in the 1950s, Israeli officials lied to the American Embassy and said it was only a textile plant. When that turned out to be false, Israeli officials offered another explanation: It was purely a metallurgical research installation that did not contain the chemical reprocessing plant needed to produce nuclear weapons. When Israel finally agreed to inspections, American officials were operating under a false assumption — that Israel had no plutonium reprocessing plant. In reality, one was built beneath the reactor. Israelis had built fake walls around the elevators that led to it. Please click the link below to read our full report. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment