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Back on April 20, 2009, Think Tank blogger Steve Coll, author of the authoritative “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, suggested in a commentary in The New Yorker:
Along with two unfinished wars and economic freefall, President Barack Obama has inherited a less visible crisis, which may, in time, trump the others: the deterioration of the global nuclear-nonproliferation regime, which has lately reached its most fragile state of disrepair since the nineteen-eighties. At that time, South Africa became an undeclared nuclear-weapons power, and other newly industrialized nations (Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina, among them) quietly pursued hedging strategies that would allow them to build their own atomic weapons quickly, if they saw the need.Mr. Coll said, “Today, a similar but more dangerous competition—not yet an open nuclear-arms race, but a race for nuclear options—is gaining momentum in the Middle East.” For more, see “No Nukes."
Questions: Why don’t U.S. Administrations ever talk publicly about Israel’s nuclear weapons? Israel is the leading proponent of bombing Iran’s nuclear reactor. While the U.S. looked the other way, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 and one in Syria in 2007.
A good book on Israel’s development of nuclear weapons is Professor Avner Cohen’s 1998 book “Israel and the Bomb.”
