The US should hold Israel to the same standards as other countries and end its decades-long ambiguity over Israel’s secretive nuclear capabilities, a group of 30 House Democrats has said.
The lawmakers signed a joint letter on Monday and sent it to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “We are, in the fullest sense, fighting this war side by side with a country whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge,” they wrote.
They said that since American service personnel were deployed in the region, Congress had a constitutional responsibility “to be fully informed about the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration's planning and contingencies for such scenarios”.
“We do not believe we have received that information,” the politicians said.
The letter was led by Congressman Joaquin Castro, and the signatories include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal.
Israel is one of only five countries not to be party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stipulates that states that do not already have nuclear weapons cannot obtain them.
This means that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has no way to monitor or verify Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
Israel has a policy of neither confirming nor denying its nuclear programme - though its existence has been an open secret for decades.
It is believed to possess around 90 nuclear warheads and enough plutonium to produce around 200 more nuclear weapons, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Israel is said to have between 750 and 1,110kg of plutonium, which would be enough to build 187 to 277 nuclear weapons.
The US lawmakers said that Washington could not develop a coherent nonproliferation policy for the Middle East, including about Iran’s civil nuclear programme and Saudi Arabia’s civil nuclear ambitions, “while maintaining a policy of official silence” about Israel, a party to a conflict “which the United States is a direct participant”.
“We ask that you hold Israel to the same standard of transparency that the United States expects from any other country that may be pursuing or retaining nuclear weapons capability,” they concluded.
Israel’s nuclear project began in the 1950s, initially with the help of France and without the knowledge of Washington.
Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American historian and professor, is one of the most prominent researchers on Israel’s nuclear history and has written several books on the subject, including Israel and the Bomb.
“About half a century ago Israel acquired nuclear weapons capability, but it has done so in a manner unlike any other nuclear weapons state did, prior or after,” he told Middle East Eye last year.
His research, which includes analysis of recently declassified US documents, found that Washington during the late 1950s and early 1960s repeatedly questioned Israel about what it was doing at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert.
US officials inspected the site on eight occasions between 1961 and 1969. During these visits, an underground separation plant, essential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium, was concealed.
Other parts of the site were camouflaged to disguise the purpose of the complex.
By the end of the 1960s, the US had finally learned the true purpose of Dimona. According to Cohen, a secret deal was struck, still in place, that Washington would not ask questions if Israel kept quiet.
“In 1969, the US accepted the Israeli exceptionalist nuclear status, as long as Israel was committed to keeping its presence invisible and opaque. This is known as the 1969 Nixon-Meir nuclear deal,” Cohen told MEE, referring to then-leaders Richard Nixon and Golda Meir.
