woensdag 27 mei 2015

Israel, ''the bomb'' and the cost in human lives

http://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/main_image_article_page/public/column-image/Dimona%20Israel%20Nuclear.jpg
The reactor in Dimona.

Last Friday the United Sates blocked the issuing of a concluding statement for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference that closed Friday night in New York, following objections voiced by Israel. The balanced final draft of the concluding statement was expected to task the UN secretary general with convening an international conference on making the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone by March 2016. Israel objected to the deadline. As Haaretz reported a few days later Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu thanked the US Secretary of State John Kerry for his intervention, as a comference on making the Middle East nuclear weapons free would have put Israel, the only country in the region that possesses such weapons, in an awkward position.

Maybe this news makes that it is the right moment to link to two publications about Israel's nuclear program. The first is an article by Richard Silverstein (of the blog Tikun Olam) which he recently published on Middle East Eye concerning the many accidents that accompanied the manufacture of the Israeli bomb in its reactor and plant in Dimona, resulting in a quite considerable loss of lives (allthough we may never know exactly how many as everything was always clouded in the utmost secrecy). Silverstein's article is partly a review of the film The Dark Secret of the Dimona Reactor (Part 1 and Part 2 in Hebrew) that Orna Ben Dor produced for Israeli TV.
Silverstein article is to be found here (and was also published by Counterpunch).
The other item is a link (also given by Silverstein in his article) to a very well documented description of what the Dimona reactor is all about under both the headlines ''Xmargedon'' and ''The Dimona Plutonium Nuclear Reactor''. This last article can be found here.

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