[[link removed]]

THE NUCLEAR EXPLOSION THAT MAKES US AID TO ISRAEL ILLEGAL  
[[link removed]]


 

James Bamford
March 29, 2024
The Nation
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Israel’s nuclear program has been in violation of international
law for decades, rendering it ineligible for American assistance. _

Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona.,

 

The researchers were startled as they looked up and saw the coal-black
sky suddenly turn into a brilliant, multicolored aurora. As
geophysicists with Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute
[[link removed]],
they were wintering over at an isolated ice station near
Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land, a place where the temperature has
dropped to as low as minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. At about the same
time, half the earth away in Puerto Rico, the giant
1,000-foot Arecibo radio telescope
[[link removed]] picked up an
unusual disturbance. An odd and powerful electromagnetic ripple
appeared on the lower surface of the ionosphere. And 1,200 miles to
the north on the Atlantic coast of Florida, in a secret US government
lab, long thin styluses like a spider’s legs began swinging back
and forth tracing two hump-shaped images
[[link removed]] on a rolling
sheet of graph paper.

The computer’s action was triggered by a signal from a satellite in
the frigid blackness of deep space, 67,000 miles above Earth
[[link removed]]. Shaped like a
giant, 26-sided Christmas tree ornament and hanging weightlessly in
the empty void, VELA 6911 was one of a series of satellites designed
to act as America’s sentinels in space, watching for signs of
nuclear detonations on any part of the planet. And in the early
morning of September 22, 1979
[//efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs26degeer.pdf],
at 00:52:43 UTC, VELA 6911’s sensitive instruments recorded what
appeared to be a very bright flash, followed quickly by a second. They
were the classic indicators of a powerful nuclear explosion. Somewhere
down below, as close as someone can come to terra incognita, a rogue
country had set off a nuclear bomb. A rogue country that was hoping
not to get caught. It was the first and only time in history that a
clandestine nuclear blast has taken place. And based on its analysis,
US intelligence agencies concluded that the rogue country was Israel.

Now, 45 years later, that explosion could play a significant role in
bringing an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza by using
American lawfare [[link removed]] to halt
Israeli warfare—finally enforcing US laws that would cut off all
aid, including the billions and billions of dollars and the tons and
tons of weapons Israel now receives. For decades, these laws, enacted
by Congress to halt harmful and destructive actions by rogue actors,
have been deliberately ignored with regard to Israel. Clearly, they
must now be enforced.

Just this week, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human
rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, issued a report
titled, “Anatomy of a Genocide
[[link removed]].”
It declared that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the
threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against
Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met.” A few days earlier,
the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had warned
[[link removed]] that
“any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel” could violate
international humanitarian law. This week, a Gallup poll
[[link removed]] indicated
that most Americans disapprove of Israel’s war in Gaza as well as of
sending them military aid to fight it.

Hours after the sky lit up from the blast, confirmation that it was a
nuclear explosion came from another US government facility, this one
on remote Ascension Island
[[link removed]].
A bleak and rugged volcanic speck in the middle of the South Atlantic
Ocean, it lies near the equator between Africa and South America and
is one of the most secret places on the planet. No one is allowed on
the island without the approval of the US and British governments. In
addition to a massive British eavesdropping base that targets
countries on both continents, the island is also home to an American
facility that monitors all undersea activity throughout the Atlantic.
And because, at a certain depth, hydroacoustic signals travel through
the water at about 5,000 feet per second, the sound of the massive
blast was detected about 110 minutes after it took place.

In the netherworld of US intelligence, the rogue atomic explosion was
shocking. The Jimmy Carter White House was quickly notified, and,
following a series of highly classified meetings, spy agencies became
unanimous in their view. “The Intelligence Community has high
confidence, after intense technical scrutiny of satellite data, that a
low yield atmospheric nuclear explosion occurred in the early morning
hours of September 22,” said a Secret/Sensitive Department of State
document [[link removed]].

Attention, as a result, turned immediately to Israel. Its nuclear
facility in the desert at Dimona had long since ceased to be a secret,
and the question wasn’t whether Israel could construct a nuclear
weapon but how many it had already built. However, while constructing
them secretly inside a building is one thing, secretly testing them
out in the open without getting caught is much more difficult.
Addressing the issue of “A Secret Test by Israel,” another CIA
document outlined a number of reasons
[[link removed]] the state might
have wanted to carry out a hidden nuclear test. Among them was
“developing the fission trigger [an atom bomb] for a thermonuclear
weapon [an hydrogen bomb]…. A low-yield nuclear test conducted
clandestinely at sea could have enabled them to make basic
measurements of the device’s performance.”

The report concluded
[//efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001108246.pdf],
“Indeed, of all the countries which might have been responsible for
the 22 September event, Israel would probably have been the only one
for which a clandestine approach would have been virtually its only
option.” And President Carter noted in his White House dairy
[[link removed]] at
the time, “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the
Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near
the southern end of Africa.”

The VELA satellite system was designed in particular to watch for
rogue tests by nuclear pariah states like Israel, one of the very few
countries that had refused to sign both the 1970 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention,
in spite of the fact that it had an illegal hidden arsenal of nuclear
weapons and a secret biological weapons program. The problem for
Israel—and a key reason for the secrecy involving the tests—was
the Glenn Amendment
[[link removed]] to
the US Arms Export Control Act. Passed by Congress in 1977, the
amendment aimed particularly at the nuclear pariah states. It mandated
an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive
US sanctions, if the president determined that any state (other than
the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)
detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. The nuclear test was also a
clear violation of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, to which Israel
was a party.

Under US law, Israel _must _be banned from receiving its annual
package of billions of dollars and arsenal of bombs. In a
2016 _Haaretz_ column, Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former
commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, laid out the
penalties
[[link removed]]:
“The sanctions for detonating a nuclear explosion are tough:
termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act,
termination of sales of defense equipment and military financing,
prohibition of loans from US banks, and more. In other words, if the
U.S. government were to conclude Israel detonated a nuclear explosion
after 1977, the law, unless waived, would effectively end all US aid
to Israel.” Newell Highsmith, who spent three decades with the State
Department and was responsible for legal issues related to
nonproliferation, agrees
[[link removed]].
“Glenn Amendment sanctions for detonation or receipt of a nuclear
explosive device have been viewed as a ‘death sentence’ because of
the breadth of sanctions and because there is no presidential
waiver,” he wrote last year for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.

In addition to the violation of the Glenn Amendment, Israel is also in
violation of the Symington Amendment
[//efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1536&context=clr],
which has similar penalties for any country that delivers nuclear
materials and technology to another country. Israel had a long history
of friendship and cooperation with apartheid South Africa, and in
addition to supplying millions of dollars worth of weapons to help
violently suppress the country’s Black majority population, it also
provided
[//efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1536&context=clr] nuclear
weapons materials and offered to sell the racist regime nuclear
warheads to keep it in power. In return, Israel received uranium from
South Africa to develop its weapons.

For decades, US presidents and members of Congress have willfully
turned a blind eye to Israel’s extensive violations of American
laws. Earlier this month, Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen
and seven other senators, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jeff
Merkley of Oregon, sent a strong letter to President Joe Biden. It
urged him to enforce section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act by
requiring Israel to stop restricting humanitarian aid access to Gaza
or forfeit military aid from the US. The law prohibits the sale and
transfer of military weapons to any nation that restricts the delivery
of US aid, precisely what Israel is doing in its deliberate war of
starvation against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “We need the
president and the Biden administration to push harder and to use all
the levers of US policy to ensure people don’t die of starvation,”
Van Hollen told _The Guardian_
[[link removed].].

At the same time that US administrations were failing to enforce the
ban on nuclear weapons testing by Israel, they also deliberately
engaged in a campaign of censorship, lies, and disinformation to hide
the truth from the American public. The Clinton White House even
promulgated a regulation
[[link removed]] that
threatens past and present government employees with harsh actions,
including firing, if they publicly acknowledge that Israel has nuclear
weapons. “All US government employees are forced to pretend they
know nothing about Israeli nuclear weapons,” former NRC commissioner
Gilinsky wrote in the _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_
[[link removed]].
“Since everyone knows it’s not true, the pretense hobbles
America’s policy on restraining the spread of nuclear weapons in the
Middle East.”

Because of this official gag order, Americans are deliberately kept in
the dark regarding the dangerousness of Israel’s illegal stockpile
of nuclear weapons—weapons that have never been subject to
international inspection and are therefore of questionable safety. And
then there is the problem of that secret cache of nuclear weapons
being controlled by a number of top Israeli officials whose extreme
positions would sanction their use. Last November, Israeli Minister
Amichai Eliyahu said one of Israel’s options in the war is to drop a
nuclear bomb on Gaza. “That’s one way
[[link removed]],”
he said. Another Israeli official, Revital “Tally” Gotliv, urged
her government
[[link removed]] to
use “everything in its arsenal,” including “doomsday” weapons,
against Hamas. “Who would have imagined that, just as we have been
worrying about Pakistani weapons falling into the hands of Islamic
fanatics, we would come to the point where we have to fear Israel’s
nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Israeli fanatics?” said
Gilinsky.

With hundreds of drone attacks in the region and missiles flying back
and forth, there is also the danger of one of them deliberately or
accidentally hitting Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant and
setting off a nuclear catastrophe. Last October, according to Israeli
reports
[[link removed]],
“Incoming rocket sirens are sounding in the Southern Negev region,
close to the southern city of Dimona.” Adding to the danger is more
than half a century’s worth of volatile nuclear waste, numbering
hundreds of tons, in shallow trenches at the nuclear weapons
complex—material that, unless carefully disposed of, could turn
Dimona into another Chernobyl.

Americans are being deliberately lied to by their own government as to
Israel’s vast and deadly nuclear stockpile, largely built with
nuclear materials stolen from the United States
[[link removed].].
For those on Capitol Hill and in the White House, the incentive for
keeping Israel’s secret—and thus allowing it to avoid US laws—is
money and power. Millions in campaign donations from wealthy
pro-Israel supporters and PACs, and power from lobbies like AIPAC. In
1979, rather than take any actions against Israel, President Carter,
like those in the White House before and after him, did nothing.
Carter has acknowledged this
[[link removed]] in years
since, writing that the “reluctance to criticize any policies of the
Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts”
of AIPAC.

The strength of AIPAC is something CNN’s Wolf Blitzer knows a great
deal about. Before his gig with cable news, he was a top propagandist
for AIPAC
[[link removed]].
There is, he noted
[[link removed]],
“a widely held attitude among Israeli officials that Israel can get
away with the most outrageous things. There is a notion among many
Israelis that their American counterparts are not too bright, that
they can be ‘handled.’”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders apparently agrees, having repeatedly
warned that Israel is violating both international and US laws. “To
pretend that Israel is not violating international law or interfering
with US humanitarian aid is absurd on its face,” he said this week
[[link removed]].
“The State Department’s position makes a mockery of US law and
assurances provided to Congress.” Nevertheless, he concluded that
“relatively few Democrats are prepared to pull the trigger and say,
‘You know what, hey, Mr. Netanyahu. You continue that and you’re
not getting another nickel in American aid.’ Why’s that so? I
guess it has a lot to do with AIPAC.”

Sanders then pointed his finger at the White House. “And it’s a
lot to do with the president,” he said. Indeed, Joe Biden, during
his time in the Senate, was the number-one recipient in Congress of
pro-Israel millions—which apparently put him at the top of
Israel’s list of “not-too-bright American politicians” that can
be “handled” with bags of cash. While vice president in 2011,
Biden gave an address to a group of fundraisers and supporters of the
Yeshiva Beth Yehuda school in Detroit. “I’ve raised more money
from AIPAC than some of you have,” he said
[[link removed]] to
applause. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you,” he added.
“I’m not.”

For the White House and Congress, it’s time to rip off the gag, stop
being “handled,” reject the cash, and enforce the law with
Israel—including the Glenn and Symington amendments. If its leaders
want to secretly explode nuclear weapons, sell nuclear materials to
racist countries, violate treaties, commit war crimes, and engage in
ethnic genocide, America’s billions, bombs, and backing should not
be making it possible.

_JAMES BAMFORD is a best-selling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and
winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. His most recent
book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of
America's Counterintelligence
[[link removed]],
published by Twelve Books._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
[[link removed]].
Distributed by PARS International Corp
[[link removed]]. _

_Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the
breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of
the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical,
independent, and progressive voice in American journalism._

_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
[[link removed]] to
The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Israel
[[link removed]]
* nuclear weapons
[[link removed]]
* U.S. military aid
[[link removed]]
* international law
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]