US Helped Israel With
H-bomb - 1980s Report Declassified
By RT
February 13, 2015 "ICH"
- "RT"
- Conceding to a federal lawsuit, the
US government agreed to release a 1987
Defense Department report detailing US
assistance to Israel in its development of a
hydrogen bomb, which skirted international
standards.The
386-page report, “Critical
Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO
Nations,” likens top Israeli
nuclear facilities to the Los Alamos and Oak
Ridge National Laboratories that were key in
the development of US nuclear weaponry.
Israelis are
"developing the kind of codes which will
enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is,
codes which detail fission and fusion
processes on a microscopic and macroscopic
level,” said the report, the release of
which comes before Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu's March 3 speech in front
of the US Congress in which he will oppose
any deal that allows Iran's legal nuclear
program to persist.
"I am struck by the
degree of cooperation on specialized war
making devices between Israel and the US,"
Roger Mattson, a formerly of the Atomic
Energy Commission’s technical staff,
said of the report, according to
Courthouse News.
The report’s release
earlier this week was initiated by a Freedom
of Information Act request made three years
ago by Grant Smith, director of the
Washington think tank Institute for
Research: Middle Eastern Policy. Smith filed
a lawsuit in September in order to compel
the Pentagon to substantially address the
request.
"It's our basic
position that in 1987 the Department of
Defense discovered that Israel had a nuclear
weapons program, detailed it and then has
covered it up for 25 years in violation of
the Symington and Glenn amendments, costing
taxpayers $86 billion,”
Smith said during a hearing in late 2014
before Judge Tanya Chutkan in US District
Court for the District of Columbia.
Smith described in his
federal court complaint how those federal
laws were violated by the US in the midst of
Israel’s budding nuclear program.
"The Symington
Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of
1961 prohibits most U.S. foreign aid to any
country found trafficking in nuclear
enrichment equipment or technology outside
international safeguards,”
Smith wrote.
“The Glenn Amendment
of 1977 calls for an end to U.S. foreign aid
to countries that import nuclear
reprocessing technology."
In November, Judge Chutkan
asked government lawyers resistant to the
report’s release why it had taken years for
the government to prepare the report for
public consumption.
“I’d like to know what
is taking so long for a 386-page document.
The document was located some time ago,”
Chutkan said,
according to Courthouse News Service.
“I've reviewed my
share of documents in my career. It should
not take that long to review that document
and decide what needs to be redacted.”
image from the report
“Critical Technology Assessment in
Israel and NATO Nations"
The government’s
representatives in the case -- Special
Assistant US Attorney Laura Jennings and
Defense Department counsel Mark Herrington
-- initially said confidentiality agreements
required a “line by line” review of
the Defense Department’s report. They later
shifted, arguing that its release is
optional and not mandatory, as
"diplomatic relations dictate that DoD seeks
Israel's review."
Smith and the US agreed
that the government would redact sections of
the report on NATO countries, though the
passages on Israel remain intact.
"The capability of
SOREQ [Soreq Nuclear Research Center] to
support SDIO [Strategic Defense Initiative
Organization, or “Star Wars”] and nuclear
technologies is almost an exact parallel of
the capability currently existing at our
National Laboratories,"
said the report, written by the Institute
for Defense Analysis for the Department of
Defense.
"SOREQ and Dimona/Beer
Sheva facilities are the equivalent of our
Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge
National Laboratories...[and have] the
technology base required for nuclear weapons
design and fabrication."
The report’s authors Edwin
Townsley and Clarence Robinson found that
Israel to had Category 1 capability
regarding its anti-tactical ballistic
missile and “Star Wars” weapons
programs.
"As far as nuclear
technology is concerned the Israelis are
roughly where the U.S. [w]as in the fission
weapon field in about 1955 to 1960,”
the report said. “It should be noted
that the Israelis are developing the kind of
codes which will enable them to make
hydrogen bombs."
In a statement on the
report’s release, Smith said Thursday,
"Informal and Freedom of Information Act
release of such information is rare. Under
two known gag orders -- punishable by
imprisonment -- U.S. security-cleared
government agency employees and contractors
may not disclose that Israel has a nuclear
weapons program."
Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu’s planned
address before the US Congress was
controversially arranged by Republican
leadership without consultation of
congressional Democrats or the White House.
The speech will occur
weeks before Netanyahu will
seek reelection, and is to center around
his opposition to any agreement with Iran
over its nuclear program, a deal the US
-- while levying heavy sanctions on Tehran
-- has pursued despite protests from its
preeminent ally in the Middle East, Israel.
Tehran’s nuclear program
is legal under the terms of the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to
which Israel is one of the few United
Nations members that is not a signatory.
© Autonomous Nonprofit
Organization “TV-Novosti”
