How Britain helped Israel get the bomb

[IndianaGreen]

How Britain helped Israel get the bomb

Newsnight reporter Michael Crick tells the story of how Britain helped Israel build the bomb - without telling the Americans.

By Michael Crick
BBC Newsnight

Documents uncovered by Newsnight in the British National Archives show how, in 1958, Britain agreed to sell Israel 20 tonnes of heavy water, a vital ingredient for the production of plutonium at Israel's top secret Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert.

Robert McNamara, President John F Kennedy's defence secretary, has told Newsnight he is "astonished" at the revelation that Britain kept this secret from America.

In Wednesday's programme, Newsnight reveals how British officials decided it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards on the Israelis, and chose not to insist that Israel use the heavy water only for peaceful purposes.

Earlier the Americans had refused to supply heavy water to Israel without such safeguards.

Making money

The documents unearthed by Newsnight also show British officials decided not to tell Washington about it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4743493.stm

[Jim Sagle]

1. Yesss!!!!!!

:party:

[IndianaGreen]

2. Consequences of Using Nuclear Weapons

Consequences of Using Nuclear Weapons
by Dean Babst and David Krieger*, 1997


Economic Chaos - If Britain decided to use one of its standard Trident submarine nuclear warheads against a Middle East threat, radioactive fallout could land in oil-producing areas. If it did, that area would likely stop production. If production continued, who would buy radioactive oil? Since the Middle East supplies the world with so much oil, decreased production might trigger economic chaos.

<snip>

We have looked at the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, from levels as low as a crude terrorist bomb to a full scale nuclear war. Even at the lowest level of use the consequences would be unimaginably grave, resulting potentially in millions of deaths and social chaos. We must act now to prevent nuclear weapons and nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.

We have also shown that any use of nuclear weapons by a state is ultimately self-destructive. A nuclear attack by a state not only risks full scale nuclear war, which would clearly have disastrous global consequences, but also endangers its own citizens simply through the massive havoc that a nuclear bomb would create in the environment, in global economics, and in distribution lines.

The obvious conclusion is that we must move rapidly to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. We must overcome the worldwide reluctance to face the terrible consequences of nuclear weapons use, accept the fragility of our lives in the Nuclear Age, and work to abolish all nuclear weapons.

http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/1997/00/00_babst_consequences.htm

[Jim Sagle]

3. That's what's great about Israel having a Middle East nuclear monopoly:

Nukes won't be used.

It's all good.

[IndianaGreen]

5. and this is why nuclear parity is the best way to keep peace

as long as one party has a monopoly, war will ensue. The balance of terror worked during the Cold War precisely because we knew, as the Soviets did, that first use of atomic weapons would bring about massive retaliation. Although it came uncomfortably close in 1962, neither side ever pulled the trigger.

The alternative to balance of terror is disarmament! Israel will either give up her nukes, or will have to accept the fact that she won't be the only nuclear power in the region.

BTW, I believe that the US should give up our massive stockpiles of WMD!

[Jim Sagle]

6. Israel is not the aggressor. Therefore your conclusion is bogus.

[IndianaGreen]

10. It has nothing to do with being an aggressor

Obviously you didn't learn anything from the Cold War, the balance of terror prevented the use of nukes. If two parties have parity in nuclear weapons, they are unlikely to use them for fear of the destruction that will be visited on them by the other's retaliation. Ironically, had the US nuked the USSR, the radiation released by American nukes would have eventually found its way to the US. We would all have died!

Bush and his enablers in Congress now want to develop a new generation of nukes that are easy to use, on the pretext that they are intended for deep underground bunkers.

We need to learn the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

Published on Friday, August 5, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun
The Hiroshima Cover-Up
by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

A month after the bombings, two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.

Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Mr. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."

Mr. Burchett's article, headlined "The Atomic Plague," was published Sept. 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation and was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. The official U.S. narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed as "Japanese propaganda" reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.

So when Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller's 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, General MacArthur ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Mr. Weller later summarized his experience with General MacArthur's censors, "They won."

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0805-20.htm

[Jim Sagle]

12. The Mideast doesn't need a balance of power. One side wants to

go on living; the other side wants to kill it. The IMbalance of power we have now is a perfect solution.

[IndianaGreen]

14. Clearly the US role in the region has been a destabilizing one

and having a man in the White House that bases his policies on his daily chats with G-d are not helping the situation any.

The US should stop being the colonial power of the 21st century and, like the British at the end of World War II, we should just pack our bags and let other nations work out their problems among themselves.

[Jim Sagle]

15. I agree.

[thebigidea]

7. did you experience similar throes of joy when Pakistan got the bomb?

[Jim Sagle]

8. No. But then, Pakistan's existence is not threatened.

[thebigidea]

9. I strongly suggest a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima....

If you walk out of there still happy about nuclear weapons and reaching for your party hat, I don't know what else to say.

As far as Pakistan's existence not being threatened, er - have you ever actually spoken to a Pakistani? And mentioned a little country called "India?"

Funnily enough, they might disagree with you. Of course, who cares what they think, right?

[IndianaGreen]

11. Nuclear weapons threaten the existence of the human race

The US should disarm, as should all other nations with atomic weapons. This planet is too fragile and precious to be sacrificed on the altar of stupidity.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. ...and France...and the US....

"France launched Israel on the nuclear path in the late 1950s by building the Dimona reactor, which is still the source of Israel's plutonium--its main nuclear weapon fuel.

"Israel got other nuclear help from the United States, which also supplied a small 5-megawatt (thermal) research reactor at Nahal Soreq."

http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/nuke.html

[Jim Sagle]

13. Yes indeedy.

[IndianaGreen]

16. For those that believe that nuclear weapons are legitimate weapons of war

For those that believe that nuclear weapons are legitimate weapons of war, turn to the Sundance Channel tonight to watch previously classified US film footage of the victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Films reveal original Ground Zero
Cable documentary to air footage from Hiroshima, Nagasaki
By Neely Tucker
The Washington Post
Updated: 2:00 a.m. ET Aug. 6, 2005

In the National Archives in College Park, the reels are numbered 11002 and 11003.

Shot by a U.S. Army Air Forces film crew in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the months after the atomic bombs were dropped, the reels go from one deformed survivor to the next. Women with scalded faces. A man with melted ears. A boy with no skin on his back. A man with such horrific wounds his hands appear to be leprous.

The footage was immediately classified as "top secret" by the military and hidden for nearly three decades.

Images from "the 11000 series," as archivists refer to the 30 hours of footage shot by the crew of Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, make a rare public appearance on television tonight, the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The footage, shot in hospitals and across Japan, forms the bulk of the postwar scenes in "Original Child Bomb," an hour-long film on cable's Sundance Channel. The documentary, drawing its title and antiwar message from a Thomas Merton poem about the A-bomb, debuts at 8 p.m. and repeats throughout the month.

"There are still parts of it I don't want to look at," says Holly Becker, the show's producer. "Certainly we didn't use the worst of what's possible there. . . . But the whole point of the film, of course, is to document the human cost of nuclear war."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8831030/

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