MER - Washington
- 20 March 1998:
While the Americans
force disarmament on Iraq -- with sponsored client-regimes controlling
the region while boycotts and embargoes are used to constrain
all who refuse to submit -- Israel remains the regional Goliath.
Indeed, Israeli military power is said to be
more than 7 times greater than all of the Arab armies
combined; and that's before the ever-present backup of the American
superpower!
Of course it is precisely Israel's super weapons of mass destruction
that are at issue. No country has violated more U.N. resolutions,
defied the international
community,
and refused to sign international treaties and allow international
inspection than Israel. American hypocrisy and duplicity are overwhelmingly
obvious
After 12 years Mordechai Vanunu remains imprisoned in Israel after being
internationally seduced and kidnapped by the Mossad. The fact that
he is no longer held totally in solitary confinement is positive,
but only a very small victory in the struggle to free Vanunu.
It was back in 1986 that Vanunu first told the world about Israel's then
secret arsenal of nuclear weapons. In the article below,
Peter Hounam of THE SUNDAY TIMES in
London, recalls what happened.
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London Sunday Times - March 15, 1998
Peter Hounam recalls how and why
Vanunu broke the story to him
WHISTLEBLOWER WITH A CONSCIENCE
THE tragedy of Mordechai Vanunu began on
the other side of the world,
when he made the fateful decision to disclose
details of his
country's clandestine nuclear program.
Shaking with trepidation, he recounted to
me how he had worked in
Israel's most secret military establishment,
making nuclear warheads
in an underground factory. The account suggested
that Israel had
become the world's sixth biggest nuclear
power. But was it true?
Exhaustive checks confirmed that Mordechai
was a classic dissident -
motivated partly by dissatisfaction with
the way he had been
dismissed from his job, but mostly by a
conviction that his country
had taken an insane course.
He eventually paid a terrible penalty for
warning the world but, even
today, his correspondence shows he is unrepentant.
He firmly denies
that he was a spy or a traitor.
"The truth is important," he told me in
a recent letter. "I will not
let them change my mind."
As the facts unfolded in our initial conversations,
it grew easier to
comprehend Mordechai's decision to become
a whistleblower. He said he
would have understood if, back in the 1960s,
his country had decided
it needed a small number of atomic bombs
- perhaps half a dozen to
deter the hostile Arab states on its borders.
Instead, it established a nuclear plant
near Dimona in the Negev
desert including a state-of-the-art, French-supplied
plutonium
separation plant in a building that extended
six floors underground.
Here the weapons-grade material for making
bombs was chemically
separated from the fuel rods of a nearby
reactor. As he was often in
charge of supervising this immense and complex
process, it was
evident to him that its purpose was to build
several hundred
warheads.
Over and over again, he said to me: "Why
do they want all these
bombs. Are they planning to fight
with them and destroy the Middle
East?"
During his shifts, Mordechai pondered these
issues, pacing the floor
of a control room with instrument panels
stretching 30 yards. He was
often alone. During quiet periods in the
dead of night he explored
other floors and found rooms in which the
plutonium was machined into
bomb parts. He knew this meant Israel had
taken the ultimate step. It
was making thermonuclear weapons capable
of destroying a city.
On October 5, 1986, Mordechai's testimony
was published in The Sunday
Times across pages one, two and three, with
the headline "Revealed:
the secrets of Israel's nuclear arsenal".
Israel immediately adopted a posture of
no comment, as did France.
The United States, Israel's ally, came under
hard questioning from a
number of Arab states, but Mordechai's reaction
was impossible to
gauge. He saw The Sunday Times article while
manacled in an Israeli
cell, following a calamitous error of judgment
on his part.
One day, while walking in London, he had
met an American tourist
called "Cindy". Five days before the story
was published, she
persuaded him to fly to Italy. He realised
she was a Mossad agent
only when he entered a flat in Rome and
was thrown to the floor by
two men. They chained him up
and he was injected with a sedative.
Several days later he was "home" in Israel.
Within weeks, he had been
charged with "helping the enemy" and espionage,
and branded his
country's worst-ever traitor.
It was this cataclysmic development that
put him on the front pages
of newspapers around the world and prompted
a campaign by a small but
dogged group of supporters to secure his
release. The news that the
nightmare of his solitary confinement had
ended brought the first
glimmer of hope that he may soon be a free
man.
Israel, however, must be concerned about
how he will react on his
release, and what further light this might
shed on the nuclear issue.
The Dimona plant is still functioning, with
the capacity to produce
scores of nuclear weapons every year. Unlike
Iraq, Israel seems
immune from any sanctions or even pressure.
Mordechai's letters make
it clear he will not be silenced until this
issue is resolved.