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Nuclear Notebook: Israeli nuclear weapons, 2021

Nuclear Notebook: Israeli nuclear weapons, 2021  https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-01/nuclear-notebook-israeli-nuclear-weapons-2021/

By Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, January 17, 2022,  onducting research on Israeli nuclear weapons has historically been very challenging, not least because Israel purposely does not acknowledge its own possession of nuclear weapons. Moreover, Western governments normally do not include Israel in their descriptions of nuclear-armed states. Additionally, Israeli nuclear whistleblowers have faced significant penalties; in 1986, former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence services and spent 18 years in prison after giving a detailed interview about Israel’s nuclear program to the Sunday Times (Myre 2004). This chilling effect means that individuals with knowledge of Israel’s nuclear program have been understandably reluctant to provide on-the-record information, which dilutes the ability of open-source researchers to analyze Israel’s nuclear forces. Thankfully, over the past two decades, historians like Avner Cohen and William Burr have contributed invaluable research that has made previously unknown nuances of Israel’s opaque nuclear policy available to the public.1

Additionally, since 1997 a US law known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment has prohibited US companies from publishing satellite imagery at a resolution that is “no more detailed or precise than satellite imagery of Israel that is available from commercial sources.” For decades, this has meant that the majority of commercially available satellite imagery of Israel has been limited to a resolution of approximately two meters, making it very difficult to analyze in detail. However, in June 2020, the US Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs Office announced that it would now allow commercial imagery providers to offer enhanced imagery of Israel at a resolution of 0.4 meters (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2020). The move was made in order to bring American imagery providers in line with their foreign counterparts, which had already been producing imagery at that level for several years. As a result, we have incorporated higher-resolution imagery into this article.

January 18, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized