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TonyGosling
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 Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2018 10:33 pm Post subject: The Samson Option: nuclear war if Israel is threatened |
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| TonyGosling wrote: | Operation Samson: Israel's Deployment of Nuclear Missiles on Subs from Germany
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/israel-deploys-nuclear-weapo ns-on-german-built-submarines-a-836784.html
Many have wondered for years about the exact capabilities of the submarines Germany exports to Israel. Now, experts in Germany and Israel have confirmed that nuclear-tipped missiles have been deployed on the vessels. And the German government has long known about it. By SPIEGEL
The pride of the Israeli navy is rocking gently in the swells of the Mediterranean, with the silhouette of the Carmel mountain range reflected on the water's surface. To reach the Tekumah, you have to walk across a wooden jetty at the pier in the port of Haifa, and then climb into a tunnel shaft leading to the submarine's interior. The navy officer in charge of visitors, a brawny man in his 40s with his eyes hidden behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, bounces down the steps. When he reaches the lower deck, he turns around and says: "Welcome on board the Tekumah. Welcome to my toy."
He pushes back a bolt and opens the refrigerator, revealing zucchini, a pallet of yoghurt cups and a two-liter bottle of low-calorie cola. The Tekumah has just returned from a secret mission in the early morning hours.
The navy officer, whose name the military censorship office wants to keep secret, leads the visitors past a pair of bunks and along a steel frame. The air smells stale, not unlike the air in the living room of an apartment occupied solely by men. At the middle of the ship, the corridor widens and merges into a command center, with work stations grouped around a periscope. The officer stands still and points to a row of monitors, with signs bearing the names of German electronics giant Siemens and Atlas, a Bremen-based electronics company, screwed to the wall next to them.
The "Combat Information Center," as the Israelis call the command center, is the heart of the submarine, the place where all information comes together and all the operations are led. The ship is controlled from two leather chairs. It looks as if it could be in the cockpit of a small aircraft. A display lit up in red shows that the vessel's keel is currently located 7.15 meters (23.45 feet) below sea level.
"This was all built in Germany, according to Israeli specifications," the navy officer says,"and so were the weapons systems." The Tekumah, 57 meters long and 7 meters wide, is a showpiece of precision engineering, painted in blue and made in Germany. To be more precise, it is a piece of precision engineering made in Germany that is suitable for equipping with nuclear weapons.
No Room for Doubt
Deep in their interiors, on decks 2 and 3, the submarines contain a secret that even in Israel is only known to a few insiders: nuclear warheads, small enough to be mounted on a cruise missile, but explosive enough to execute a nuclear strike that would cause devastating results. This secret is considered one of the best kept in modern military history. Anyone who speaks openly about it in Israel runs the risk of being sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
Research SPIEGEL has conducted in Germany, Israel and the United States, among current and past government ministers, military officials, defense engineers and intelligence agents, no longer leaves any room for doubt: With the help of German maritime technology, Israel has managed to create for itself a floating nuclear weapon arsenal: submarines equipped with nuclear capability.
Foreign journalists have never boarded one of the combat vessels before. In an unaccustomed display of openness, senior politicians and military officials with the Jewish state were, however, now willing to talk about the importance of German-Israeli military cooperation and Germany's role, albeit usually under the condition of anonymity. "In the end, it's very simple," says Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. "Germany is helping to defend Israel's security. The Germans can be proud of the fact that they have secured the existence of the State of Israel for many years to come."
On the other hand, any research that did take place in Israel was subject to censorship. Quotes by Israelis, as well as the photographer's pictures, had to be submitted to the military. Questions about Israel's nuclear capability, whether on land or on water, were taboo. And decks 2 and 3, where the weapons are kept, remained off-limits to the visitors.
In Germany, the government's military assistance for Israel's submarine program has been controversial for about 25 years, a topic of discussion for the media and the parliament. Chancellor Angela Merkel fears the kind of public debate that German Nobel literature laureate Günter Grass recently reignited with a poem critical of Israel. Merkel insists on secrecy and doesn't want the details of the deal to be made public. To this day, the German government is sticking to its position that it does not know anything about an Israeli nuclear weapons program.
'Purposes of Nuclear Capability'
But now, former top German officials have admitted to the nuclear dimension for the first time. "I assumed from the very beginning that the submarines were supposed to be nuclear-capable," says Hans Rühle, the head of the planning staff at the German Defense Ministry in the late 1980s. Lothar Rühl, a former state secretary in the Defense Ministry, says that he never doubted that "Israel stationed nuclear weapons on the ships." And Wolfgang Ruppelt, the director of arms procurement at the Defense Ministry during the key phase, admits that it was immediately clear to him that the Israelis wanted the ships "as carriers for weapons of the sort that a small country like Israel cannot station on land." Top German officials speaking under the protection of anonymity were even more forthcoming. "From the beginning, the boats were primarily used for the purposes of nuclear capability," says one ministry official with knowledge of the matter.
Insiders say that the Israeli defense technology company Rafael built the missiles for the nuclear weapons option. Apparently it involves a further development of cruise missiles of the Popeye Turbo SLCM type, which are supposed to have a range of around 1,500 kilometers (940 miles) and which could reach Iran with a warhead weighing up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds). The nuclear payload comes from the Negev Desert, where Israel has operated a reactor and an underground plutonium separation plant in Dimona since the 1960s. The question of how developed the Israeli cruise missiles are is a matter of debate. Their development is a complex project, and the missiles' only public manifestation was a single test that the Israelis conducted off the coast of Sri Lanka.
The submarines are the military response to the threat in a region "where there is no mercy for the weak," Defense Minister Ehud Barak says. They are an insurance policy against the Israelis' fundamental fear that "the Arabs could slaughter us tomorrow," as David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel, once said. "We shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter," was the lesson Ben-Gurion and others drew from Auschwitz.
Armed with nuclear weapons, the submarines are a signal to any enemy that the Jewish state itself would not be totally defenseless in the event of a nuclear attack, but could strike back with the ultimate weapon of retaliation. The submarines are "a way of guaranteeing that the enemy will not be tempted to strike pre-emptively with non-conventional weapons and get away scot-free," as Israeli Admiral Avraham Botzer puts it.
Questions of Global Political Responsibility
In this version of tit-for-tat, known as nuclear second-strike capability, hundreds of thousands of dead are avenged with an equally large number of casualties. It is a strategy the United States and Russia practiced during the Cold War by constantly keeping part of its nuclear arsenal ready on submarines. For Israel, a country about the size of the German state of Hesse, which could be wiped out with a nuclear strike, safeguarding this threat potential is vital to its very existence. At the same time, the nuclear arsenal causes countries like Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to regard Israel's nuclear capacity with fear and envy and consider building their own nuclear weapons.
This makes the question of its global political responsibility all the more relevant for Germany. Should Germany, the country of the perpetrators, be allowed to assist Israel, the land of the victims, in the development of a nuclear weapons arsenal capable of extinguishing hundreds of thousands of human lives?
Is Berlin recklessly promoting an arms race in the Middle East? Or should Germany, as its historic obligation stemming from the crimes of the Nazis, assume a responsibility that has become "part of Germany's reason of state," as Chancellor Merkel said in a speech to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in March 2008? "It means that for me, as a German chancellor, Israel's security is never negotiable," Merkel told the lawmakers.
The perils of such unconditional solidarity were addressed by Germany's new president, Joachim Gauck, during his first official visit to Jerusalem last Tuesday: "I don't want to imagine every scenario that could get the chancellor in tremendous trouble, when it comes to politically implementing her statement that Israel's security is part of Germany's reason of state."
The German government has always pursued an unwritten rule on its Israel policy, which has already lasted half a century and survived all changes of administrations, and that former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder summarized in 2002 when he said: "I want to be very clear: Israel receives what it needs to maintain its security."
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Part 1: Israel's Deployment of Nuclear Missiles on Subs from Germany
Part 2: Franz-Josef Strauss and the Beginnings of Illegal Arms Cooperation
Part 3: First Submarines Are Secretly Assembled in England
Part 4: The Shipyards of Kiel
Part 5: The Germans and the Atomic Question: No Questions, No Problems
Part 6: The Deal for Submarine Number Six |
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http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
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TonyGosling
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Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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TonyGosling
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Joined: 25 Jul 2005
Posts: 18335
Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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| Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2019 1:10 am Post subject: |
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Israel’s Secretive Nuclear Facility Leaking as Watchdog Finds Israel Has Nearly 100 Nukes
Israel is one of only five nations in the world that refuse to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international treaty aimed at ending the proliferation of nuclear weapons and achieving global nuclear disarmament.
by Whitney Webb
June 17th, 2019
By Whitney Webb Whitney Webb
https://www.mintpressnews.com/international-watchdog-finds-israel-has- nearly-100-nuclear-weapons/259274/
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) — an international watchdog organization focusing on conflicts, the arms trade and nuclear proliferation — released a new report on Monday that claimed that Israel has nearly a hundred nuclear warheads, more than previously thought.
The SIPRI report described Israel’s nuclear arsenal as follows: 30 gravity bombs capable of delivering nuclear weapons by fighter jets; an additional 50 warheads that can be delivered by land-based ballistic missiles; and an unknown number of nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles that would grant Israel a sea-based second-strike capability.
In total, the SIPRI report estimated that Israel possesses between 80 and 90 nuclear weapons, an increase over previous years. SIPRI was unable, however, to confirm those estimates with Israel’s government, which has a long-standing policy of refusing to comment on its nuclear weapons program — a policy it describes as “nuclear ambiguity.”
As a result of this “nuclear ambiguity” policy, the actual number of Israeli nuclear weapons is unknown. Some other organizations, such as the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, have estimated that Israel has produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to arm between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads. Israel is one of only five nations in the world that refuse to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international treaty aimed at ending the proliferation of nuclear weapons and achieving global nuclear disarmament.
Israel Nuclear Weapons graph
Credit | The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook 2019
During a speech last August in front of the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to use nuclear weapons to “wipe out” Israel’s enemies. More recently, Netanyahu and his allies in the U.S. accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, despite the fact that intelligence agencies of both the U.S. and Israel have long recognized that Iran has no such program.
Unsafe, but only for those whose lives don’t matter
Just as the new SIPRI report has again brought scrutiny to Israel’s nuclear program, new information about Israel’s nuclear facility — the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which houses the Dimona reactor — has also raised concerns about the facility’s safety.
Late last week, an Israeli court heard arguments that the site had leaked radioactive waste on more than one occasion and that information about those leaks had been hidden from some of the facility’s employees. One of those employees, Faridi Taweel, is suing the facility after learning he had cancer, which he suspects was the result of exposure to leaked radioactive material at the site.
The exposure of the numerous leaks at the Dimona facility is greatly concerning, especially in light of the revelation just a few years ago that the Dimona reactor is believed, according to a group of Israeli scientists, to have an estimated 1,537 defects. Israel has reportedly refused to consider replacing or fixing the aging nuclear core.
The fact that the site has leaked and is rife with defects should be a major issue for Israelis, as the facility is just 30 miles south of Israel’s capital Tel Aviv. Yet it is the city of Dimona itself that is in the greatest danger, as it is located just eight miles from the highly defective reactor.
But Dimona is largely populated by Jews from Northern Africa. This minority, referred to as “Black Hebrews” in Israel, is routinely discriminated against by Israel’s government, a recent example of which was the revelation of a covert Israeli government program of forcibly sterilizing African Jewish immigrants.
In addition to its large population of African Jews, Dimona and the surrounding Negev Desert are home to several Palestinian Bedouin villages, villages that are frequently labeled as “illegal” and demolished by Israel’s government. The fact that there is no political will or effort to clean up the site or prevent future leaks, coupled with the fact that the most at-risk populations are minorities frequently discriminated against by Israel’s government, reveals yet another troubling and overlooked aspect of Israel’s secretive nuclear program.
Feature photo | A Titan II missile in a silo at the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Ariz. Photo | Department of Defense
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
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www.thisweek.org.uk
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www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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TonyGosling
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| Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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U.S. Author Gets Apology In Libel Case
By Lawrence Van Gelder
Aug. 19, 1994
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/19/world/us-author-gets-apology-in-lib el-case.html
August 19, 1994, Section A, Page 11Buy Reprints
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.
An American author and his British publisher yesterday accepted substantial damages and an apology that effectively ended a libel action brought against them in English courts by Robert Maxwell and his newspaper company before his death.
The out-of-court settlement announced in High Court in London also ended a countersuit brought by the author, Seymour M. Hersh, and the publisher, Faber & Faber Ltd. The Maxwell lawsuit was prompted by Mr. Hersh's 1991 book "The Samson Option," about Israel's nuclear weapons program.
In yesterday's proceedings, a lawyer for the Mirror Group, which was controlled by Mr. Maxwell before his death in November 1991, said it acknowledged that Mr. Hersh "is an author of excellent reputation and of the highest integrity who would never write anything which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in writing what he did." Ties to Mossad
Mr. Hersh's book said Mr. Maxwell had ties with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and that Nicholas Davies, foreign editor of The Daily Mirror, the flagship of Mr. Maxwell's newspaper empire, had helped arrange the sale of Israeli arms to Iran as well as help Israeli agents kidnap an Israeli nuclear technician.
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Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Davies denied the allegations. The two men and the Mirror Group Newspapers filed their lawsuit in October 1991.
Mr. Maxwell's legal action died with him. Michael Nussbaum of Washington, Mr. Hersh's lawyer in the United States and a participant in the negotiations that led to the settlement, said Mr. Davies, who was later dismissed from The Daily Mirror, had not pursued the case.
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The Mirror Group, in addition to apologizing to Mr. Hersh and Faber & Faber and agreeing to pay them damages, also agreed to pay their legal costs. Mr. Nussbaum said terms of the settlement precluded him from disclosing the exact amount of the damages.
Mr. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre. He was later a reporter for The New York Times. He was not available for comment yesterday.
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http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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TonyGosling
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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Israel IS a 'nuclear power'! Benjamin Netanyahu appears to admit for the first time that his country has atomic weapons... before correcting mistake
Israel is widely believed to have an atomic arsenal but has never confirmed it
Netanyahu stumbled at the weekly cabinet meeting while reading in Hebrew
'The significance of this project is that we are turning Israel into a nuclear power'
The politician, 70, smiled and quickly corrected himself to say 'energy power'
By JAMES GANT FOR MAILONLINE
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7853665/Netanyahu-appears-adm it-time-Israel-atomic-weapons-correcting-mistake.html
PUBLISHED: 12:43, 5 January 2020 | UPDATED: 13:57, 5 January 2020
View comments
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Israel as a nuclear power before correcting himself with a bashful nod and an embarrassed smile.
Israel is widely believed to have an atomic arsenal but has never confirmed or denied it has nuclear weapons, maintaining a policy of ambiguity for decades.
Netanyahu, 70, stumbled at the weekly cabinet meeting while reading in Hebrew prepared remarks on a deal with Greece and Cyprus on a subsea gas pipeline.
Netanyahu (pictured today), 70, stumbled at the weekly cabinet meeting while reading in Hebrew prepared remarks on a deal with Greece and Cyprus on a subsea gas pipeline +5
Netanyahu (pictured today), 70, stumbled at the weekly cabinet meeting while reading in Hebrew prepared remarks on a deal with Greece and Cyprus on a subsea gas pipeline
'The significance of this project is that we are turning Israel into a nuclear power,' he said, before quickly correcting himself to say 'energy power'.
He then paused, acknowledging his slip of the tongue with a smile, and carried on with his comments.
The rare blooper from one of Israel's most polished politicians led to swift mockery on social media.
Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival in a March 2 vote after two inconclusive elections in April and September.
In November, he was indicted on corruption charges, which he denies.
And Israel was last week drawn into the battle between the US and Iran following President Donald Trump's drone strike on General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is understood to have briefed Israel ahead of time about their plans to kill the revered military leader who was the powerful head of Iran's elite Quds Force.
Pompeo spoke to Netanyahu on the phone on Wednesday night, ostensibly to thank him for Israel's help after the attack on the US embassy in Iraq, according to The Times of Israel.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was likely told of the US drone strike by Mike Pompeo before the attack (pictured together) +5
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was likely told of the US drone strike by Mike Pompeo before the attack (pictured together)
The Israeli Prime Minister tweeted hours before the drone strike that 'very, very dramatic things are happening' in the region +5
The Israeli Prime Minister tweeted hours before the drone strike that 'very, very dramatic things are happening' in the region
But on Thursday morning, hours before the attack in Baghdad, Netanyahu forewarned about 'very, very dramatic things' happening in the region.
He tweeted: 'I want to make one thing clear: We fully support all of the steps that the US has taken as well as its full right to defend itself and its citizens.
'Moreover, we know that our region is stormy; very, very dramatic things are happening in it. We are alert and are monitoring the situation.
_________________
www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org
www.rethink911.org
www.patriotsquestion911.com
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/ |
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