Nixon backed off Israeli nukes

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"The United States decided against curbing Israel’s nuclear capability in 1969, according to declassified documents.

The latest edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, drawing on newly released White House papers, reports that Israel had a nuclear bomb by 1967 and that within two years this was discovered by U.S. intelligence.

Senior advisers to President Nixon recommended that he try to check Israel’s nuclear program, for fear of destabilizing the Middle East and bringing confrontation with the Soviet Union closer.

But Nixon, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969, decided against applying pressure. According to the bulletin, in exchange for the U.S. restraint, Israel undertook not to go public with its nuclear capability by not conducting tests or deploying missiles."

http://jta.org/page_view_breaking_story.asp?intid=2411


Related article:

The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb

By Avner Cohen and William Burr
Sunday, April 30, 2006

<snip>

"On Sept. 9, 1969, a big brown envelope was delivered to the Oval Office on behalf of CIA Director Richard M. Helms. On it he had written, "For and to be opened only by: The President, The White House." The precise contents of the envelope are still unknown, but it was the latest intelligence on one of Washington's most secretive foreign policy matters: Israel's nuclear program. The material was so sensitive that the nation's spymaster was unwilling to share it with anybody but President Richard M. Nixon himself.

The now-empty envelope is inside a two-folder set labeled "NSSM 40," held by the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives. (NSSM is the acronym for National Security Study Memorandum, a series of policy studies produced by the national security bureaucracy for the Nixon White House.) The NSSM 40 files are almost bare because most of their documents remain classified.

With the aid of With the aid ofrecently declassified documents , we now know that NSSM 40 was the Nixon administration's effort to grapple with the policy implications of a nuclear-armed Israel. These documents offer unprecedented insight into the tense deliberations in the White House in 1969 -- a crucial time in which international ratification of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was uncertain and U.S. policymakers feared that a Middle Eastern conflagration could lead to superpower conflict. Nearly four decades later, as the world struggles with nuclear ambitions in Iran, India and elsewhere, the ramifications of this hidden history are still felt."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801326.html

[Media_Lies_Daily]

1. I wonder why Pakistan wasn't mentioned?

[mike_c]

2. pakistan didn't develop a working nuclear bomb until...

...nearly two decades later. It didn't begin a development program until the early 70's, a couple or three years after the time referenced in these papers. Or am I missing the point of your question?

[Tesha]

3. Here's the BullAtomSci article itself...

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj06cohen

[ShockediSay]

4. Israel's Nuclear Balckmail for Critical 1973 US Support

Early in the morning of 9 October, Kissinger received a call from Dinitz that Israeli forces were in a more "difficult" position. A counter-offensive launched the previous day had failed with major losses....Dinitz acknowledging that the Israelis had lost over 400 tanks to the Egyptians and 100 to the Syrians....

Israeli cabinet had decided that it had to "get all equipment and planes by air that we can." Kissinger, who had assumed that Tel Aviv could recapture territory without major infusions of aid, was perplexed by the bad news--"Explain to me, how could 400 tanks be lost to the Egyptians?"--and the diplomatic implications of substantial U.S. wartime military aid was troublesome. As indicated on the record of the 8:20 a.m. meeting, Dinitz and Kissinger met privately, without a notetaker, to discuss Golda Meir's request for a secret meeting with Nixon to plea for military aid....

To underline the urgency of the situation, Dinitz may have introduced an element of nuclear blackmail into the private discussion. While Golda Meir had rejected military advice for nuclear weapons use, she had ordered the arming and alerting of Jericho missiles--their principal nuclear delivery system--at least to influence Washington...

Kissinger has never gone on record on this issue and no U.S. documentation on the U.S. Israeli nuclear posture during the war has been declassified. Whatever Dinitz said, Kissinger was responsive to the pleas for more assistance.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB98/index.htm

and see


Her idea, instead, was to fly secretly to Washington and, as Henry Kissinger later wrote, ''for an hour plead with President Nixon.''

Mr. Kissinger flatly rejected that idea, explaining such a rushed visit ''could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail.'' By that time, American intelligence had signs that Israel had put its Jericho missiles, which could be fitted with nuclear warheads, on high alert (the Israelis had done so in an easily detectible way, probably to sway the Americans into preventive action).

Mr. Kissinger instead started to arrange air supply to Israel, and within three days a tremendous United States airlift to Israel was in action. The tide was turned. By Oct. 21 the Israelis were within 20 miles of Damascus and had crossed the Suez Canal, encircling the Egyptian Third Army. A permanent cease-fire was established within a few days.

published in the New York Times
"The Last Nuclear Moment"
by Avner Cohen
October 6,2003

[gordianot]

5. It is forgotten the U.S. went to Defcon 2 during the 1973 war.

It happened once before in 1963 during the Cuban missile crisis. Much like Bush Nixon was on the ropes and was headed for a Constitutional crisis. This is also about the time Alexander Haig showed up with his pistol, slinking around the WH watching Nixon get drunk.

A time to never forget, but we did not know until years later.