ISLAMABAD – Former US President Jimmy Carter’s administration covered up anIsraeli nuclear test back in 1979, a policy that has continued under thesubsequent administrations, Foreign Policy Magazine has revealed.
Foreign Policy said that a US panel of experts established by Carter backthen found that “the September 22 signal was probably not from a nuclearexplosion.”
Carter, however, knew this was not the true story, Press TV Series.
According to the report, Carter wrote in his diary on February 27, 1980,“We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeedconduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end ofAfrica.”
“The Carter administration was so afraid to enforce the Partial Test BanTreaty against Israel’s 1979 violation that it did what it could to eraseor keep hidden evidence of its detection of a test,” Foreign Policy said.
“Subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, went alongwith this, and the US government still pretends it knows nothing about anyIsraeli nuclear weapons.”[image: PressTV-Israel has close to 100 nuclear warheads: Revealed]linkPressTV-Israel has close to 100 nuclear warheads: RevealedlinkA new report reveals that the Israeli regime, which has a long-standingpolicy of not commenting on its nuclear arsenal, is in possession ofapproximately 100 nuclear warheads.link
The cover-up reportedly aimed to avoid any negative impact on theCarter-mediated Camp David Accords, which was signed between Israel andEgypt a year earlier, and to avoid imposing sanctions against Israel.
“Now, 40 years later, there is a scientific and historical consensus thatit was a nuclear test and that it had to be Israeli,” Avner Cohen, aprofessor and senior fellow at the Middlebury Institute of InternationalStudies and a global fellow at the Wilson Center, told Israel’s newspaperHaaretz.
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Among the articles published by Foreign Policy on Sunday is one headlined“Politicians May Lie. The Archives Don’t” by Cohen and William Burr, thedirector of the Nuclear Documentation Project at the National SecurityArchive at George Washington University.
It lists several arguments the authors say confirm that Israel wasresponsible for the nuclear test even though “no public smoking gun hassurfaced that conclusively ties Israel to the Vela [satellite] event, andno credible and identifiable Israeli source has ever openly confirmed anIsraeli test.”
In the article, Cohen and Burr said after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War or YomKippur War, “top [Israeli] leaders and their nuclear advisers” recognizedthat Israel’s “small nuclear arsenal … was inappropriate and perhaps evenirrelevant to the military situation in which Israel found itself duringthe early stages of the Yom Kippur War.”
Thus, the authors say, Israel conducted a nuclear test.
They also referred to the 1976 sacking of scientist Shalhevet Freier, thedirector general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, as possible proofof an Israeli test, as he opposed such a trial.
The Foreign Policy said, “We believe, based on a great deal of documentedand anecdotal evidence, that the Vela event was indeed the detection of alow-yield Israeli nuclear test.”
