Fifty-five Israel intellectuals, speaking as members of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament in the Arab-Israeli Region, called on the Israel Government last night to take the initiative to prevent the spread of nuclear arms into the Middle East.
Most of the signators are members of the faculties of the Hebrew University, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology at Haifa and the Weizmaon Institute. The statement warned that Israel’s vulnerability to nuclear attack was far greater than that of Egypt and added that even if a nuclear second strike by Israel was feasible, it would be — for Israel — a “posthumous revenge.”
The committee urged the Government to assert its readiness to start negotiations on the issue with the Arab governments and with international organizations. It expressed the hope that such negotiations could ultimately lead to conventional disarmament.
Defense Ministry sources meanwhile expressed “dissatisfaction” and “irritation” over the “unauthorized attendance” by former Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres and Prof. Ernst Bergman, who recently resigned as chairman of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, at the recent nuclear disarmament conference in Toronto. Mr. Peres, now Secretary general of former Premier David Ben-Gurion’s dissident Israel Workers Party (Rafi)and Prof. Bergman, are known to hold views on this subject contrary to those of the Government.
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