Israel Said to Have Nuclear Capacity to Level All Major Mideast Cities

Israel appears to have the nuclear potential to level every major Middle Eastern city, according to a book released this week by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Israel’s nuclear program “is far more advanced than previously believed and . . . accordingly, the pace of proliferation in the region in recent years has been more rapid than generally acknowledged,” Leonard Spector writes in “Going Nuclear,” the third annual Carnegie Endowment for Peace report on nuclear war.

Spector bases his discussion on Israel on disclosures by Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, who provided the basis for a detailed account of Israel’s nuclear program published in the London “Sunday Times” last October.

Vanunu’s disclosures revealed that Israel may “now possess more than 100 nuclear weapons — not the 20 to 25 previously thought — and that some of them may employ nuclear fusion, the principle of the H-bomb, which would make them tens of times more powerful than the atom bombs used in World War II,” Spector writes.

Evidence also suggests that Israel deployed a sophisticated short-range missile, the Jericho II, during the early 1980’s, which it could equip with a nuclear warhead.

Israel has declared that it “will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East,” a statement repeated by Premier Yitzhak Shamir during his recent trip to Washington.

NO COMMENT FROM U.S.

Israel continued its nuclear buildup while the U.S. “at least partially aware of the direction of events, turned a blind eye” Spector writes. State Department spokesman Charles Redman refused to comment during a press conference Wednesday about Spector’s assertions.

Three other Middle Eastern countries, Libya, Iran and Iraq, have long been interested in acquiring nuclear weapons, but made little progress towards nuclear arming last year, according to the report.

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s interest in obtaining nuclear weapons has been thwarted by a 1983 global embargo on nuclear transfers to Libya, says the report. “Although Tripoli has turned to clandestine nuclear dealings in the past, it remains unlikely that Libya will be able to obtain nuclear arms or nuclear-weapons material by that means because such commodities remain unavailable,” Spector writes.

Iraq’s nuclear program is at “standstill” as a result of the destruction of its reactor by Israel in 1981, declining oil revenues and the costs of its war with Iran, the report states.

Iran has “extensive nuclear hardware, materials and technology” that had been built up by the Shah, although it has made no recent progress in its nuclear program, Spector notes. But Iran’s “nuclear activities pose a future proliferation threat and deserve to be monitored.”

Pakistan made considerable progress in its nuclear activities in 1986 so “it is at a nuclear-weapons threshold: it either possesses all of the components needed to manufacture one or several atom bombs or else just remains short of this goal,” Spector writes. But the U.S. and Soviet Union may prevent Pakistan from conducting a nuclear test, he adds.