The Middle East will not see peace and stability as long as Israel refuses to put its nuclear weapons under international control, a US political commentator says.Jim W. Dean, the managing director of Veterans Today, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.
Most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to theSunday Timesnewspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor.
Israel, which has started several wars in the region in its 65-year history of occupation, maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity over its nuclear weapons program and does not allow international inspectors to visit its nuclear sites.
Everybody should bet the farm now on putting Israel on the spot if the West really wants peace and stability in the Middle East, they basically have to get Israel to turn all their WMD over to an international supervision also, Dean said.
He added that the United States is protecting Israels nuclear weapons, saying, They (Israelis) have a Big Brother, the United States, that allows them to get away with it.
The veteran analyst also said that Israeli nuclear arsenal is offensive not defensive as Washington and Tel Aviv claim.
In the last ten years, we have had a lot of declassified intelligence here in United States, and virtually every military intelligence report has always concluded that Israel had complete conventional weapons superiority against any potential enemies in the region and their weapons of mass destruction was not needed for defensive purposes, it was a completely offensive platform, he said.
Commenting on the history of Israeli nuclear program, Dean said, The French started helping them initially; they (Israelis) were stealing nuclear material from the British, the US, during the Johnson years, allowed them to steal nuclear material.
So the whole record of how Israel was allowed to become a nuclear weapons powerhouse in the Middle East, which was really a destabilizing force, that has been covered up because really it has been a big mistake, he noted.
By Press TV
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