Apparent nuclear slip dogs Israeli prime minister

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, December 12, 2006

JERUSALEM – For half a century, military censors have struggled to defend Israel’s worst-kept secret – that the country possesses atomic weapons.

By refusing to confirm or deny that it has the bomb, and refraining from testing one, Israel has lived up to a quiet understanding with the United States to avoid fueling a Middle East arms race.

So why does it appear that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert finally spilled the beans?

In an interview on German television late Monday, the Israeli leader seemed to list Israel among the world’s nuclear club. Asked by the interviewer about Iran’s calls for the destruction of Israel, Olmert replied that Israel had never threatened to annihilate anyone.

“Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map,” Olmert said. “Can you say that this is the same level, when you are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?”

Israel’s newspapers reported the remark Tuesday under front-page headlines, one calling it a “nuclear slip of the lip.”

Olmert’s office said the quote was taken out of context and that he had been listing “responsible nations,” not nuclear states. Aides also noted that the prime minister had refused several times during the interview to confirm that Israel has nuclear weapons and that he had spoken in English, which is not his native language.

Surrounded at birth by hostile neighbors, Israel began building a nuclear bomb in the mid-1950s. Since 1969, the United States has accepted Israel’s status as a nuclear power. Intelligence analysts and independent experts have long known that the country has 100 to 200 sophisticated nuclear weapons, making it the region’s sole nuclear power.

Some analysts believe that Israel, faced with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, has been seeking a way to go public with its own capabilities to maintain a deterrent advantage.

Such thinking gained credence last week when Robert Gates, the incoming U.S. secretary of defense, identified Israel as a nuclear power in testimony to a Senate committee.

“It could be that Olmert wanted to hint at Israel’s capability as part of the aggressive statements he has recently been making, with the goal of warning the West that if they don’t take care of Iran, Israel will,” Israeli security analyst Ronen Bergman wrote in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

“On the other hand,” he added, “this may have been a slip of the tongue.”

Whatever the case, Olmert returned to a more ambiguous line Tuesday at a news conference during a visit to Berlin.

“Israel has said many times … that we will not be the first country that introduces nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” he said, repeating a formula meaning that it will not launch a first strike from its arsenal. “That was our position; that is our position. Nothing has changed.”