#nuclear weapons

According to estimates by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, published recently in the New York Times, Israel has “at least 90 [nuclear] warheads and enough fissile material to produce up to hundreds more.” President Jimmy Carter, who was in a position to know, said in 2014 that he believed the number is closer to “300 or more, nobody knows exactly how many.” In either case, this is more nukes than another country we’re routinely told to be terrified of: North Korea, which the Center estimates possesses “20 to 30  possibly assembled warheads.” These Israeli warheads can be delivered in a variety of ways, including by U.S.-made fighter jets, by German-made “Dolphin” submarines, and by a variety of missiles—including the Jericho 3, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that came online in 2011. Describing the early tests of this missile, Isaac Ben-Israel—who was both a scientist, a retired IDF general, and a member of the Knesset at the time—said in 2008 that “everybody can do the math and understand… that we can reach with a rocket engine to every point in the world.” If that’s not a thinly veiled threat, nothing is.  Of course, we don’t know exactly how many nuclear warheads Israel has, because Israeli leaders refuse to publicly admit they have any. The whole military program is kept in near-total secrecy, under a policy called “strategic ambiguity,” meaning the existence of the bombs is neither confirmed nor denied. Historians believe Israel first got a nuclear weapon in 1967, after secretly refining plutonium at the Dimona facility and running a “full deception campaign” to convince U.S. inspectors the purpose of the reactors there was civilian rather than military. (Ironically, this is exactly the kind of deception Israel now accuses Iran of practicing.) It’s also strongly suspected that Israel tested a nuclear weapon off the coast of South Africa in 1979, in partnership with that country’s apartheid government. It’s called the Vela incident, after the spy satellite that spotted the nuclear flash. But “strategic ambiguity” means there’s little international oversight or accountability involved with any of this, and much of it takes place in violation of international law. Like North Korea and a small handful of other nations, Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), despite United Nations resolutions that it should do so. It has signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, but likely broke it with the South African incident. And most importantly, its leaders refuse to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to access Dimona, so we have no way of knowing what’s going on in there.  Under U.S. law, Israel’s rogue nuclear program means that the United States should not be supplying it with military aid of any kind. The law in question is the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, and its language is unambiguous. But for more than 50 years now, U.S. leaders have been willing to ignore their own laws and accept this uneasy state of affairs. A 1993 report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks,” sums up the rationale well: “would the United States be willing to sacrifice its relationship with Israel—and possibly risk Israeli national survival—to pressure that state to give up a nuclear arsenal it believes essential to its security?” For successive administrations, the answer has been no.

This is pretty much how Twitter was handled.

Fire everyone and hire back the parts that break your bottom line. If it didn’t affect his bottom line, Elon didn’t care.

Anon is saying: Israel has them, therefore it's unfair to deny the Iranian regime the nuclear weapons it seeks.

The fairness argument sounds intuitive until you ask what 'fair' actually means in a world where states have different intentions, different records, and different legal obligations

In geopolitics, morality isn't about ensuring everyone has the same toys. It's about harm reduction.

If you apply a consistent moral principle like "it is wrong for a state to explicitly call for the mass murder of another people," the deceptively simplistic fairness assertion falls apart.

Iran's regime hangs protesters from cranes, murders ~40,000 of its citizens in a couple days, and routinely calls for genocide of another people...which makes it awkward to argue they should have the most destructive weapons in human history bEcAuSe FaIrNeSs.

This isn't a rational argument, let alone a moral one.

Which of these is not like the others?

The US's nuclear deterrence threat: "Don't attack us with nukes or we'll take you with us"

France's/UK's nuclear deterrence threat: "Don't attack us with nukes or we'll take you with us."

Israel's nuclear deterrence intent: "Don't wipe us out, or we'll take you with us"

The Iranian regime's explicit, publicly-stated intent for their weapons: "Death to Israel".

The Islamic Republic has made "Death to Israel" and the destruction of the Jewish state a core pillar of its identity for nearly 50 years. It funds proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas on the basis of this shared, explicitly genocidal goal.

When a regime that regularly executes its own citizens for protesting and that calls for the erasure of another country wants nukes, the world sees a high-risk actor shaped by an apocalyptic theological faction whose doctrine holds that engineering chaos accelerates the return of the Mahdi. It's an actual operational framework that treats civilizational catastrophe as a goal.

No country officially supports Iran acquiring a bomb. No sane leader even approves of the idea in private.

Since antizionists are fond of citing internal law they haven't read, let's look at the legal angle:

Iran is a signatory to the NPT. By signing it, they legally committed to never developing nuclear weapons in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology. When the regime pursues a bomb, it isn't just making a weapon, it's also breaking a legal contract it chose to sign - and it has already violated the NPT repeatedly.

Israel did not sign on to the NPT and is not, therefore, bound by it.

The "fairness" framing of the Ask also ignores how Israel actually holds its weapons.

Israel has never officially admitted to having nukes - it has conducted no nuclear tests and made no announcements in a policy called amimut (opacity). The purpose of amimut is to prevent a regional arms race. A confirmed arsenal might force every neighbor to seek to match it, but an unconfirmed one deters without triggering an arms race.

Iran, by contrast, has been openly enriching uranium toward weapons-grade while chanting "Death to Israel" at state functions.

Anon's framing falsely assumes the only relevant variable is who has the weapon.

In reality, the relevant variables are (1) who holds it, (2) what they've said they'll do with it, (3) what legal obligations they've accepted, and (4) what their actual record of behavior looks like.

By every one of those measures, Israel and Iran are not comparable cases.