Israel exercising for nuclear disaster with Iran

By Jerry Mazza Online Journal Associate Editor Jun 23, 2008, 00:21

Both Reuters via Yahoonews.com and the New York Times reported Friday that Israel carried out a major military exercise this month, described by unnamed American officials as a rehearsal for mayhem, i.e., a powerful attack on Iran’s nuclear uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

As described, more than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 (American made) fighters engaged in exercises over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece in the first week of June. The point of the workout, it seemed, was to hone in on long-range strikes on Iran’s uranium facilities, American officials said.

The kicker is that since much of the facility is buried deeply underground in extremely fortified facilities, there’s no guaranty that a surface attack would cripple the facility. Ergo, if Iran is, indeed, at the weapons grade uranium enrichment point, one could plan for a counterstrike and an aggregate response from other Middle and Far Eastern Muslim and Asian nuclear powers.

Of course, Israeli officials, the Times said, would not discuss the exercise. Nor, needless to say, would they be willing to discuss their Dimona nuclear plant that has existed since the early 1960s, enriching uranium, and stockpiling by now some 200 nuclear warheads, as America has quietly looked the other way and, indeed, aided Israel with some $3 billion in military aid each year, in addition to millions more in unsecured loans, and hundreds of millions from pro-Israel Jewish-American groups.

Furthermore, Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but Israel has never done so. In fact, they did their best to keep Dimona’s subbasement nuclear reactor a secret. So much so that when Americans visited in the ’60s, Israel built a wall to conceal the elevators and stairways to the reactor.

In fact, Israel’s 60 years of nuclear proliferation is documented in my linked story from Online Journal. It states that “Of course, by 1958, the Dimona plant, alternately called a manganese and/or textile plant, was photographed by US U-2 spy planes and identified as a likely site of a reactor complex. The French, swarming like ants about the complex, were hard to hide, as well as in Beersheba, so much so that Charles DeGaulle, France’s president, wanted a promise from Israel not to make nuclear weapons, and to announce the “project” to the world. Before Israel did that, they were preempted by the US State Department announcing the secret plant. Even the NY Times announced on December 21, 1960 that Ben-Gurion was building a 24-megawatt reactor “for peaceful purposes.”

Continued . . .