Updated on
Summary
Israel rejected as deeply flawed a declaration by signatories of a global anti-nuclear arms treaty that urged it to sign the pact and put its nuclear facilities under United Nations safeguards. All 189 parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the United States, called on Friday May 28, in a declaration that singled out Israel, for a conference in 2012 to discuss banning weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.This resolution is deeply flawed. It singles out Israel, the Middle East's only democracy and the only country in the region threatened with annihilation. Yet the terrorist regime of Iran, with a very aggressive nuclear programme, is not even mentioned at all, not even once, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesperson, Mark Regev, told Reuters in Jerusalem.Israel is presumed to have a sizeable nuclear arsenal but neither confirms nor denies it. It is the only Middle East state that has not signed the NPT and, like India and Pakistan, did not participate in the review conference.Professor Uzi Even, a top Israeli scientist and former parliament member who worked in Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona, said that Israel's nuclear ambiguity policy should end.We have been mentioned together with India and Pakistan and even, to my sorrow with North Korea, as people now believe universally that we do posses nuclear technology and our ambiguity is just a laughing stock. So it's time to end it, Even told. One of the suspicions that other people have is that we produce plutonium in the nuclear reactor centre in Dimona. Plutonium has a very long lifetime, something like 24,000 years. We don't need to do that in the future. What we have done for the last 40 years would have to stop and I think that the nuclear reactor centre in Dimona, being as old as it is now can be put under international supervision without harming our strategic positions, Even said.
