View of the Israeli nuclear facility in the Negev Desert outside Dimona
A newly released report in a US professional journal confirms that the Israeli regime possesses at least 80 operative nuclear warheads and has enough material to produce up to 190 more.
The report published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear weapon proliferation experts Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen estimate that Israel halted its production of nuclear warheads back in 2004 “once it reached around 80 munitions,” RT reports Monday.
However, the experts add, the Tel Aviv regime “can easily double its arsenal since it has enough fissile material to build at least another 115 bombs.”
- “There are rumors that Israel is equipping some of its submarines with nuclear-capable cruise missiles,” the report says, echoing the 2013 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook on Armament and International Security, which also implied that the Israeli regime may have nuclear-capable submarine-launched cruise missiles and reported the same assessment of nuclear stockpiles.
It is still not known how many nuclear warheads of the total inventory could already be deployed, as Israel continues to maintain its long-held policy of nuclear ambiguity, under which it never confirms nor denies its possession of nuclear and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
In December 2012, Tel Aviv once again dismissed the latest demand from the members of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to join the accord.
The suspicions about Israeli nuclear warheads were fueled by the fact that Germany supplied Israel with five Dolphin-class submarines, which are supposedly capable of launching nuclear missiles, and signed a contract to build yet another one.
Israeli regime’s stockpiles of WMD have come under particular scrutiny following the US-Russian recent agreement for the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons, which is seen as a significant step towards a WMD-free region.
This is while Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari also stated last Thursday that “The main danger of WMD is the Israeli nuclear arsenal,” stressing that the Tel Aviv regime also possesses chemical weapons but “nobody is speaking about that.”
The Syrian envoy further described his country’s chemical weapons as “a mere deterrence against the Israeli nuclear arsenal” and other WMD, referring to a declassified CIA report on Israel's chemical weapons program.
Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday: “It's well known that Syria has a certain arsenal of chemical weapons and the Syrians always viewed that as an alternative to Israel's nuclear weapons.”
This is while recently declassified CIA documents suggest that the Israeli regime secretly built up its own stockpile of chemical and biological weapons decades ago, adding more fuel to the lingering complaint of Arab states, who constantly accuse Tel Aviv of possessing nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, during a speech on Sunday before talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said that "in any case, Israel must be poised and ready to defend itself, by itself, against any threat - and this capability and readiness are more important now than ever."
