[REDACTED] *y v*y / more about D*m*n* / don't ask don't tell / that's Israel's story and it's stickin' to it

Click image -- You betcha! :=)

----- Original Message -----

From: R***** C******

Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 12:48 PM

Subject: Re: oy vey

India and Pakistan were similarly low-key until they decided to go public, surprising many in the West who didn't suspect the strategic purpose of their nuclear power programs.

However, in my opinion, it's just a bad idea to spread secret military installation location information with the general public.

-B** C******

----- Original Message -----
From: Robert Merkin
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:14 AM
Subject: oy vey

Israel's facility is in

*Redacted*

====================

Hiya B** C****** et omnes --

Many issues in your comment -- and thanks.

You may recall I'm a former journalist. "Redacted" just gives us newsies (in Open Societies) the hives. We're not irresponsible. A half-century of dealing with "redacted" has convinced us that it's almost always worse for everyone than "dacted."

The fundamental question -- which will be heatedly debated until the end of time -- is:

Does secrecy about nuclear programs benefit or harm people of good will all over the world?

(People of good will as distinguished from terrorists and psycho rogue states.)

I could argue in this specific story that Israel's supersecrecy surrounding Dimona's activities directly led over the years to a low, shoddy, irresponsible level of concern for the health of Dimona employees.

Where a nation -- Canada, for example -- is a signator and willing participant to international treaties about nuclear activities, the pressure is huge for each signator nation to conform to accepted international norms.

At the other end of the spectrum, I wonder how concerned a nation like North Korea is about the workers in its nuclear facilities. Because where health and human safety aren't high on the agenda, the nation gets its desired program results much faster and much more cheaply.

If, specifically, you're concered about letting Bad People know precisely where nuclear weapons facilities are, the cat named Dimona was out of the bag after former Dimona worker Mordechai Vanunu spilled the beans in 1986 (and spent 18 years in Israeli prison for blabbing). Even earlier, during the 1967 Middle East War, Soviet (-made) MiG fighter jets overflew Dimona, and probably didn't think it was a dairy farm.

All such facilities everywhere in the world are Big and Noisy.

And that's a lucky and a good thing. The more people of good will know about the what and where of these facilities, the more pressure is brought to bear on dragging them into the norms of the world community.

Are we giving too much info to Bad People? Another debatable question -- but Bad People are gonna do what Bad People are gonna do, and sanitizing the Internet and the public library isn't going to impede their schemes much.

We could have protected the World Trade Towers by hiding their location from the public, but ...

Bob

P.S. Wikipedia -- a source I certainly don't consider Gospel -- says Israel's arsenal goes far beyond fission weapons:

Although no official statistics exist, it has been estimated that Israel possesses between 60 to 400 thermonuclear weapons, believed to be of Teller-Ulam design, with each one in the megaton-range.^[3][4][5] The Israeli government maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity on whether it has nuclear weapons, saying only that it would not be the first to "introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East".^[6] The International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei regards Israel as a state possessing nuclear weapons.^[7]