May 5, 2010
To the Editor,
Please advise your readership that a proposal for a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East is seeing new life under the Obama administration.
Mr.John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, said that President Obama’s consent to discuss demilitarizing the Middle East of nuclear weapons endangered Israel, and that Obama was playing into Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hands. He told Army Radio: “…The only unknown answer at this point is exactly how much pressure he [Obama] will exert on Israel to do just that. But part of that pressure is being exerted right now by even considering the possibility of a conference on a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.”
The Obama administration’s newfound opposition to Israel’s formally undisclosed nuclear program reverses nearly 50 years of American silence on the subject.
President John F. Kennedy pressured then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to drop Israel’s plans for nuclear weapons in 1963.
In his seminal book Israel and the Bomb, Dr. Avner Cohen, wrote that Ben Gurion defended Israel’s need for nuclear weapons in the context of the mass murder of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis and the “scenario of a united Arab military coalition launching a war to liberate Palestine and destroy the Jewish state.”
President Kennedy continued to push Israel to abandon its nuclear option until his death in 1963. No American president had made an issue of Israel’s nuclear capability — until now.