Jeffrey’s “post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1015/spying-on-the-bomb about the National Security Archives’ recently-released documents related to the South African and French nuclear arsenals reminded me that Mordechai Vanunu issued his estimate of the Israeli nuclear weapons arsenal this past December.
Vanunu, in a 21 December interview with _Voyenny Parad_, said:
Question: Do you know how many nuclear bombs Israel has?
Mordechai Vanunu: When I worked at Dimona, nuclear materials were already being produced there – plutonim, lithium, tritium, and others. Enough to make ten nuclear bombs per year. In other words, starting from 1985, Israel has over 200 nuclear warheads by now.
It’s a bit old, but “this paper”:http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cpc-pubs/farr.htm from the USAF Counterproliferation Center contains a series of estimates of the Israeli arsenal (see Appendix A).
ACA uses an estimate of “75-200 nuclear weapons”:http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat.asp , FYI.
This reminds me of a mostly idle curiosity about the “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East” bit:
http://tinyurl.com/pbnqn
Any opinions?
Well, I have no idea about Libya in the 1950s, as that poster mentions, but the US certainly had nukes in Turkey by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Colonel Farr sounds like quite an interesting character.