There is documentary evidence – the South African documents – which you actually admit is evidence, but not “proof”. There is lots of other evidence in the form of testimony by people who were in a position to know what they are talking about.
So, what is “enough” evidence?
There is a lot of CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence. It’s not a FACT. What’s so hard to understand? I’ve already told you would would be ‘enough’ evidence as far as I’m concerned. I think we’ve hijacked this thread enough on this tangent, to be honest, and I’m tired of saying the same things over and over again. My original point, way back up thread, was that pretty much all of the paragraph I quoted from Hail Ants was either an exaggeration or basically wrong…and that this same stuff keeps coming up in every thread that deals with Israel even peripherally.
You (and I) have no more, or less, evidence that Israel has nukes than pratically every single country on that list. You have press reports of what individuals have said, what spokemen for governments have said, and documents some of them have released. We all know the press gets things wrong, we all know that people lie, we all know that governments lie, and we all know that documents have been made up to support any number of lies.
What makes Israel so special that you accept all those other countries as having nukes as a fact, but you don’t for Israel? I will grant you may have some special knowledge of American nukes because of where your dad worked. I too have some (extremely limited) special knowledge about American nukes because I know an engineer who works on certain aspects of warhead design.
WHAT… is the airspeed of a plutonium laden moth!?!
…
sigh
[QUOTE=Boyo Jim]
What makes Israel so special that you accept all those other countries as having nukes as a fact, but you don’t for Israel?
[/QUOTE]
Because there is more than circumstantial evidence that they have them, of course. In most cases, the countries in question have physically tested a weapon…which, aside from even wilder speculation, Israel hasn’t done. In addition, all of the other nuclear armed countries I’m aware of freely admit they have the things. And they have visible programs developing the things. Hell, we even know that Iran has such a program, and they have gone out of their way to attempt to conceal it.
It takes no special knowledge. There is video footage of above ground tests from all three countries, there is the less than tenuous evidence that WE DROPPED TWO OF THE THINGS ON JAPANESE CITIES, there is the fact that you, I or anyone can freaking go on tours of old silos in at least 2 of the 3 countries you mentioned (and I’d be willing to bet you can in France as well). It’s a mountain of SOLID evidence…no special knowledge required. Then we have Israel…where all we have is speculation and conjecture. Some facts that may POINT to the possibility of such weapons, but nothing, absolutely nada solid.
So… nothing. All this is evidence is a least second-hand to YOU, because you have just seen what is reported in the press.
So, you too know that these countries have nuclear weapons because “everybody else knows”. But that is not good enough for Israel.
Sorry about the typo. I meant Mothra. I don’t know what Mothra weighs with or without Mexico’s uranium.
To your first question, the technology for detecting tests, and improved methodology for distinguishing tests from normal seismic events is getting better. See, e.g., this portion of a 2009 article in Scientific American, Advances in Monitoring Nuclear Weapon Testing. FT(excerpt):
The article further talks about a 1997 event in the Kara Sea that was suspected of being a Russian test, which would have violated the test ban. Further analysis indicated the signal was of natural origin. Finally, the article mentions detection of the North Korean suspected fizzles from 2006 and 2009; not just seismic detection but atmospheric sampling revealed radionuclides consistent with a fission device detonation. (And who knows what level of complexity beyond that?)
I am not a geologist or geophysicist. I have talked with those who are in the oil and gas industry. It’s not at all clear to me that an offshore test (so as to be as far from shore based seismographs as possible), conducted below the seabed and below relatively seismically-opaque layers such as the pre-salt layer off of Brazil, would be all that detectable. Take a drill ship and drill a test bore into the middle of a seamount in the middle of the ocean. Place device deep in test bore and cement in the hole. Is the world going to be able to detect such a test? Especially if the test was a small one and if you do the test in an already-seismically active area? So, I am not as confident as the authors, though perhaps I should be, if I knew more about the subject.
The state of the art seems to have advanced beyond 1997 concerns about monitoring, evoked by a professor of earth sciences at UCSC , Dr. Thorne Lay. FTA:
FWIW, if we discount the 1979 Vela Incident as Israel’s responsibility, then to the best of my knowledge, Israel has never detonated any of its putative nuclear weapons. Yet, we all still think they have them (sorry,** XT**), and assume they will work when fired. So, I don’t think that a—to pick on them again—Taiwanese weapon would need to be tested, especially if they were working off of a known design/engineering drawings/notes. Much testing could be done to validate weapon parameters without needing to detonate the device. Things like explosives and initiator timing, structure changes of either HEU or Plutonium under very high pressures, sensitivity testing etc: a gazillion things that an expert in nuclear weapons—I’m certainly not one—would like to know to optimize their design. Or to eliminate potential deliberate errors in the acquired plans, assuming they didn’t start from a clean sheet of paper. They’d want to know these things if they wanted to make multistage weapons. Or to make their weapons safe from accident or unauthorized use, and available to be used in a military context. Will the device survive the stresses of an IRBM launch? Will it blow up if a bomb goes off next to the magazine or the magazine catches fire? How close can I store it next to its brothers without inadvertent criticality accidents? What will a lightning strike, or just too much RF, do to the bomb circuitry? And so on.
For a country like Taiwan, although in a seismically active area, but surrounded by countries with seismographs, (Never mind any hydrophones placed within the Straits of Formosa.) I’d think it difficult for them to detonate a test nuclear weapon nearby without anyone finding out.
Not true.
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has technically never come into force, because it has not been ratified by several signatories, including China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the United States, while India, Pakistan, and North Korea are not even signatories, and have in fact conducted tests since the CTBT was written. (Those three, plus Israel, are also the countries officially outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) By treaty terms, all eight of those countries–having participated in the negotiations, and having established reactors at the time–have to get on board before it’s official.
So the CTBT has been adhered to by the signatories, since 1996, as a voluntary policy matter. If a US President wanted to set a new policy direction, he certainly could.
The Partial Test Ban Treaty, dating to the Kennedy era and still in force, banned tests in the atmosphere, in space, or underwater, but permitted underground testing. China, France, and North Korea never signed this one.
We also have photographic evidence of bomb assemblies thanks to Vanunu. These and Vanunu’s statements have been verified by US and British nuclear scientists. And of course Vanunu’s kidnapping by Mossad and conviction for espionage and treason adds his believability. And we have 1,200 declassified pages of the Vanunu trial transcripts (but not the full transcripts). They clearly confirm that Vanunu was convicted for releasing real information.
We have French government documents describing the facility at Dimona. How it was intentionally designed as a plutonium breeder reactor. We also have French documents detailing the transfer of weapon design information.
We have British government documents detailing the transfer of key materials for nuclear enrichment and bomb construction.
We have evidence of Israelis importing key nuclear components from the US such as the krytons Milchan was convicted of illegally exporting to Israel.
From '65 through '69 the US was allowed to annually inspect Dimona. The eventual conclusion was that plutonium was being extracted.
We have the South African documentation regarding technology and perhaps weapon transfers.
We have the Cohen research, which includes confirmation via interview with people involved in the program.
And finally we have two Israeli prime ministers Peres and Olmert who have both accidentally confirmed the existence of the program in interviews, like when Olmert in an interview said that Iran was trying to build nuclear weapons like “America, France Israel, and Russia.” Of course he backed off of that. But the Israeli opposition, who would explicitly know about a program chastised Olmert for confirming the program.
And the interesting thing is how all of these actively support one another. Weaponizing material from the type of plant we know the French built, would require precisely the type of material the British helped them acquire. Vanunu’s description would require precisely the krytons that Milchan sold to Peres. Likewise the Vanunu design is a derivative of the design the French provided them. And so on. This isn’t a bunch of unrelated information. We have a pretty good idea of how many weapons Israel might have, their nature, their construction, their material components, how they were derived and so forth.
It is a false equivalency to compare the Iraqi mobile trailers and the Israeli program. We may be wrong about some of the details in the Israeli program, but its basic existence is really not in dispute.
Has anyone ever considered the entire thing may be a hoax by mossad to try to make arab countries think Israel has a nuclear program?
I am not advocating that idea, I am just wondering if it’s been cosniderd or put forward by anyone reputable.
It is a non-zero possibility. XT is right about that. And certainly Saddam played that game pretty well. But we just have way too much evidence (circumstantial or not) to give it too much credence. We can say with high degrees of confidence that Israel has weapons grade plutonium. They have the reactor and all the equipment necessary to separate it. We can say with high degrees of confidence they have warheads to put the plutonium in. We have photos of those, and detailed descriptions that match up. We have undeniable proof that they have delivery systems including the full three prongs (planes and land based ballistic missiles and submarine launch systems). The idea that they never actually separated the plutonium, or put the material into the warheads, or put the warheads on the delivery systems… well it seems unlikely at the least.
My point was that it’s not a fact…it’s still speculation. And getting back to the OP and my original point, Israel is a poor example of what the OP was getting at because IF Israel developed nuclear weapons they kept it secret (to this day) from not only the international community but their own people as well. Also, since Israel never signed the NNPT, they could have developed the things if they had chosen to without violating or backing out of the treaty.