One Year After Osirak

...The subject is on the table...

...To pressure for horizontal control while going ahead with vertical proliferation can only increase this resentment...

...And for the first time, it seems that such an idea is no longer outrageously naive...

...Since then, silence...

...Israeli F-16s swooped down on Iraq's brand-new Osirak reactor, the setting sun behind them, and bombed it back to square one...

...Neither have two of the five declared nuclear powers in the world—France and China— while nearly half the member-states of the UN have either not signed it, not ratified it, or not signed the accompanying safeguards agreements...

...Moreover, he pointed out that Israel is not the only interested party: "I think in the next few years Iran will take care of Iraq...

...In the wake of Eklund's proposal, UN officials hastened to explain that the exLesley Hazleton is a British-Israeli journalist and author...

...As disengagement in the Sinai preceded Camp David, so, too, nuclear disengagement could precede comprehensive peace talks...

...And if there were any doubts about Iraq's nuclear intentions, the raid cleared them up...

...Israel has gained time—but the time will prove useful only if it is used to work out means of nuclear arms control...

...A treaty with little more force than the NPT itself would be relatively easy to achieve...

...If something like the Club were to be resurrected, it would need stiff economic and other sanctions against countries supplying nuclear technology banned under its rules, and penalties including jail terms for private businessmen who choose to ignore such rules for their own profit...

...Furthermore, he revealed that the agency has made no progress at all in persuading Pakistan to allow additional monitoring facilities at its Karachi reactor, where "anomalies and irregularities" have been detected...

...Sigvard Eklund, suggested that the only chance to halt proliferation was to stage the explosion of a nuclear bomb, with the media invited for front-row seats...

...To do so, they would need a far tougher version of the now defunct Club of London rules—a cartel of nuclear powers that failed, since not all members could resist undercutting each other in the nuclear market...

...The Israelis meanwhile pressed for a far tougher treaty—a contractual agreement to be worked out directly between the parties involved...

...And in November 1981, the United States' Nuclear Regulatory Commission joined the sudden public awareness of the danger with a declaration that the safeguards system of the IAEA "would not detect a diversion [of nuclear materials for atomic weapons] in at least some types of facilities...

...Here too Osirak has been a watershed...

...A few years is a lot in the Middle East," says one Israeli official who concentrates on nuclear issues...

...If a Middle East nuclear-weapons-free zone is to be anything other than a good idea presented annually at the United Nations, the West must exercise both economic and strategic restraint...

...Yehoshafat Harkabi, reserve general, political science professor and former head of Israel's military intelligence, calls this idea "simply irresponsible...

...International pressure is needed— from the very countries that have been supplying the Middle East with nuclear technology...

...But there is one even tougher requirement for success: effective control of vertical proliferation, at least in the form of a nuclear freeze...

...At present, all except Cuba have signed, but neither Brazil nor Argentina—Latin America's nuclear threshold rivals—have ratified...

...Not surprisingly, pressure from Washington to restrict this flow of technology was ignored...

...Despite a massive flow of French arms to Iraq, France is still $4 billion in deficit to Iraq...

...Eugene Rostow, head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (note the proliferation of nuclear agencies and wonder why proliferation of nuclear arms has become so easy), announced last year that America has begun "preliminary diplomatic talks" on the idea with nations in the Middle East and key powers outside it...

...The Israeli argument in defense of the raid was a cogent one, and even experienced politicans were not afraid to say so...

...But now it seems that the Osirak raid achieved far more than a few years' time...

...The IAEA thus has no option but to ignore the possible existence of "undeclared income...

...This sudden spate of honesty has been a direct result of the Israeli raid on Osirak, which was itself taken as a sign of complete lack of confidence in the IAEA, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (the NPT) which the IAEA is meant to enforce, and in the safeguards agreement which is part of the NPT...

...But most strongly disagree...

...And when others develop nuclear capability, they will face an Israel that has no second-strike capability...

...Especially when Qaddafi has financed much of Pakistan's nuclear effort, and.presumably not out of sheer philanthropy...

...And just as clearly, the NPT is no indication of a country's nuclear aims or abilities...

...A few Israeli strategists argue that since Israel could also inflict awful damage on a nuclear enemy, and since the Arab states would also lack a second-strike capacity, a nuclear-free zone is not necessary...

...The Osirak reactor had been under IAEA supervision, yet it was clear that it was intended for military nuclear production...

...The absurdity of the Eklund proposal indicated the depth of disillusion within the IAEA...

...Since this amounted to little more than a series of unilateral declarations, Israel refused to support it until 1980 (when its support was probably a compensation for its refusal to agree to Sadat's attempted insertion of a clause on nuclear arms control into the Camp David treaty...

...And Pakistan may also re-supply Iraq...

...Even Ronald Reagan has changed his tune...

...With both the Israeli and the Egyptian proposals stalled, Egypt last year proposed a new angle in the UN...

...In January 1980, he bluntly stated that "I just don't think it's any of our business" if other countries seek nuclear weapons...

...A treaty for a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East could be far more effective than the NPT—depending on the kind of treaty...

...Moreover, the very idea of a "rational" nuclear balance of terror in an area that has spawned five Arab-Israeli wars since 1948, not to speak of numerous internecine Arab wars, is clearly absurd...

...Experts argued about how much time—from a minimum of three years to a maximum of ten—until Iraq could rebuild its reactor and its nuclear program...

...Egypt will receive such fuel through its agreement with the United States, for example...

...Iraq is France's second largest oil supplier, and one of its main arms customers...

...Eklund intended...

...Steven Weissman and Herbert Krosney in their recent book The Islamic Bomb (Times Books) have detailed the efforts to build that bomb...

...And if the 1967 pre-emptive attack on Egypt's air force kept international lawyers wrangling for years, the Osirak raid has given them fodder for decades...

...And a nuclear-weapons-free zone clearly cannot be reached just through the efforts of the parties involved...

...The world reeled as much from the implications as from the daring suddenness of the attack itself...

...Six weeks after Osirak, he was talking about the dangers of proliferation...

...Sixteen days after it happened, Iraqi president Saadam Hussein called on all "peace-loving nations in the world" to help the Arab states acquire nuclear weapons as a "rational" move to counter Israel's presumed nuclear capacity...

...France did offer Iraq low-uranium fuel (the caramel type, offered under American pressure on France), but Iraq refused it...

...Though the raid brought instant condemnation of Israel by the United Nations, world reaction was far more subdued than some had expected...

...Some approaches are aimed at beefing up the IAEA...

...Never before had a nuclear installation been attacked...

...In 1980, for instance, the then director of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA), Dr...

...Israel has been proposing such a zone for several years, not the least because Israel is the most interested party...

...The Non-Proliferation Treaty did, in fact, include provisions for control of horizontal as well as vertical proliferation, but the big nuclear powers ignored these provisions in both letter and spirit...

...It's all armchair strategy...

...Though it is still the only country in the Middle East with nuclear capability, that status cannot last indefinitely...

...What is not declared cannot be checked...

...Infected perhaps by this sudden flow of candor, the late Moshe Dayan promptly announced what had long been suspected: Israel could assemble nuclear weapons "in a short time"—generally believed to be under 48 hours or, as one commentator put it, "only a screwdriver away...

...That is, one or two bombs can effectively destroy Israel in a first strike, leaving Israel without retaliatory capacity...

...The problem with the Israeli proposal—in any other light it would be an advantage—was that it would establish a framework of negotiations that could also be used for peace negotiations...

...In all, the United States has helped no less than 19 countries, directly or indirectly, to reach the threshold stage of nuclear weaponry...

...The only trouble is that this treaty does not go into effect until all Latin American countries have signed and ratified it...

...It was all absolutely unprecedented: not only the extreme to which Israel had pushed the principle of anticipatory self-defense, but the raid itself...

...Other approaches are models of what might be possible, such as the nuclear-weapons-free zone established in Latin America under the Tlatelolco Treaty...

...One year after, there is at least a glimmer of a chance...

...This time the anticipation was not a matter of days, however, but years...

...Horizontal proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons to previously non-nuclear countries (as distinguished from vertical proliferation, which is the build-up of overkill between the USA and the USSR...

...The man whose views are generally taken as representing the official Israeli viewpoint on an officially unacknowledged subject agrees with Harkabi...

...Egypt proposed such a treaty for years, calling for letters of agreement to be deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations...

...The interests of both regional and global well-being depend on the supplier states overcoming economic interest in the interests of peace...

...And it was about time...

...Where do we go from here...

...Volatile" is the word most used for the Middle East situation...

...For instance, a report in October last year by the Ad Hoc Group on United States Policy towards the United Nations—a group which includes Edmund Muskie, Dean Rusk and Cyrus Vance—stated that "if the Security Council's condemnation of Israel's raid was understandable, a selective standard has prevented the UN's dealing with the tensions rooted in the deep-seated causes of the raid, namely Iraq's continued state of war with Israel and the nuclear insecurity of the Middle East region...

...Who, for instance, is to guarantee the Western concept of rationality in the thinking of Qaddafi...

...It would produce even greater instability," he says...

...Nevertheless, Tlatelolco is being studied again as a model for the Middle East...

...The deal went through...

...Israel has never signed the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty...

...Sooner or later, unless the international community can come up with failsafe safeguards, Israel will face an Islamic bomb...

...Negotiations can only succeed if nuclear supplier countries expand restraints on the transfer of sensitive technology, as proposed last year by Democratic Senator John Glenn...

...The reactor was due to "go critical"within weeks and then, claimed the Israelis, would have been used to manufacture nuclear weapons...

...The NPT is basically a gentleman's agreement—and where oil is traded for nuclear technology and materials, there are no gentlemen...

...The silence has been because the obstacles to such a treaty lie as much outside the Middle East as inside it...

...This would not give the press much to see, and is presumably not what Dr...

...Israel has nuclear capability, Pakistan is close to it, and Iraq will reach it again...

...At first, the Israeli raid seemed to be simply a way of buying time...

...Before Osirak, that would plainly have been impossible...

...Israel's raid on Osirak made the disillusion public...

...Either it was to be enriched weapons-grade uranium, the French were told, or no deal...

...The new IAEA director, Hans Blix, has gone on record saying that "you can't stop proliferation by safeguards" such as those the IAEA administers...

...He did not specify where this should happen...

...Add nuclear weapons and explosion seems assured...

...Yuval Ne'eman, professor of nuclear physics and a former deputy director of military intelligence, points out that there is no symmetry in the Middle East conflict, so that a balance of terror is impossible...

...At first there seemed to be a consensus—the Arab countries are as nervous of each others' nuclear potential as they are of Israel's—but then Iraq and Syria ob jected to the political implications of the shuttle...

...With Iraq temporarily disarmed, Pakistan is now the main threat...

...President Mitterand had in any case promised to review France's nuclear agreement with Iraq...

...The Ad Hoc Committee of Muskie, Rusk, Vance et al., for instance, recommended a Nuclear Security Planning Committee to be attached to the Security Council, working with the IAEA to strengthen its enforcement capability and improve its information base...

...Horizontal proliferation is now recognized worldwide as an urgent issue—more urgent and possibly more dangerous even than vertical proliferation...

...Basically, the NPT is an accounting system...

...They invoked the principle of "anticipatory self-defense"—the same principle used at the start of the 1967 Six Day War...

...There is no guarantee, and you can't experiment with these matters...

...Brazil gets almost 40 percent of its oil from Iraq, and its own nuclear knowhow was the result of a deal with West Germany—which in turn received its knowhow from the United States...

...Before Osirak, if the world thought at all of nuclear danger, it did so only in terms of vertical proliferation, so much so that those aware of horizontal spread neared despair...

...One of these, and perhaps the most promising—at least in theory—is the idea of a nuclear-weapons-free zone...

...Iraq received nuclear technology from France, Italy and Brazil...

...Iraq also provides over a fifth of Italy's oil, creating an Italian balance-of-payments deficit which Italy has tried to reduce not only with nuclear technology but also with a series of electrical power stations—a detail hardly likely to reinforce Iraq's pre-Osirak claim that it needed nuclear technology for purely peaceful purposes...

...Clearly, the Middle East is going nuclear...

...plosion would have to conform to the terms of the test-ban treaty, which allows only underground explosions...

...The USSR and China have always been cautious about exporting nuclear technology, but the West has been positively generous...

...Under the flag of Qatar, they pushed through an amendment to the Egyptian proposal which condemned Israel, thus ensuring the pro posal's failure...

...Israel has effectively brought to world attention what had been quietly passed over for too long—the dangers of what is called, in the lingo, "horizontal proliferation...

...It checks on materials declared under the safeguards agreement...

...And since the NPT is now acknowledged to be so weak, other measures are being proposed...

...Now France will only re-supply Iraq with caramel uranium, though even that is too much in the opinion of many of France's leading scientists, since, with new technology, caramel can be reprocessed into weapons-grade material...

...And so the Israeli proposal was doomed from the start: the irredentist "hard-line" Arab states, including Iraq and Libya, would never sign it...

...Hence Third-World countries have come to resent the NPTas an invention of the nuclear powers, designed to keep the Third World out of the arms race while allowing the great powers to add to their stockpiles...

...It called for a special UN envoy and staff to go to the Middle East and explore the modalities for such a zone, shuttling from country to country...

...He will have plenty of ideas to sort through if he wants to do something to control those dangers...

...He quotes Sadat's statement in his memoirs that crossing the Suez Canal in 1973 would have been worth 100,000 Egyptian casualties, and King Saud's claim that it was worth six million dead to rid the Middle East of Israel...

...Pakistan is nearing the nuclear threshold, and Iraq will recover sooner or later...

...One option has always been to supply only low-uranium fuel to countries seeking nuclear reactors...

...They claim that a nuclear balance of terror is possible in the Middle East...