Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday was asked whether Israel has nuclear weapons and acknowledged that "most of the world assesses that they do," but also reaffirmed the US policy of not acknowledging the existence of Israel’s nuclear stockpile and secret weapons program.
Rubio made the comments when being questioned by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who recently led a letter to the State Department asking for answers about Israel's nuclear weapons program. Rubio’s State Department responded by referring the group of Democratic lawmakers to the government of Israel.
“I have to say, Mr. Secretary, that’s a very bizarre response,” Castro told Rubio at a congressional hearing. Castro then asked Rubio if he could tell the American people whether or not Israel has nukes.
“You know that that’s a question we don’t, they’ve never acknowledged to have a nuclear program, people can have, as you know, an open source and other reporting suspicions about what they possess. If we're speaking frankly, I think most of the world asseses that they do,” Rubio said.
“But they’ve never acknowledged that publicly, and as a feature of our foreign policy, for a variety of reasons, we don’t discuss it that way either,” he added.
Castro expressed concern over what Israel’s “red lines” could be when it comes to using its nuclear weapons and said he was “shocked that our government wouldn’t make an effort to know, to understand and then to give our oversight body the information that we need to make decisions about the war. Rubio said Castro’s concerns were “fair” and that he’d be willing to answer more questions in a classified briefing.
Every US presidential administration since President Nixon has maintained an understanding with Israel under which the US and Israel do not acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and the US doesn’t pressure Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The ambiguity has allowed the US presidents to provide military assistance without worrying about the 1976 Symington Amendment, a foreign assistance law that prohibits aid to countries that traffic in or receive nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to be somewhere between 70 and 300 nuclear warheads, is almost always missing from the conversation in US media coverage and political discussions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, which has never been used to develop weapons. Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the NPT, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, who was killed by an Israeli strike on February 28, had issued a Fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons.