Israel believes it's above the rules

Israeli ministers and official government spokesmen seem to think they are not subject to the rules of human decency applied to all others by the international community.

Yet, intriguingly, they have already taken an initiative towards a nuclear-free Middle East at an overlooked international meeting in Paris two years ago. Israel's then prime minister Ehud Olmert signed up to the Paris Declaration on the Summit for the Mediterranean which included the following passage.

"The parties shall pursue a mutually and effectively verifiable Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and their delivery systems."

Furthermore the parties will consider practical steps to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as excessive accumulation of conventional arms.

If Jerusalem came clean and disclosed full details of its atomic arsenal, it might be able to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is currently under a month-long review at the UN in New York, as a fully fledged nuclear power and de facto call the bluff of the five nuclear weapons states currently party to the NPT, the US, Russia, Britain, France and China.

To do so, Israel would have to document that it had in fact become an atomic-armed power before the end of 1966. This is because, according to article 1X (3) of the NPT,

"For the purposes of this treaty, a nuclear-weapon state is one which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to January 1 1967."

There is interesting evidence for this, none of it definitively confirmed.

Israel remains the atomic jack-in-the-box.

David Lowry Former director, European Proliferation Information Centre