Victoria Bela
As the war between Israel and Hamas rages on in Gaza, international organisations have expressed their concern over a widening of the conflict, which has the potential to involve nuclear weapons.
On October 7, the surprise Hamas attack on Israel began a war that has taken the lives of thousands of civilians. As Israel continues to enact what United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called “collective punishment” against Palestinian civilians, fear and anger have grown.
The attack on Israel also exposed a weakness in its military defence, with many questioning whether Israel could still defend itself with conventional weapons.
In an October 9 post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Israeli lawmaker Revital Gotliv urged the government to unleash a “doomsday weapon” carried by Israel’s Jericho ballistic missiles.
But the extent of Israel’s nuclear capabilities – and whether the country could use them effectively in battle – remains an open question.
Many international organisations and countries – including China – believe that Israel has nuclear weapons. But Israel has conducted few, if any, tests. The mystery that surrounds its nuclear programme has sparked questions among military experts about the nation’s actual deterrence capabilities.
Israel has long maintained a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” – meaning it has never directly confirmed or denied the existence of a nuclear arsenal.
“Israel is universally believed to possess nuclear arms stored in a partially disassembled state,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA), told the Post via email on Thursday.
The nation is “estimated to have 90 nuclear warheads”, with the fissile material stockpiles to have over 200, he said.
Kimball added that the use of nuclear weapons, and even the threat of use, would make Israel “an international pariah and a target of foreign, conventional military attack”.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a 2017 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said in a statement on Monday that “Israel is a nuclear-armed state, the only such state in the Middle East”.
Alicia Sanders-Zakre, ICAN’s policy and research coordinator, told the Post via email that “Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons significantly increases the risks associated with the conflict and contributes to regional tensions”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was “following with concern” developments in the region, where it performs activities aimed at preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons considers the US, Britain, China, France and Russia to be “nuclear states”, because they built and tested nuclear explosives before 1967. Israel, Pakistan and India have never signed the treaty.
The five treaty-recognised nuclear powers “all have land, sea and air-based nuclear strike capabilities and maintain a higher level of nuclear combat readiness”, according to a paper published earlier this month in a journal run by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation Limited, an aerospace defence contractor for the People’s Liberation Army.
But according to the paper, the effectiveness of nuclear strikes based solely on land-based capabilities, which is all the authors believe Israel possesses, is “questionable”.
The nuclear nations that have not signed on to the non-proliferation treaty have conducted fewer than 10 nuclear tests each, compared to nearly 50 conducted by China and over 1,000 conducted by the US, according to the United Nations.
North Korea is the only nation that has conducted nuclear tests since the end of the 1990s. Although other countries are no longer testing their nuclear weapons, they have been able to maintain their nuclear arsenals through scientific assessments such as computer simulations, Sanders-Zakre said.
In the US, maintaining and “modernising” the nuclear stockpile has been possible in part because of the extensive data obtained through earlier tests, according to the US National Nuclear Security Administration.
Sanders-Zakre noted that Israel was suspected of conducting a joint nuclear weapons test with South Africa in 1979, which was picked up as a flash by the US satellite Vela in waters close to South Africa.
Israel is not known to have conducted any other tests. However, the country did not build its nuclear programme alone.
In the 1960s, France helped Israel establish the Negev Nuclear Research Centre near the city of Dimona, which was capable of producing nuclear weapons. The US only discovered the facility after construction began, according to researchers at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
Israel has US-made aircraft capable of delivering nuclear bombs and German-made submarines capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Israel’s own Jericho ballistic missiles are also capable of delivering nuclear warheads over 1,500km (932 miles) to nearby nations, according to an article written by Clive Williams, a visiting professor at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.
While the exact details of Israel’s nuclear warheads and delivery methods are unknown, its US- and German-made vehicles could act as reliable delivery methods if fitted for nuclear warheads.
In August, the IAEA’s director general wrote in a report that there was a “long-standing and fundamental difference of views” between Israel and other Middle Eastern states regarding the regulation of nuclear activity.
Kimball pointed out that Israel only has agreements to allow the IAEA to inspect specific facilities and does not – unlike most non-nuclear states – have a comprehensive safeguard agreement “to ensure that civilian nuclear activities and materials are not being diverted for nuclear weapons use.”
Kimball said that while Israel had a nuclear arsenal, the country had “no justification nor any military need to employ nuclear weapons”.
The ACA is “deeply concerned about a further escalation of violence against civilian populations,” Kimball said. “But we are not concerned that this might involve the use of nuclear weapons.”
Although Israel has insisted that it has no interest in “introducing” nuclear weapons to the Middle East, it has continued to avoid signing comprehensive safeguard agreements with the IAEA.
In a vote at the UN General Assembly last year, a vast majority of member states called for Israel to place all of its nuclear sites under IAEA supervision and to get rid of any nuclear weapons it possessed.
The IAEA did not comment on whether Israel had taken actions in line with this call.
The civilian death toll in the war between Israel and Hamas since October 7 has already exceeded that of the 50-day conflict in Gaza in 2014 – a loss that was unparalleled at the time.
The bombing of the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza on Tuesday ignited a wave of protests, though there is uncertainty about the source of the explosion, which resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths.
Shifting tides among nuclear nations and those feared to join their ranks have made the future of international nuclear cooperation uncertain.
On Tuesday, Russia announced it would begin to revoke its ratification of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, but the country will remain a signatory. The treaty, which is not in force because it has not been ratified by all necessary parties, would ban nuclear explosions for any reason.
Iran’s UN Security Council-imposed ban on ballistic missiles was also lifted on Wednesday, which had banned the nation from acquiring and selling missile technology capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
The US, Australia and EU have maintained their own sanctions and restrictions against Iran in a bid to continue limiting their nuclear potential.
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