Britain admits Tel Aviv's nuclear arsenal "widely assumed"
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
London, Nov 8, IRNA
UK-Israel-Nuclear arsenal
The British government has suggested that the reason it has not made an issue of Israeli illegal nuclear arsenal is because Tel Aviv has yet to confirm possessing
"We are aware of the widespread assumption that Israel possesses nuclear weapons," Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman said in response to whether the UK will make representations to Israel about joining the non-proliferation treaty.
"But note that Israel has refused to confirm it," Triesman said in a written parliamentary reply published Wednesday.
He declined to answer if Israeli nuclear arsenal, estimated to be up to 200 warheads or more, was larger than that of the UK.
But the Foreign Office minister insisted that the British government has "on a number of occasions called on Israel to accede to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state." It was reported earlier this year that Britain not only secretly sold the Israeli regime heavy water but also supplied plutonium to help the Zionist regime develop nuclear weapons some 40 to 50 years ago.
The plutonium was supplied by the UK's Atomic Energy Authority as a result of which Tel Aviv was able to put together a pair of crude nuclear bombs just in case things did not go as planned in the 1967 Six-Day war against Arab nations, the New Statesman reported.
In August 2005, the BBC revealed fresh evidence from official documents showing that Britain secretly shipped to Israel a surplus 20 tons of heavy water in 1958 that was originally supplied by Norway.
The New Statesman, a weekly magazine, in March suggested the British government could find itself in trouble at the IAEA for breaching the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, saying that it still has not told the UN watchdog of its plutonium and uranium sales.
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