North Korea's announcement in March that it would no longer be bound by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was met with international alarm and approbation. But some observers feel the most significant proliferation issue today revolves not around North Korea's attempts to acquire the bomb -- nor even that of Iran or Iraq -- but rather the supposedly secret nuclear arsenal of Israel.
Israel's nuclear weapons program "presents a tremendous danger in this fragile region," Israeli peace activist Gideon Spiro told Sojourners. "We're certainly happy that Iraq is in the process of dismantling its weapons of mass destruction, but if you neglect the Israeli bomb you cannot prevent others from having it." A senior Iranian official, for example, told the German weekly Stern last year that Israel's nuclear arsenal "leaves us no choice but to acquire the same weaponry."
The Israeli government and its supporters in the West -- including the U.S. government -- have for decades ignored or denied the existence of Israel's nuclear arsenal. The conspiracy of silence was broken in 1986 when a technician at Israel's nuclear production plant near Dimona revealed to the London Sunday Times that Israel had as many as 200 state-of-the-art nuclear weapons, putting Israel's arsenal on a level with that of China, France, and Great Britain.
The worker who blew the whistle on the "secret" Israeli weapons -- Mordechai Vanunu -- was kidnapped in Europe that year by the Israeli Mossad and, after a secret trial, sentenced to 18 years in solitary confinement -- in conditions Amnesty International has called "cruel, inhuman, and degrading." Spiro, head of a Jerusalem-based group working to secure Vanunu's release, believes Vanunu is being persecuted because he said things that "nobody wanted to hear."
"Vanunu is the tragic biblical situation: a prophet ahead of his time, hated by his own people," Spiro told Sojourners while on a U.S. visit in March. "The government was saying to us, 'Israel won't be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.' Vanunu knew from the inside that this was a lie."
Vanunu's decision to disclose Israel's nuclear secret grew out of his 1986 conversion to Christianity and his moral opposition to nuclear arms proliferation, according to his pastor, Rev. John McKnight, rector of St. John's Anglican church in Sydney, Australia. "He feels this is what he should be doing as a Christian," McKnight told the Religious News Service during Vanunu's trial.
Vanunu attended a six-week seminar the church sponsored on social issues, including one on the Christian responsibility to oppose nuclear weapons. Vanunu wrote to McKnight from prison, "I choose to obey the Lord Jesus, to obey his commandments, to love one another and bring peace to the people." McKnight, who baptised Vanunu, called him a "clear-thinking Christian activist."
The campaign to free Vanunu has taken on new urgency as his supporters fear that the six-and-a-half years of solitary confinement is beginning to take a psychological and physical toll. The Sunday Times has organized a campaign in Britain on behalf of Vanunu's release -- an unusual action for a mainstream newspaper. The U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu has urged letters to members of Congress urging U.S. pressure for his release.
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners.
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