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Flash From the Past: Why an Apparent Israeli Nuclear Test In 1979 Matters Today
Lasrick writes: Stanford's Leonard Weiss writes about growing evidence that Israel and South Africa cooperated on nuclear weapons testing in the 1970s, and in fact conducted a test: "On September 22, 1979, a US satellite code-named Vela 6911, which was designed to look for clandestine atmospheric nuclear tests and had been in operation for more than 10 years, recorded a double flash in an area where the South Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean, off the coast of South Africa. The detection immediately triggered a series of steps in which analysts at national labs in the United States informed their superiors that the recorded signal had all the earmarks of a nuclear test... The event has been a subject of controversy ever since, but is now recognized by most analysts as the detection of an Israeli nuclear test with South African logistical cooperation." Weiss goes through the history of the investigation and new evidence that has come to light, and relates it to the rhetoric surrounding Iran's nuclear energy program and the recent agreement Iran struck with the P5+1, as well as to efforts for a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. Terrific cloak-and-dagger read with plenty of technical details.
The whole history of that region has been various peoples stomping the shit out of various other peoples. This latest spat is just a continuation of stuff that has been going on for at least eight centuries. If it wasn't Israel it would be something else (Lebanon for instance). Of course, the British managed to screw things up in a way only the British can do when the created Palestine. To be fair, the French tried hard but were out classed by the Brits.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11.
More specifically: some muslims openly celebrated the murder of innocent civilians and were caught on camera. Some extremist christians do similar things. Some extremist jews do similar things. Some Russians do similar things. Muslims don't have a monopoly on mediaval behaviour.
The atmospheric test (Vela incident) was most likely of a small (as in artillery shell sized) fission device intended for use as part of a thermonuclear device. These devices have small yields, and are mostly neutron output, and produce very little fallout. A high air burst with a limited yield means that there is limited ground (or seawater) sucked up into the fireball. By the 60s, people had figured out how to do tests that didn't fill the air with fallout. Essentially, this was a "neutron bomb".
Israel is thought to have done conventional fission devices underground in the 60s. The sophistication of such a device is pretty low: you could probably cookbook it from the Los Alamos Primer and it would work without needing any preliminary tests (see "the Nth Country Problem" report, as well as more recent studies where they let physics students use open source materials to do a design, which is then evaluated by actual bomb engineers).
The Vela event was a test of a thermonuclear primary using boosting, and it's thought that Israel didn't have sufficient analytical capability and simulation codes in the 70s to be able to be sure it would work without a test. The US and Soviets did all their "practical" tests back in the 50s and moved to simulation. A air burst over the ocean is a pretty good way to "hide" a test, compared to, say, a underground test: very little fallout, and the ocean just moves around a bit. By 1979, the seismic sensor systems were very sophisticated: an Israeli underground test would have been trivially detectable. The only real detection risk was from orbit: the double pulse is highly characteristic of a nuclear explosion, and the exact capability of those spacecraft was classified. The Israeli's figured that if we did detect it, we wouldn't acknowledge it publicly, because it would raise a lot of ugly problems with the enormous foreign aid (>$10B/year) we were sending after the Camp David accords (in 1978) and the rules about aid and nuclear nations.
There *were* evidences of the EMP (recorded at Arecibo as disturbances of the ionosphere) as well as in hydrophone data.
I gave you the facts regarding the Holocaust comparison. You are simply ignoring them and responding with "bad stuff happened in both places". The Warsaw ghetto was part of a program that was almost uniquely bad. The Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing losing wars and on the scale of what happens to people who start wars with superior powers is rather humane. Both things are bad. But you simply lack any ability to make moral arguments when you sit there and lie about the facts via. making a comparison which is wholly inaccurate for shock value. If you have read about the holocaust you wouldn't be making the comparison.
As for the world, the world didn't stand by silently when the Jews were destroyed. The world protested mildly. The world wasn't going to do much about it but they certainly were willing to tsk-tsk Hitler and the Nazis over it. Which is the same thing that happens other minorities are destroyed.
The world tsk-tsked over Tibet.
The world tsk-tsked over the Guatemalan civil war.
The world tsk-tsks over North Korea.
The world tsk-tsked over East Timor.
and so on again and again and again.
Your little vow to never let it happen again to anyone was a total failure. But of course you don't give a crap about the victims or you would be focusing on things like North Korea. The issue is the perpetrators. It offends your moral sensibility to learn that when Judaism decided to stop being the ghost of Judea and return to being a living breathing nation it went back to farting, having bad breath and sneezing. "Oh it was so much more refined as a ghost". Nations are born in blood. Get over it. Israel will do what any nation does when its existence is threatened. Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to establish a hostile state.
I've been to Israel. The Palestinians could make great Israelis. But they didn't go down the path of integration and instead have gone down the path of a century long struggle against the Jews losing war after war after war. After 1936-9 they should have just accepted defeat and admitted the new society arising in mandate Palestine was going to be Israel not Palestine and become part of it, the same way my great grandparents became part of America. But instead they keep fighting pointless in the name of their dead society. I don't like that they are destroying themselves by putting their hand and then arm over and over and over again into the blades of a lawnmower believing that somehow they will convince the lawnmower to give up. But I don't blame the lawnmower. The Greeks knew that the elpis (expectation of help from Zeus) was the worst of all tragedy to befall men. The Palestinians unfortunately believe that their situation will change magically rather than accepting that if they want to live in the Palestinian territory they will need to do so as Israelis.
Electing a party whose primary platform is "armed resistance" and then immediately engaging in it. Again you really need to work on your honesty.
This is a lie. Israel restricts dual usage materials. Almost all usage is not dual usage.
First off by definition a law requires an enforcing power. If a power is unable to enforce it has opinions it doesn’t make law.
Second your history is wrong. International agreements on peace became popular in response to the death toll in the Napoleonic wars.
One more thing I forgot to say. The Jewish reaction to the Holocaust was not to get a few lawyers together and work for a better United Nations. Rather it was to start the process of galvanizing support among the remaining European Jews for Zionism. The reaction was not the Geneva Convention to protect Jews. Jews had seen international conventions protecting them be ignored many times over the last 1900 years. Rather the reaction was to form a Jewish army and stop being a stateless minority. The mass migration to Palestine had the support of European Jewry after WWII.
And to a great extent the success of the Zionist project then caused a nationalist surge in the other major bodies of Jews. The mainstream Jewish political philosophy of a century ago looks nothing like it does today. Circumstances changed ideology.