Colin Powell’s nuclear email estimates Israel has 200 nuclear warheads
The existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons is classified information by the Israeli and U.S. governments.
On Friday, The Associated Press reported a spokeswoman for Powell said he was referring to public estimates of Israel’s nukes. The statement read:
Gen. Powell has not been briefed or had any knowledge from U.S. sources on the existence and or size of an Israeli nuclear capability.
He like many people believe that there may be a capability and the number 200 has been speculated upon in open sources.
This email was written 10 years after he left government and has not received briefings on classified matters.
In the March 2015 email, Powell was discussing that day’s speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Powell wrote to Democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds, a hedge-fund founder who serves on the board of the Colin L. Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York:
Iranians can’t use one if they finally make one. The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands.
Asked about the issue at a briefing Friday, State Department spokesman John Kirby stated:
I’m not going to discuss matters of intelligence. We support the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
On 8 August 2016, Grant Smith the director of the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, filed a Federal lawsuit because U.S. aid to Israel has been illegal under our own laws passed in the 1970’s which prohibits aid to nuclear powers who have not signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.
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Photo of Mordechai Vanunu copyright Eileen Fleming, June 2009
In 2005, I was just an American writer in Jerusalem when I met Israel’s WMD Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu ‘by chance’.
We began a series of interviews that are freely streaming at YouTube and enshrined in articles and books, simply because Vanunu informed me:
The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground.
In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’
Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection.
When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.
Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.- “Beyond Nuclear: Mordechai Vanunu’s Freedom of Speech Trial and My Life as a Muckraker” by Eileen Fleming
My first two questions to Vanunu in 2005:
View UNCENSORED “30 Minutes with Vanunu” taped in March 2006, a few weeks after Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial began because he spoke to foreigners who were media [such as Amy Goodman] after his release from 18 years behind bars for telling the world everthing he knew as a mid-level technician on the night shift within Israel’s WMD Facility at Dimona in the Negev.
As reported in Mordechai Vanunu 30 Yrs Israel’s Nuclear Hostage, Vanunu wrote regarding his latest kangaroo court trial which began on the 4th of July 2016:
After 30 years in Israel prison the new trial started today. From the big trial of exposing Israel Atomic weapons secrets to new charges about moving apartment without reporting, for meeting foreigners, and for speaking to Israel media about Dimona Nuclear secrets. So the trial started and will continue in next months…
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- Mordechai Vanunu: Final Annual Update and this Writers Next Steps - June 19, 2021