Egypt Turns Down Request to Sign Nuclear Treaty,Says Israel Must Join First

[NNN0LHI]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBQ7OCHWCE.html

Egypt Turns Down Request to Sign Nuclear Treaty, Saying Israel Must Join First

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Egypt's foreign minister on Saturday turned down a request from the world's nuclear watchdog to sign a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons, saying Israel should first join a separate agreement calling for a halt to the spread of atomic bombs.

The refusal by Israel, which is believed to possess hundreds of nuclear warheads, to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has also made the Middle East more insecure, Ahmed Aboul Gheit was quoted by Egypt's semiofficial Middle East News Agency as saying.

Aboul Gheit's comments came in a letter to Tibor Toth, the new executive secretary of the commission that oversees the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. snip

All Middle Eastern counties except Israel are signatories to the NPT. Israel is believed to have commenced its nuclear program in the 1950s, but has never denied nor confirmed the widely held view that it possesses atomic bombs.

[Jim Sagle]

1. .

:boring:

[H5N1]

2. Israel has no nuclear weapons - just ask them!

[ConcernedCanuk]

3. There are many different sources that suggest 100-200 nukes in Israel

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The upper and lower plausible limits on Israel's stockpile may be bounded by considering several variables, several of which are generic to any nuclear weapons program. The reactor may have operated an average of between 200 and 300 days annually, and produced approximately 0.9 to 1.0 grams of plutonium for each thermal megawatt day. Israel may use between 4 and 5 kilograms of plutonium per weapon <5 kilograms is a conservative estimate, and Vanunu reported that Israeli weapons used 4 kg>.

/snip/

Based on plausible upper and lower bounds of the operating practices at the reactor, Israel could have thus produced enough plutonium for at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200 weapons.

Some type of non-nuclear test, perhaps a zero yield or implosion test, occurred on 2 November 1966 . There is no evidence that Israel has ever carried out a nuclear test, although many observers speculated that a suspected nuclear explosion in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979 was a joint South African-Israeli test.

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/

Interesting read

[mom cat]

4. I was wondering when an Islamic country would state the obvious.

How can anyone point the finger at Egypt or Iran regarding potential nuclear development when Israel has at least a hundred actual ones?

[bribri16]

5. It's about time somebody stood up against the hypocrisy. n/t