© Sunday Times
It's a fair question. Going back 10 years into Post archives, I could not find any in-depth reporting on Israeli nuclear capabilities, although national security writer Walter Pincus has touched on it many times in his articles and columns.
I spoke with several experts in the nuclear and nonproliferation fields , and they say that the lack of reporting on Israel's nuclear weapons is real - and frustrating. There are some obvious reasons for this, and others that are not so obvious.
First, Israel refuses to acknowledge publicly that it has nuclear weapons. The U.S. government also officially does not acknowledge the existence of such a program. Israel's official position, as reiterated by Aaron Sagui, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy here, is that "Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace." The "introduce" language is purposefully vague, but experts say it means that Israel will not openly test a weapon or declare publicly that it has one.
According to Avner Cohen, a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California who has written two books about this subject, this formulation was born in the mid-1960s in Israel and was the foundation of a still-secret 1969 agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon, reached when the United States became sure that Israel possessed nuclear bombs.
Comment: What we are seeing today in Syria - that is, ALL of the massacres and car bombs etc. - is the work of the 'Free Syrian Army' and it is precisely the same kind of tactic that has been playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 10 years. This is a NATO 'proxy Army', trained and funded by the intelligence agencies of NATO countries to sow chaos in the targeted nation as an alternative to a 'boots-on-the-ground' invasion by NATO country armies. Even in the case where an invasion takes place, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, this proxy army war takes over fairly quickly because such proxies can kill and maim with impunity whereas regular Western soldiers cannot do so to the same extent. There are two main benefits of such proxy army tactics:
1) In the case of Syria, they can be used to try and create such chaos that NATO countries can ultimately invade or start a bombing campaign for "humanitarian reasons".
2) In the case of Iraq, for example, they can be used to justify the continued occupation by NATO in order to fight these same proxy armies that NATO created.
See also: 'Free Syrian Army' aka 'al-Qaeda' aka US, Israeli and British Mercenaries, Use Syrian Man as 'Suicide Bomber'