Vanunu release spurs nuke talk

VIENNA, Austria — Israel continues to produce atomic weapons and already has hundreds of nuclear warheads, researchers said as Israeli officials released a man imprisoned for 18 years for leaking some of the country’s most sensitive nuclear secrets.

Because Israel is not party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has no power to look into its nuclear program.

The U.N. watchdog agency, however, is seeking contacts with Israel, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei repeatedly has called for talks on eliminating all weapons of mass destruction from the Middle East.

Israeli authorities yesterday freed Mordechai Vanunu, jailed for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s nuclear-weapons program to a British newspaper in 1986.

Israel neither confirms nor denies it has nuclear weapons and refuses to discuss such speculation.

Mr. Vanunu walked out of a prison in Ashkelon and immediately defied Israeli restrictions by speaking with the international press to demand the Jewish state open its nuclear facilities to international inspection.

Friedrich Steinhaeusler, a former IAEA nuclear-safety expert who now is a physics professor at the University of Salzburg, insisted that Israel still has nuclear weapons and is producing more.

The best estimates put the size of the Israeli arsenal at 150 nuclear weapons, Mr. Steinhaeusler said. With air, sea and land-based launching systems, “They have the Middle East under control,” he said.

But Avner Cohen, an expert on Israel and nuclear weapons at the Maryland-based Center for International and Security Studies, said, “There is a lot of uncertainty” about the number of weapons held by Israel.

“There are all kind of estimates, from the upper teens on the lower side to over 300 on the higher side,” he said.

John Simpson, director of the Mountbatten Center of International Studies at Britain’s University of Southampton, estimated the number of atomic weapons held by Israel at no more than 200.

He said his estimate was based on the presumed output of plutonium by a reactor in Dimona and on the number of tunnels in cliffs from which the weapons could be deployed.

IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky declined to comment on Israel, saying the agency has no jurisdiction there.

But Mr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian, in a lecture earlier this month, condemned “this imbalance in the region, [with] Israel sitting on nuclear weapons and everybody else trying to stick to the Nonproliferation Treaty.”

However, Mr. ElBaradei said Israel was unlikely to readily change its stance.

He said Israelis think “as long as many people, individuals and groups continue to talk about the destruction of Israel, they just simply cannot afford to give up the nuclear option in the absence of a comprehensive peace accepted by the people of the region.”