Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 14. januar
2008 / Time Line January 14, 2008
Version 3.5
13. Januar 2008, 15. Januar 2008
01/14/2008
National Security Archive Update, January 14, 2008
In 1974 Estimate, CIA Found that Israel Already Had a Nuclear
Stockpile and that "Many Countries" Would Soon Have Nuclear
Capabilities
Washington DC, January 14, 2008 - In the wake of the Indian
"peaceful nuclear explosion" on May 17, 1974 and growing concern
about the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, the U.S.
intelligence community prepared a Special National Intelligence
Assessment, "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons," published today by the National Security Archive.
The 1974 Indian test created shock waves in the U.S. government,
not only because of its broader implications, but because the
intelligence community had failed to detect that it was imminent
(This failure led to an intelligence post-mortem.) The possibility
that the Indian test might lead to a nuclear arms race in South
Asia and create new pressures for nuclear proliferation elsewhere
induced the U.S. government, which under Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger had treated this problem as a lower-level issue, to begin
viewing developing policies to curb proliferation as a higher
priority.
That the SNIE estimated that "many countries" would have the
economic and technological capability to produce nuclear weapons by
the 1980s underlined the seriousness of the problem, as did another
statement: "Terrorists might attempt theft of either weapons or
fissionable materials." Noting that there were over 50,000 nuclear
weapons in the world, the report observed that "absolute assurance
about future security is impossible."
The CIA released the 1974 SNIE in response to a FOIA request by
National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson, author
of Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi
Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton,2006).
Quicker than usual, the CIA posted the SNIE on its Web site before
the National Security Archive published the document. In response
to the CIA posting, the estimate has already received some play in
the U.S. and Israeli press. Interestingly, twenty years ago, the
CIA released an excised version of the "Summary and Conclusions" of
this document in response to a FOIA request by the Natural
Resources Defense Council. It became the subject of a front-page
story in The New York Times on 26 January 1978, under the headline,
"C.I.A. Said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs." In response to press
queries, the CIA stated that the release was a mistake because it
included some classified details.
01/14/2008
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