Vanunu Continues To Be Harassed

As reported by both Haaretz (click here) and the Guardian (click here), Mordechai Vanunu has been detained by Israeli authorities for allegedly leaking national secrets.

In 1986 Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli nuclear facility Dimona, released information to the press in London about Israel's secret nuclear weapons program; a program which in 1986 had already stockpiled 200 nuclear warheads. Vanunu was later lured from London to Rome by a romantic liaison with a woman working for the Mossad. There he was drugged and kidnapped, and returned to Israel. He was sentenced to 18 years in jail, 11 of which he spent in solitary confinement. (for more information see the website Free Vanunu)

Given Israel's concern over the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Arab states, it seems both ironic and more than a little hypocritical that they insist on such secrecy over their own nuclear weapons program. It is also laughable to watch Israeli politicians twist themselves into knots when refusing to acknowledge the existence of their nuclear arsenal.

All nations have a responsibility to deal in an open and honest manner over possession of nuclear weapons. The reasons aren't simply for the benefit of their own population, who should have a right to debate the efficacy of such weapons, but also because nuclear weapons, if used, could drag the world into a nuclear conflagration.

Israel's continued confinement and harassment of Vanunu not only underlines a clearly flawed policy of paranoid secrecy, but it also demonstrates an official and unseemly thirst for revenge that far outstrips Vanunu's so-called crime. After 18 years in an Israeli prison it is also something that Vanunu has paid in full many times over.