The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst for years

George Monbiot is convinced that Iran are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, a point which I remain unconvinced of, but he makes a larger point. If Iran are doing so, they are not starting a Middle East nuclear arms race, they are joining it.

George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions on Israel?

Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military response would, of course, be disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown - who maintain their nuclear arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty - are in no position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Bush claims, the proliferation of such weapons "would be a dangerous threat to world peace", why does neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to a secret briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, possesses between 60 and 80 of them?

Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of "nuclear ambiguity": neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

When it comes to the NNPT the west displays more hypocrisy than it does on any other subject. We continue to hold on to our own nuclear arsenals, indeed, the UK recommissions Trident whilst the US develops a new range of "bunker busting" nuclear weapons - both clear violations of our commitment under the treaty to disarm ourselves of our nuclear arsenals - whilst we threaten God knows what damage to any other nation which dares to attempt to acquire them.

And all of this is being done whilst we all pretend that we don't know that Israel is a nuclear power, because if we admit that we know this, then the US - under it's own laws - would have to suspend the billions of dollars it sends to Israel every year.

Monbiot lays out the difference in attitude the US displayed when it discovered that Israel was developing a nuclear bomb.

At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50 F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel's abandonment of its nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to the secretary of state in October 1968 reveals, the order would make the US "the principal supplier of Israel's military needs" for the first time. In return, it should require "commitments that would make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear". Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant defence secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington), Rabin "did not dispute in any way our information on Israel's nuclear or missile capability". He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced that the proposal was "completely unacceptable to us". On November 27, Lyndon Johnson's administration accepted Israel's assurance that "it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons".

As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made.

And the farce is continues almost every six months:

Every six months, the intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on technology acquired by foreign states that's "useful for the development or production of weapons of mass destruction". These reports discuss the programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and other nations, but not in Israel. Whenever other states have tried to press Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US and European governments have blocked them. Israel has also exempted itself from the biological and chemical weapons conventions.

By refusing to sign these treaties, Israel ensures it need never be inspected. While the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors crawl round Iran's factories, put seals on its uranium tanks and blow the whistle when it fails to cooperate, they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in Israel. So when the Israeli government complains, as it did last week, that the head of the IAEA is "sticking his head in the sand over Iran's nuclear programme", you can only gape at its chutzpah.

When the west pressures Iran to meet it's commitments under the NNPT - ignoring the fact that the Iranians are allowed to enrich uranium under the NNPT for civilian purposes - we are also ignoring the elephant in the room, which is Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Until we become serious about our commitments under the NNPT, then we are simply spouting hypocrisy when we demand that others adhere to a treaty which we ourselves are blatantly ignoring.

And by allowing Israel to continue to refuse to sign up to the NNPT, we are making a joke out of our supposed desire for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Click title for Monbiot's excellent article.

Tags: Iran, US, nuclear weapons, NNPT, IAEA, Israel