by MARK CURTIS
The UK broadcaster is writing hundreds of articles on Iran’s budding nuclear programme while failing to inform the public about Israel’s actual nuclear weapons.
The BBC is failing to properly inform the public about Israel’s possession of nuclear arms, new analysis by Declassified shows.
The British broadcaster widely reported Israel’s attacks on Iran which began on 13 June, and US airstrikes on the country that took place on 22 June.
Both Israel and the US claimed their attacks, which are widely seen as illegal, were to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability.
But the irony of two nuclear armed-states attacking a non-nuclear state to prevent it acquiring such weapons appears to have been lost on the BBC.
The British broadcaster appears to barely notice that Israel is a nuclear-armed state.
We analysed the BBC’s online reporting (excluding videos) for 13-26 June, looking at all articles tagged with either Iran or Israel, and found 103 articles and a further 821 short pieces in the BBC’s live written reporting.
The possibility that Israel might possess nuclear arms is mentioned in just six of those 103 articles. In five of those six, there is a single sentence that often occurs as the last line of the article: “Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, although it neither confirms nor denies this”.
Only one article, dated 18 June, contains a slightly longer consideration of Israeli nukes in its ninth and last section. This is a 96-word response to the question: “Does Israel have nuclear weapons?”, which is part of a “Your questions answered” piece that suggests BBC viewers might be interested in the issue.
Its first sentence is: “There are estimates that it has about 90 nuclear warheads. But the real answer is we do not know”.
It then repeats Israel’s position that it “neither confirmed nor denied a nuclear capability” and its final sentence says again that “there is no overt declaration by Israel” as to its possession of nuclear weapons.
Israeli weapons
While many of the BBC’s hundreds of articles about Iran quote Israeli officials on Tehran’s nuclear programme, the broadcaster is failing to consult independent sources of information about Israel’s nuclear arms.
Swedish research institute SIPRI estimates that Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads but that the number could reach as high as 300. Israel’s army, air force and navy are all assessed to be nuclear-armed.
Various sources suggest that Israel’s submarines have been refitted to carry missiles armed with nuclear weapons. As long ago as 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that “experts in Germany and Israel have confirmed that nuclear-tipped missiles have been deployed on the vessels”.
Furthermore, SIPRI’s latest assessment is that Israel is “believed to be modernizing its nuclear arsenal and appears to be upgrading its plutonium production reactor site at Dimona” in the Negev desert.
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