Almost beyond belief. Almost...

[fpb]

Weird news of the day: the BBC has just revealed that when Israel was trying to start a nuclear program with a view to creating its own atom bomb, in 1960, Britain, of all countries, sold it the essential "heavy water", after Norway and America hard refused. America, at the time, was doing everything in its power to prevent Israel getting the Bomb. What is most astonishing is that the transaction was carried out by middle-level civil servants in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who never even informed the British Government of this decision! You may not believe this, but the documents confirm it: they show that the officials concerned only spoke with each other, and that, at the same time, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was actually pressing Israel not to go ahead with its nuclear program!

Comments

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Curse you, Humphrey Appleby!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, without those Sir Humphreys and their arrogance and stupidity, Israel just might have been destroyed long ago. In 1973 especially, the Egyptians refrained from pressing their advantage because they had received French advice that Israel woudl react to a threat to its survival - as opposed to a mere battlefield setback - by using the bomb. Since then, the survival of Israel has been essentially due to a kind of lower-case mutual assured destruction calculation by Egypt, without whose army nobody can fight Israel.