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Nuclear Proliferation Deniers

By Jaime Sneider
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To secure U.S. permission, Israel actually presented the United States with a video of the Syrian nuclear facility it bombed last September:

Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core’s design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows “remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon,” a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video “very, very damning.”

Syria’s Ambassador likens this to the evidence the United States presented to the UN about Iraq, and warns Americans not to be so gullible this time around. But the real suckers are reporters, like Seymour Hersh, who buy this drivel. In his story last February, Hersh quotes anonymous Syrian officials claiming the facility only housed a chemical weapons program and the North Koreans were just ordinary construction workers. Yet Syria has extensive experience with chemical weapons and would not need the help of North Koreans to build them. And speaking of chumps, one of Hersh’s original sources is sticking to his story:

David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program. “The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities,” he said. “The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program.”

To Albright, it is not enough to demonstrate that the Syrians are secretly building an unapproved nuclear reactor with a rogue nuclear state. The burden doesn’t even shift back to the Syrians. Does Albright think the Israeli video was obtained with the consent of the Syrians? Does he think the Syrians would have eagerly admitted UN weapons inspectors? Left-wingers decry so-called climate change deniers, but what amount of evidence will it take them to recant their denials of Syria’s nuclear weapons program?

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