It may have been coincidental that The Washington Post came out with a forceful column very critical of US silence about Israel’s nuclear arsenal as it assists the Tel Aviv government in its conflict with Iran over its alleged potential for nuclear weapons.

The Post’s ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, provided details about Israel’s nuclear potential in an excellent column last Sunday, pointing out that readers periodically ask him: “Why does the press follow every jot and title of Iran’s nuclear programme but we never see any stories about Israel’s nuclear capability?”

He said “it’s a fair question” and shockingly revealed that “going back 10 years into Post archives, I couldn’t find any in-depth reporting on Israeli nuclear capabilities, although (the Post’s) national security writer Walter Pincus has touched on it many times in his articles and columns”.

He added that several experts in the nuclear and non-proliferation fields he had talked with said that “the lack of reporting on Israel’s nuclear weapons is real — and frustrating”.

Pexton noted “some obvious reasons for this and others that are not so obvious” but none hinted, astonishingly, at direct US or Israeli pressure or even the influential Zionist lobby in the US that silence officials and the media.

Israel’s hackneyed position is that it “will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East”; an Israeli embassy spokesman claimed that “Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace”.

Pexton explains that “the ‘introduce’ language is purposefully vague” and experts told him that it means “Israel will not openly test a weapon or declare publicly that it has one”.

Mostly importantly, Pexton underlined, “Americans don’t leak about the Israeli nuclear programme either”, and George Perkovich, director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told him that “Israel’s nuclear weapons serves both the US and Israeli interests”.

In other words, the Post’s ombudsman added, “if Israel were public about its nukes, or brandished its programme recklessly... it would put more pressure on Arab states to obtain their own bomb”.

US-Israeli relationship on nuclear issues are pegged to what Pexton describes as “a still-secret 1969 agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon, reached when the United States became sure that Israel possessed nuclear weapons”.

Perkovich explained that one reason US sources do not leak is that it can hurt one’s career.

“It’s like all things having to do with Israel and the United States. If you want to get ahead, you don’t talk about it; you don’t criticise Israel, you protect Israel. You don’t talk about illegal settlements on the West Bank even though everyone knows they are there.”

But Pexton’s gem came in his concluding line: “That doesn’t mean the media shouldn’t write about how Israel’s doomsday weapons affect the Middle East equation. Just because a story is hard to do doesn’t mean The Post, and the US press more generally shouldn’t do it.”

There is much more about Israel’s undercover operations in this field, as pointed by Victor Gilinsky, former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in an article appearing in the New York Review of Books published in May 2004.

Gilinsky cited three shocking incidents: the 1968 smuggling past European inspectors of 200 tonnes of uranium ore to Israel, the CIA’s conclusion at about the same time that Israel previously stole bomb-grade uranium from a US naval fuel plant, and the 1979 Vela satellite signal that was widely interpreted as an indication of an Israeli nuclear test in the Indian Ocean.

Although the Obama administration is seen as dragging its feet towards Israel’s case against Iran, many questions are still raised about continued American intentions in the Middle East.

It is time that the American administration that will come into office in November begins serious efforts to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, a step that fits well the Arab Spring if this embryonic democratic movement is to have any chance of real success.