Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday cancelled plans to attend a two-day conference on nuclear security in Washington next week.

US President Barack Obama has convened the first-ever nuclear security summit to address the changing threats of nuclear arms and materials since the end of the Cold War. That includes the proliferation of so-called "loose nukes" – weapons or weapons-grade material that could be used by terrorists to make bombs.

Israeli officials say Mr. Netanyahu changed his plans after learning that Egypt and Turkey intended to press Israel on its nuclear status. "This conference is about nuclear terrorism," Mr Netanyahu said on Wednesday. "And I'm not concerned that anyone will think that Israel is a terrorist regime. Everybody knows a terrorist and rogue regime when they see one, and believe me they see quite a few – around Israel."
 

Israel never talks about its nuclear capabilities, but Dr Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, says it’s an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons. She told Newsline that Mr. Netanyahu’s decision not to attend the summit is a slap in the face for its closest ally, the US, and is a hypocritical move.

Shocking
“I think it’s very significant and rather shocking,” she says, all the more so because Israel has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and so is not bound by its inspections regime and other conditions. “Israel cannot on the one hand benefit from being outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and at the same time be arguing that it’s no one else’s business and they don’t have to engage collectively in international talks.” More than 40 countries are expected to attend the summit, including India and Pakistan, which like Israel are nuclear countries that have not signed the NPT.

Dr Johnson says what's needed even more than next week’s conference is an actual nuclear weapons prohibition treaty – similar to the existing conventions banning chemical and biological weapons. Especially, says Dr Johnson, if President Obama wants to see the nuclear weapons-free world he said he envisioned when signing a new nuclear treaty with Russia on Thursday. “You have a chance of actually creating a strong verification scheme from scratch,” she says of the possibility of creating such a convention. “We have a lot of instruments, but to put them into one place and make them legally binding – that’s what nuclear security requires now, not putting Band-Aids on a very dangerous trade.”

Free riders
Dr Johnson says President Obama is moving in the right direction regarding nuclear disarmament – from Thursday’s treaty with Russia reducing the number of deployed warheads to his Nuclear Posture Review released earlier this week, in which the circumstances where the US could use nuclear weapons were limited.

But Israel, she says, risks being left out in the cold if it doesn't come to the non-proliferation table soon.

“For a long time they were free riders on the nuclear Non-Proliferation regime,” she says, benefiting from the fact that all their Arab neighbour states and Iran joined the NPT and pledged not to acquire nuclear weapons. “But now the fact that they’re refusing to engage on this nuclear security summit that India and Pakistan are both engaging in demonstrates that Israel is not prepared to take even the first step. I think that’s going to leave them much more politically vulnerable than they’re calculating.”

The Nuclear Security Summit opens on Monday in Washington DC.