Netanyahu to US "Don't ever second guess me on Hamas again"

[reACTIONary]

232. I don't think there is any doubt about...

... the fact that Israel possess nuclear weapons.

One post in this thread says 50. The Wikipeda page states "Estimates as to the size of the Israeli nuclear arsenal vary between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads." Those are estimates, and cover a pretty wide range to have been based on "documentation of numbers of nuclear warheads".

The source of the quote is "Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem" - and yet it contains no qualification or other indication that the number of nuclear warheads is not publicly known, is merely an estimate, and that these estimates are subject to wide variation. As a historian I would have expected him to say something like "perhaps in the hundreds".

Maybe I'm just sensitive to such locutions, but that immediately sets off my bull shit detector.

The article itself is characterize by the Guardian (the publisher) as "a personal and highly controversial view of the current crisis in the Middle East". Not exactly an expression of full faith and confidence. And, by the way, "the current crisis" is not actually "the current crisis" we are discussing since the article was published over 10 years ago. And is based on a book that was published 25 years before that.

The original contention that I was responding to is that Israel has threatened to use its nuclear capability to "take out the major European cities". That's ridiculous.