Khaldon Azhari

TOKYO: There is hypocrisy in the system that attempts to control nuclear arms, particularly with Israel, according to Ankit Panda, a Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Israel, he pointed out at a news conference in Tokyo, is a nuclear arms state that has stayed outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is bombing safeguarded facilities in Iran that have been under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“Iran’s facilities were not like, let’s say the reactor that the Israelis bombed in Syria in 2007 that the North Koreans were building for Bashar al-Assad, which was not under IAEA safeguards,” Panda said in reply to a question from Arab News Japan on the hypocrisy surrounding Israel’s nuclear capabilities. “These were facilities that IAEA inspectors had told us the number of centrifuges, the activities undergoing at those facilities, but nevertheless, they were bombed.”

As a result, Panda says, the Iranians have suggested that complying with the system of safeguards hasn’t had the intended benefits.

Panda had kind words for Japan’s position as it condemned Israel’s actions and has largely avoided the hypocrisy of other countries, especially G7 countries.

He said the relationship between Israel and the United States, as well as many European countries, is complicated, and they are finding it hard to “disentangle those broader concerns they have in dealing with Israel from the questions that I think pertain to the non-proliferation order and non-proliferation principles.”

“So, Japan taking a principled stance, and condemning the Israeli attack, I think really was the right thing to do in terms of supporting a non-proliferation regime that, in my opinion, works best when we steer clear of these hypocrisies and try to apply the same standards to all states.”

However, Panda doesn’t think the fact that three major countries – Israel, India, and Pakistan – are nuclear powers outside the NPT means the NPT is a failure, “because the NPT has been tremendously successful in limiting the number of countries that have ultimately acquired nuclear weapons.”