Letters to the Editor | 13 October 2007

A-bomb or B-movie?

Sir: I have no idea whether or not we really came close to WW3 last month, as your correspondents Douglas Davis and James Forsyth insist (‘We came so close’, 6 October), but one line in their exciting piece brings doubts to mind. After ‘secretly’ crossing into Syria (as opposed to coming in on a guided tour, presumably) soil samples collected by ‘elite’ Israeli commandos (thank heavens they didn’t use run-of-the-mill commandos) at Tartous ‘suggested that the cargo [from North Korea] was nuclear’.

Really? Presumably any such nuclear material would have been transported and stored in rather robust, sealed and shielded containers. If this stuff was radioactive enough, and leaky enough, for it to have contaminated the soil of Tartous, a biggish town, to such an extent in a matter of days then we would know about it. And the bombing — and subsequent scattering — of large amounts of weapons-grade plutonium or uranium-235 would have created some considerable local bother in the town and indeed along the whole Levantine coast. Hats off to the Israelis if they did indeed manage to put the kibosh on a Syrian A-bomb; however, there is a B-movie, James Bondish flavour to this story that invites a degree of grown-up scepticism.

Michael Hanlon
London SE5

Don’t blame the Jews

Sir: Jonathan Mirsky’s review of Mearsheimer and Walts’s The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy: The very special relationship (Books, 29 September) demonstrates how insidious the discourse about Israel has become. Mirsky talks glibly about ‘Israel’s expulsion of most of its Palestinian population’. No serious historian would support this assertion. In 1948, when Israel was established following the 1947 United Nations vote, the surrounding Arab states attacked with the aim of destroying the fledgling state. Many Palestinian Arabs fled, mainly to escape the fighting, some heeding the instructions of the Arab command to clear the field for the onslaught against the Jews, and some because of Israeli military action.