WASHINGTON: In a private email exchange last year leaked this week by hackers, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed Israel’s nuclear weapons capability with a friend, saying the country had 200 warheads.

Though Israel is widely believed to have developed nuclear weapons decades ago, it has never declared itself to be a nuclear state. The existence of its weapons programme is considered classified information by both the Israeli and US governments.

Powell, a retired army general who has served as White House national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday through a spokeswoman he was referring to public estimates of Israel’s nukes.

“Gen Powell has not been briefed or had any knowledge from US sources on the existence and or size of an Israeli nuclear capability,” the statement said.

“He like many people believes that there may be a capability and the number 200 has been speculated upon in open sources.”

In the March 2015 exchange from his personal Gmail account, Powell was discussing a speech that day to a joint session of Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The conservative Israeli leader staunchly opposed the deal then proposed by President Barack Obama to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

“Iranians can’t use one if they finally make one,” Powell wrote to Democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds, a hedge-fund founder who serves on the board of the Colin L. Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York.

“The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands.”

Itai Bardov, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, declined to discuss Powell’s email or his nation’s policy of not commenting on whether it has nuclear weapons.

Asked about the issue at a briefing on Friday, State Department spokesman John Kirby also declined to comment. “I’m not going to discuss matters of intelligence,” he said. “We support the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.”

Powell is not the first top-level US government official to publicly discuss Israel’s nukes. Former president Jimmy Carter has said in interviews and speeches that Israel has between 150 and 300 warheads.

But the issue is not supposed to be discussed openly by those who work for the US government and hold active security clearances.

Even members of Congress are routinely admonished not to even mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal, said Avner Cohen, a professor at the James Centre for Non-proliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

“It’s noteworthy that someone like Colin Powell said that,” said Cohen, who has written extensively about Israel’s nuclear programme.

“Obviously, he was privy to all kinds of intelligence on this issue. It’s kind of considered by everybody to be a public fact, but the United States government as a matter of policy has never said that.” Cohen said US intelligence on Israel’s nuclear programme carries “top level” classification.

As an indication of the subject’s sensitivity, he pointed to the recent case of James Doyle, a political scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who lost his job after publishing an academic paper in 2013 that included Israel on a list of nations that either “possess nuclear arms or are in alliance with nuclear powers”.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2016