By IRNA,
New York : Ex-US President Jimmy Carter has said Israel has at least 150 atomic weapons in its arsenal.
Carter made his comments on Israel’s weapons at a press conference at the annual literary Hay Festival in Wales.
He also described Israeli treatment of Palestinians as “one of the greatest human rights crimes on earth”.
Carter gave the figure for the Israeli nuclear arsenal in response to a question on US policy on a possible nuclear-armed Iran, arguing that any country newly armed with atomic weapons faced overwhelming odds.
“The US has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons; Russia has about the same; Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” he said.
“We have a phalanx of enormous capabilities, not only of weaponry but also of rockets to deliver every one of those missiles on a pinpoint accuracy target.”
Most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country’s Dimona nuclear reactor.
The US, a key ally of Israel, has in general followed the country’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”, neither confirming or denying the existence of its assumed arsenal.
During the press briefing, Carter expressed his support for Israel as a country, but criticised its domestic and foreign policy.
“One of the greatest human rights crimes on earth is the starvation and imprisonment of 1.6 million Palestinians,” he said.
The former US president cited statistics which he said showed the nutritional intake of some Palestinian children was below that of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as saying the European position on Israel could be best described as “supine”.
Carter, awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, brokered the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state.