By Walter Pincus
ICH
June 17, 2009 “Washington Post”
The 1960 report defends Israel’s nuclear ambitions, offers guidance on handling today’s nuclear-hopefuls.
“We do not believe that Israel will embark on the development of nuclear weapons with the aim of actually starting a nuclear war,” reads the declassified 48-year-old CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate.
The estimate, publicly released June 5 by George Washington University’s National Security Archives, continues, “Possession of a nuclear weapon capability, or even the prospect of achieving it, would clearly give Israel a greater sense of security, self-confidence and assertiveness.”
“In any public announcement concerning their nuclear reactor program, the Israelis would almost certainly stress the peaceful nature of their efforts, but they would also, as time goes on, make plain that henceforth Israel is a power to be accorded more respect than either its friends or its enemies have hitherto given it,” reads the estimate.
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via CIA Declassifies Report on Israel’s Nukes : Information Clearing House – ICH
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Dandelion Salad 
Why do you think we make so many mistakes, miscalculations, errors of judgment, and keep making more of them, never learning from previous mistakes? We’ve been doing that for such a long time, that we must be getting good at it – just go over some of our proud achievements in the last 50 years! I’d go out on a limb and bet that if all mistakes, committed by major to semi-major countries of the world, were tabulated, we’d get, so disproportionately, the gold medal in both quantity and quality – but again, why is that? Is it because we are a super power, which renders our mistakes super in magnitude? Probably, but definitely there’s more to it. Many factors weigh in that go into the heart of our culture, set of actual values – practiced and unpractised, morality, tolerance or lack of it for others, their beliefs and ways of life that differ from ours, acceptance and respect of others who are just different in their ways from what we call and consider mainstream, the encouragement of following others based on unfounded fear or blind belief and not much evidence to support them, selfishness that we instil in our kids about that being the best, strongest, most beautiful, richest comes first before being good, decent, compassionate.
As powerful and advanced as we are technologically, militarily, economically, we definitely fall short in human skills where wisdom and compassion are pivotal and paramount. As a matter of fact, at times, it seems as if we fell behind and regressed instead of progressed in the areas that really matter; and becoming more and more single-minded, selfish, greedy, intolerant and robotish in how we go about living and co-existing with others in this fragile world of ours.