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JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday embarked on what looked like a damage limitation exercise the day after making remarks read as an official acknowledgment thatthe Jewish state possesses nuclear weapons.
Olmert, on a visit to Germany, had triggered a political row and calls for his resignation in Israel when he was seen as having broken the official taboo on any admission within Israel of the existence of the country's nuclear arsenal.
Olmert resorted - three times - at a joint press conference with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to a well-tried formulation of Israel's "nuclear ambiguity" by declaring that "Israel won't be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East".
But the episode - officially the result of a "misunderstanding" of Olmert's earlier words - left some analysts and politicians wondering in Israel whether it had been a more deliberate, if subliminal, attempt to ratchet up the pressure on Iran to abandon its own nuclear ambitions by warning that Israel was capable of responding.
Israel has long refused to say whether it does or does not have nuclear weapons despite virtually universal recognition abroad that it does. The "ambiguity" policy is seen as allowing Israel to maintain its deterrent capacity without stimulating a Middle East arms race or attracting unwelcome inspections.
In an interview with the German television station N24 on Tuesday Olmert said: "We have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"
Likud Knesset member Yuval Steinitz declared:"The terrible statement made in Germany undermines 50 years of Israel's policy of ambiguity, and joins the irresponsible slips of the tongue such as the announcement regarding the fate of the abducted soldiers in Lebanon.
"A Prime Minister who is unable to control his statements on sensitive matters of security must quit."
The Prime Minister's office denied that he had breached nuclear ambiguity and said the list had been of "responsible" nations, not ones with nuclear weapons.
This explanation was rejected by Knesset member Yosef Chagal, a party colleague of Avidgor Lieberman, who now heads the ministry charged with dealing with "strategic threats" - including that posed by Iran.
"This was not in my opinion a slip of the tongue. In my view it was a demonstration of power."
Israeli dissident Mordechai Vanunu served an 18-year jail sentence for releasing revelations about the Dimona nuclear weapons plant and affirming that Israel had a weapons programme.
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