CITY OF LONDON PIRATE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

BBC HANDED EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE OF MASSIVE CORRUPTION THAT COULD TOPPLETHEBRITISH ESTABLISHMENT

BY TOM STEELE · 5TH MARCH 2015

Gordon Bowden is an ex RAF officer who has spent the last 13 years uncovering detailed and forensic evidence of massive corruption within the British establishment that involves Lords, Politicians and the Monarchy.


The evidence that he is witnessed and recorded handing into the BBC to do their own full investigation, is set to reveal the biggest political corruption scandal in British history, that included the setup of a colossal 250,000 “shell virtual oil and gas companies” registered from a few house addresses in Finchley Rd London, and linked to the most prominent people at the core of the British establishment. These companies were deliberately set up to steal and rob BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of pounds from the public and asset strip the whole country!


BBC HANDED EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE OF MASSIVE CORRUPTION THAT COULD TOPPLE THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT! BY TOM STEELE · 5TH MARCH 2015


Gordon Bowden is an ex RAF officer who has spent the last 13 years uncovering detailed and forensic evidence of massive corruption within the British establishment that involves Lords, Politicians and the Monarchy. The evidence that he is witnessed and recorded handing into the BBC to do their own full investigation, is set to reveal the biggest political corruption scandal in British history, that included the setup of a colossal 250,000 “shell virtual oil and gas companies” registered from a few house addresses in Finchley Rd London, and linked to the most prominent people at the core of the British establishment. These companies were deliberately set up to steal and rob BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of pounds from the public and asset strip the whole country!


The BBC must investigate this as they cannot have plausible deniability now they have clearly been shown the factual and forensic evidence that backs up Gordon Bowdens claims. We recently highlighted a story about David Cameron. Tony Blair and the Stolen Nuclear Bombs. Gordon Bowden confirms by his own investigations that this was also part of the massive corruption, money laundering and even murder committed by the organised criminal syndicate that has taken control of the levers of power in Britain. The police must now recognise that they are protecting a criminal cabal and start making arrests with the help of the British military if necessary. I questioned recently why Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind jump ship so quickly and without the usual outraged denial we expect from politicians caught lining their own pockets, I think the reasons have now become obvious, in my opinion they are taking a “hit for the team” because they are afraid they may share the same fate as others and get all “suicidal” because they know too much. We all need to hold our politicians accountable on this corruption, and in the run up to the May election, we have the perfect opportunity to ask serious questions and demand full answers and not be distracted by talk of tuition fees and a few extra nurses. I would urge readers to share this information far and wide and prevent these crooked and corrupted criminals scurrying away into the darkness like cockroaches caught in the light.


The BBC must investigate this as they cannot have plausible deniability now they have clearly been shown the factual and forensic evidence that backs up Gordon Bowdens claims. We recently highlighted a story about David Cameron. Tony Blair and the Stolen Nuclear Bombs…

Gordon Bowden confirms by his own investigations that this was also part of the massive corruption, money laundering and even murder committed by the organised criminal syndicate that has taken control of the levers of power in Britain. The police must now recognise that they are protecting a criminal cabal and start making arrests with the help of the British military if necessary.


I questioned recently why Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind jump ship so quickly and without the usual outraged denial we expect from politicians caught lining their own pockets, I think the reasons have now become obvious, in my opinion they are taking a “hit for the team” because they are afraid they may share the same fate as others and get all “suicidal” because they know too much.>By Bill Bigelow

The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

March 17, 2015 "ICH" - “Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.


Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.


Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:


… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak


December day,


The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive


Us all away


They set my roof on fire, with their cursed


English spleen


And that’s another reason why I left old


Skibbereen.


By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.


These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks..





To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. From Hunger on Trial Teaching Activity.


First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.


Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?


Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.


The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.


More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”


Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.


But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.


As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?


These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.


So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.


Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor ofRethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the online Zinn Education Project, www.zinnedproject.org. This project, inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, offers free materials to teach a fuller “people’s history” than is found in commercial textbooks. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A People’s History for the Classroom. and A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching About the Environmental Crisis.


See also -



Hunger on Trial: An Activity on the Irish Potato Famine and Its Meaning for Today

ORANGE ORDER GOAT SEX THREAT TO WORLD HEALTH

Craigavon must transcend politics and borders, according to Professor Piot, in the Davos at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Craigavon is a burrough in what the Orange Order, call Northern Ireland, where many people have apparently died of Aids, allegedly because Orangemen ride goats in their initiation ceremony, as one Orageman today admitted off the record, that they give their attention to goats, because they think practising bestiality, is the safest way to avoid getting the disease, and that these accusations come, after a vote this week, to fly the Union Flag over council offices every day of the year.

However members of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals, have appealed to people in Craigavon, to come forward with any information. Locals report that Orangemen are now excusing their activity in the north, to have sex with goats, to avoid getting Aids. Other admissions were made from the apprentice boys off the record, which has been broadcast all over Craigavon, despite any official complaints. Bestiality should be a a criminal offence in the Burrough of Craigavon and charges should be laid under criminal procedure, in terms of animals protection, said one resident in Lurgan, because we don't want our daughters consorting with Orangemen who practice bestiality. She said convictions should be obtained for bestiality, offenders imprisoned and taken off the streets for the sake our daughters. She made an appeal to anyone with information on bestiality, to come forward. 

She wished to remain anonymous, because of sectarian fears, but stressed that charges can only proceed against the Orange Order, when sufficient information is available, to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that this is part of Orange culture. While the Orangeman interviewed, admitted he considered bestiality as safe sex, that he and his brethern had sex with goats up to five times a week. We know all about Aids and ebola, and we are very afraid of it. That is the biggest reason we have sex with goats and most of us like a bit of variety. Goats do not have Aids, but some of our wives have, because we have discovered, that many of them have, as a result of having different toy boys, with many of them coming from Dublin. 

We have seen brethern dying from aids and other diseases, not because of our goats, but because they slept with one another, and infected each other and swapped their wives, who already got it from Dublin. Goats do not have these infections, we would prefer have sex with them. I'm not sick, while I have been accused of being a carrier, but there is nothing I can give to goats or goats can give me. We will not become infected, because our goats were all virgins when we started. We share the same goat only among ourselves, and we will not get other's diseases from Dublin.

However the woman from Lurgan, said these statements, reveal a lack of education, and that Craigavon Council, should launch an information campaign, in the affected areas of Craigavon. Education and prosecution are the key to solving this problem, which originated with the Orange Order. She stated, that we cannot move forward as a Community, without co-operation from the Orange Order and information from their members. We are deeply concerned that the Orangemen, have repeatedly stated, that their reasons for having sex with goats, is to avoid Aids, when the reality is, that it is part of their culture, fostered by the Orange Order for centuries. She suggested urgency by Craigavon Council is needed, to correct this myth. 

The practice also affects goat farming in other areas of the north. Goat owners in south Armagh, complain, that nobody wants to buy goats from the north anymore. Again off the record because of sectarian fears, he stated, that we have learned, these rumours are true and Irish people, do not want to be associated with Orange Order goats. No one in their right mind wants anything to do with them or their cheese or goat milk because they have been contaminated by Willie. I will have to destroy all my goats, he complained. While the Belgian professor in Davos stated:

"Our world is getting more vulnerable to big epidemics, because of population expansion, huge mobility and more intense contact between animals and people,said Prof Peter Piot at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, urging encouraging leaders to take a long-term view. Prof Piot is in charge of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

He said, the threat of Ebola, and other infectious diseases like influenza and Sars, are to be discussed in Switzerland this week, adding "I bet everything I have that there will be other outbreaks. My concern is that when the Ebola outbreak is over we will just forget about it. We need to be better prepared and we need to invest in vaccines and treatment, It's like a fire brigade, you don't start to set up a fire brigade when some house is on fire.


Prof Piot said "There is always tension between the sovereignty of a country and the need to fight epidemics because they are a risk for the world as a whole, so in economic terms, it's a global public good. However Prof Piot, did have some good news to share, particularly for the wives of the Orange Order, adding that he was delighted by the Ebola vaccine trials, currently happening. The Orange Order were not available for comment but one of them, became rather abusive, when asked for an interview, and told our reporter to, F###  off down to Killorglin and investigate what they were doing to the goats down there.

WORLD'S ECONOMISTS Call Ireland Stupid

In this Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss Timothy Franz Geithner the American economic policy maker and central banker, who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury, under President Barack Obama, calling Ireland stupid and also discuss ‘numpty’ taxes and ‘stupid’ Ireland again as bankers and central bankers, treat everyone else like the ‘muppets’ they believe we are. They also discuss Angela Merkel refusing to meet with Timothy Geithner and how it is that QE is causing deflation. In the second half, Max interviews Matt Taibbi about his Rolling Stone Alayne Fleischmann, exclusive on the JP Morgan whistleblower, Timothy Franz Geithner who was interviewed in the previous episode of the Keiser Report.

#right2water,

CURRENT STATUS OF VIDEO NEEDS TO BE CLARIFIED BY AUTHOR TO AVOID CONFUSION

Currently there is a peaceful revolution happening in Ireland. It is more of a process rather than an event. The people are awakening and rising. The country is approaching a political crossroads, with some hard choices to be made the principal being?

A) A Socialist Republic joining BRICS.

B) Integrating further with a creeping Neo-Fascist Europe.

C) Leave the EU with England for a Federal Republic of Commonwealth.

D) Slide into chaos and anarchy.

While these choices are initially repugnant to most Irish people's ideals, it would be wise, if people considered them carefully, in the cold light of day, in order to make a peaceful transition.

DEC 10 - 1 P.M.  LEINSTER HOUSE 


MAIREAD FARRELL 

OUR HEAD IS OUR BEST WEAPON

FLEGGER RA TAKE DOWN PSNIRA IN BELFAST

Willie Frazer has again been refused a personal protection weapon, because of his suspected links, with the Flegger RA in East Belfast and Crossmaglen and is not at all happy about it. Willie Frazer said that the the Free State government is interfering far too much and he doesn't recognize them and that paramilitaries are welcome. He admits that these paramilitaries have murdered people, but he elaborated by saying, ‘thankfully not in my community’. Former IRA Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness, believes this is an absolute disgrace of a statement, which should be withdrawn immediately, but Willie is not listening, because he is a dissident, who has no time for McGuinness, who previously called all of Willie's associates, neanderthals.

The Flegger RA, over the past week, have taken down, what they term are several PSNIRA Officers, who were on duty in Belfast, and are now recovering in hospital from serious injuries. The Flegger Ra were formed recently, after Willie Frazer reported to the Minister of Regional Development, that other dissident Orange Vounteers tried to murder him. He also claimed that the Provos were responsible for his abduction previously, after the Flegger RA, tried to murder Conor Murphy, a member of the British Parliament. All of this is a result, of what Susan Mckay referred to in her book, as, ‘Northern Protestants, An Unsettled People, in which Willie said, "if a Paki came over here from India and shot dead a Provo, I'd shake his hand."

Willie who is a professional mourner, admits he uses his parades in memory of victims of violence, as a cynical political propaganda message, to get its anti-Agreement message across. Willie in a telephone interview stated,``We are bringing that message down south.'' Frazer is extremely angry at being refused a personal protection weapon again, because of his links with  to the Flegger RA.
He is also angry that Conor Murphy, a member of the British establishment is trying to make Willie out to be a subject of ridicule. This along with all the other spiteful, hate-filled words against Mr Frazer and other libelous remarks about former Loyalists, by other British establishment figures in the Gerry Adams party, has motivated many former Loyalists to form the Flegger RA.

Many former Loyalists simply cannot stomach the concept of PSNIRA policing as being synonomous, with the concept of being British and have decided if you can't beat them, they might as well join them, especially if there's a few Euros involved. The change by former loyalists to the RA, has come as no surprise at all to the  non-British Scots, after their recent Independence referendum, with the former bastion of Britishness, loyalist paramilitaries, switching sides. One Provisional sinn fein councillor, commented off the record, "Let our PSNIRA British police, deal with this matter," adding that there are a lot of spiteful, hate-filled words against Willie and that everyone needs to adhere to British Law & Order. They must accept PSNIRA Policing and Justice like everyone else adding that Gerry Adams was unavailable for comment, because it is a very difficult time for Gerry at the moment, who is busy, trying to teach some of his older dogs, new tricks!

The Amalgamate would like to thank LondonDerrySkill & Slugger for their artistic collaboration!

ISRAELI NUCLEAR ROGUE BULLY TERRORIST STATE THREATENS THE WORLD

Nuclear-Weapon States:

The nuclear-weapon states (NWS) are the five states—China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States—officially recognized as possessing nuclear weapons by the NPT. Although the treaty legitimizes these states’ nuclear arsenals, it also establishes that they are not supposed to build and maintain such weapons in perpetuity. Article VI of the treaty holds that each state-party is to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” In 2000, the five NWS committed themselves to an “unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” But for now, the five continue to retain the bulk of their nuclear forces. Because of the secretive nature with which most governments treat information about their nuclear arsenals, most of the figures below are best estimates of each nuclear-weapon state’s nuclear holdings, including both strategic warheads and lower-yield devices referred to as tactical weapons. Russia and the United States also retain thousands of retired warheads planned for dismantlement, not included here.

China: About 250 total warheads. 
France: Fewer than 300 operational warheads. 
Russia: Approximately 1,512 strategic warheads deployed on 498 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates Russia has another 1,000 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads. Additional thousands are awaiting dismantlement.
United Kingdom: Fewer than 160 deployed strategic warheads, total stockpile of up to 225.

United States: 4,804 nuclear warheads as of September 2013 [2], including tactical, strategic, and nondeployed weapons. According to the latest official New START declaration, the United States has1,585 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on 778 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the United States' nondeployed strategic arsenal is approximately 2,800 warheads and the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal numbers 500 warheads. Additional warheads are retired and await dismantlement.

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Non-NPT Nuclear Weapons Possessors:

Three states—India, Israel, and Pakistan—never joined the NPT and are known to possess nuclear weapons. Claiming its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes, India first tested a nuclear explosive device in 1974. That test spurred Pakistan to ramp up work on its secret nuclear weapons program. India and Pakistan both publicly demonstrated their nuclear weapon capabilities with a round of tit-for-tat nuclear tests in May 1998. Israel has not publicly conducted a nuclear test, does not admit to or deny having nuclear weapons, and states that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Nevertheless, Israel is universally believed to possess nuclear arms. The following arsenal estimates are based on the amount of fissile material—highly enriched uranium and plutonium—that each of the states is estimated to have produced. Fissile material is the key element for making nuclear weapons. India and Israel are believed to use plutonium in their weapons, while Pakistan is thought to use highly enriched uranium.

India: Between 90-110 nuclear warheads.
Israel: Between 75 to 200 nuclear warheads.
Pakistan: Between 100 to 120 nuclear warheads.

The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal

Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?

• 
• • Julian Borger
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 15 January 2014 18.18 GMT
  • Jump to comments (1087)

Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona. Photograph: Getty Images

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.

When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.

Meanwhile, western governments have played along with the policy of "opacity" by avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East withnuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to "speculate".

UK governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsianswered tangentially. "Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related issues," the minister said. "The government of Israel is in no doubt as to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]."

But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.

The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.

Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP

Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.

"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.

Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country."

Milchan was not shy about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to actor Richard Dreyfuss's home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.

According to Milchan's biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel's current president, Shimon Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy's, named after the hostess and owner's wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for her role in the Profumo sex scandal). Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.

He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.

Arguably, Lakam's exploits were even more daring than Khan's. In 1968, it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled "plumbat", a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies with help from German officials, reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with centrifuge technology.

When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.

US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.

Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons knowhow and materials, giving South Africa's apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.

Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging

Israel's nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the other way. In documents seen by the BBC in 2005 British officials argued it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit, in 1961.

Israel's nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad.

"There was a tendency to try to export and there was a general feeling of support for Israel," Andre Finkelstein, a former deputy commissioner at France's Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.

France's first reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an aide: "It's exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear programme."

Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.

"[T]his went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports, including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy," Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in a collection of Cohen's papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. "We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation."

In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.

By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."

The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.

The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.

Producer Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the premiere of Mr and Mrs Smith. Photograph: L Cohen

Israel refused to countenance visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early 1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean reprocessing plant.

As more and more evidence of Israel's weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.

The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.

The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.

In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel's bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America's nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.

Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.

"It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed," recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. "It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on."

The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.

A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.

It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.

"I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.

Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.

"It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather – a window – and Vela got blinded by the flash."

The US policy of silence continues to this day, even though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black market, albeit at much reduced volumes. In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted: "Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel … decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons programme. Today, there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit procurements – US sting operations and legal cases show this."

Avner Cohen, the author of two books on Israel's bomb, said that policy of opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by inertia. "At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It has in many ways become a burden for the US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding."

In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America's behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.

"Somehow the kabuki goes on," Weiss says. "If it is admitted Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it's very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that."