Obama to offer Israel "nuclear umbrella": report
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama plans to offer Israel a strategic pact designed to fend off any nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.
Quoting an unnamed American source close to Obama's administration, the Haaretz daily said Washington would pledge under the proposed "nuclear umbrella" to respond to any Iranian nuclear strike against Israel with a U.S. retaliation in kind.
Iran denies its nuclear program has military designs. But virulent anti-Israel rhetoric from Tehran has spread fears that the Israelis, who are believed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal, could attack their arch-foe pre-emptively.
The latitude for unilateral Israeli action might be limited by a U.S. nuclear umbrella. Similar Cold War treaties -- NATO in Europe, the nuclear umbrella over Japan -- defended U.S. allies while obliging them to get Washington's nod for military moves.
Asked about the Haaretz report, Brooke Anderson, the national security spokesperson for Obama's transition team said, "There is one president at a time, and we are respecting that so we are not and have not been engaged in any substantive policy discussions with foreign governments."
"We will not respond to rumors," Anderson said.
Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton had raised the idea of an "umbrella of deterrence" for Israel and other Arab countries during her Democratic presidential nominating race against Obama in April.
But Obama said then he was troubled by the idea of "expanding the U.S. nuclear umbrella potentially to a whole host of other countries without any clear idea of what these criteria are, who might be involved and so forth."
An official in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government said only: "We do not engage in speculation whose source is unclear."
An aide to rightist opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a race to replace Olmert in a February 10 election and who has said he believes Obama is serious about preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, declined to comment.
Speculation on the possibility of a U.S.-Israeli strategic pact was stirred two years ago, when President George W. Bush said in an interview with Reuters that his country would "rise to Israel's defense" in the face of Iranian threats.
Obama replaces Bush on January 20.
Israel was founded partly as a haven for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, on the promise that Jews would now look to their own defense. Formally submitting to foreign protection could spell a major credibility crisis for the Israeli government.
(Additional reporting by John Whitesides in Washington and Steve Holland in Chicago; Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Charles Dick and David Storey)
