Sep 23, 2011 12:28 AM EDT

In an exclusive story to be published Monday on growing military cooperation between the two allies, U.S. and Israeli officials tell Newsweek that the GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators—potentially useful in any future military strike against Iranian nuclear sites—were delivered to Israel in 2009, just several months after Obama took office.

The military sale was arranged behind the scenes as Obama’s demands for Israel to stop building settlements in disputed territories were fraying political relations between the two countries in public.

The Israelis first requested the bunker busters in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. At the time, the Pentagon had frozen almost all U.S.-Israeli joint defense projects out of concern that Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/23/president-obama-secretly-approved-transfer-of-bunker-buster-bombs-to-israel.html

At least 10,000 missiles are unaccounted for in Libya, a senior NATO official has admitted, according to a German media report, amid fears the weapons could fall into the hands of al-Qaeda.

News weekly Der Spiegel reported on its website on Sunday that Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, who chairs the committee of NATO military chiefs, held a secret briefing for German MPs on Monday, in which he expressed the alliance's concerns.

The weapons could end up in other countries and in the wrong hands, the admiral said, according to Spiegel, "anywhere from Kenya to Kunduz" in Afghanistan.