The blurb on the cover by Israeli journalist/historian Tom Segev
says that "Cohen's book will necessitate the rewriting of Israel's
entire history." There is something to this.
This exellent historical overview of the evolution of Israel's
nuclear program suggests that the Israeli government's quest for a
nuclear arsenal was a major unrecorded factor in a number of the
critical junctures in the country's history. According to Cohen,
three men were the father's of Israel's nuclear program: Israel's
first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the nation's political
leader; Prof. Ernst David Bergman, his chief scientist; and Shimon
Peres (then director general of the Defense Ministry and deputy
defense minister), BG's chief executive officer. "Israel's nuclear
project was conceived in the shadow of the Holocaust," writes
Cohen. "The determination not to be helpless again, a commitment to
the idea that Jews should control their own fate, characterized
Ben-Gurion's determined campaign for Jewish statehood after the
Second World War. It also inspired his pursuit of nuclear
weapons."
Ben-Gurion, and his protégé Peres, had a great belief in
the ability of science to compensate for a lack of numbers and
natural resources. Because of Israel's geopolitical circumstances,
Ben-Gurion suffered from a strategic pessimism, telling one of his
aides: "I could not sleep all night, ever for one second. I had one
fear in my heart: a combined attack by all Arab armies." His
solution to this danger was: l) to seek a formal alliance with one
or more of the Western powers (an unsuccessful quest); and 2) to
develop a nuclear deterrent capability.
In a farewell address to the employees of RAFAEL (the Armaments
Development Authority) on June 27, l963, eleven days after he
announced his final resignation from the premiership, he provided
his justification for the nuclear project: "I am confident that
science is able to provide us with the weapon that will secure the
peace, and deter our enemies."
President Eisenhower's l953 Atoms for Peace Program appeared to
offer Israeli policy-makers an avenue to develop their nuclear
dreams. This did lead to the establishment of the small Nachal
Soreq Nuclear Center, under American auspices, but anything more
ambitious was prevented by American conditions against utilizing
the program for military purposes. Since most of the few Israeli
senior decision-makers and scientists involved in the project
believed that Israel could not develop a nuclear potential on its
own, another foreign source had to be found.
Suez, Sevres, Dimona
Since l953 Shimon Peres had advocated the cultivation of France as
the primary external source for Israeli armaments and military
technology. The Suez Crisis in l955-56 offered the opportunity
Peres was waiting for. When Egyptian president Nasser nationalized
the Suez Canal on July 26, l956, Peres advocated responding
positively to the French prime minister Mollet government's request
for Israeli participation in a tripartite alliance with England to
regain control of the Suez Canal. According to Cohen's documented
and verbal sources, one of Peres's primary motivations for saying
that "under certain circumstances I believe that we would be so
prepared," was the belief that this was the opportunity Israel had
been waiting for to get a nuclear reactor. According to his l995
memoirs, Peres wrote that the nuclear issue was discussed briefly
at the end of the secret Sevres Conference (Oct. 22-24), which
cemented the British-French-Israeli cooperation. He wrote: "Before
the final signing, I asked Ben-Gurion for a brief adjournment,
during which I met Mollet and (Foreign Minister) Bourges-Maunoury
alone. It was here that I finalized with those two leaders an
agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona, in
southern Israel, and the supply of natural uranium to fuel
it."
Alongside natural uranium, heavy water was also needed from an
external source. Since the American Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
refused to supply it without placing it under peaceful use
safeguard regulations, the Israeli Mapai-dominated government used
its good connections with the Norwegian Labor Party, the longtime
dominant force in Norwegian politics, to obtain the necessary heavy
water through a process of negotiations (l956-l959), without being
constrained by safeguards and inspections. Ironically, these same
good connections were to be used 35 years later for peaceful
purposes, to prepare the Oslo Accords.
The next major historical juncture affected by the nuclear program
was the l967 Six-Day War. Israeli interpretations of the events
focus on false Soviet intelligence reports of an imminent Israeli
attack on Syria, which led to a series of miscalculations by
Nasser. Most accounts agree that a series of miscalculations by
Egypt, Syria, Israel and the UN contributed to the outbreak of
war.
Cohen suggests that the nuclear issue should be taken into account
as one of the factors that led to the war. He writes that in 1967
"Dimona was not the cause of Nasser's miscalculation," but as the
crisis evolved, "he may have entertained the idea that an Israeli
action would provide him an opportunity to attack Dimona in 1967."
On May l7, a few days after the crisis had begun, "two Egyptian MiG
2ls made a brief high-altitude reconnaissance flight over the
Dimona nuclear facility." That was also the day that UN secretary
general U Thant withdrew the United Nations Emergency Forces (UNEF)
from Sinai. Cohen writes that "on the evening of May l7th, General
Aharon Yariv, the head of the (IDFs) Intelligence Branch, altered
the basic assessment he had provided during the previous two days:
Egypt's intentions were no longer benign, they appeared to be
aggressive." On May 2l, prime minister Eshkol told the Defense
Ministerial Committee that he feared the Egyptian intent was "to
stop Israeli shipping through the (Tiran) straits, and would bomb
the nuclear reactor. A full military assault would follow." The
following night, Nasser announced the closure of the Straits of
Tiran to Israeli shipping.
Cohen believes that anxieties about a possible attack on Dimona
contributed to a breaking of the deadlock in the newly formed
National Unity Government on June 2, leading to Israel's preemptive
action on June 6.
While the debate about whether president John F. Kennedy was a
peace-maker or a Cold Warrior continues among historians, Cohen
writes that "no American president was more concerned with the
danger of nuclear proliferation than John Fitzgerald Kennedy." A
l962 study prepared by the Office of the Secretary of Defense
stated that Israel was considered the most likely proliferator
after China, followed by Sweden and India. With the specter of
between 15 and 25 nuclear nations by the 1970s haunting him,
Kennedy applied pressure, first on Ben-Gurion, and later on Eshkol,
to allow American inspection of Dimona, to ensure that the facility
was only being used for peaceful purposes. A series of eight
American inspections (the Israelis insisted on calling them
"visits") took place at Dimona between l961 and l969. Cohen make it
clear that the inspectors were not given sufficient time or access
to reveal all that was going on at the nuclear facility.
The Parameters for a Nuclear Program
The book also elucidates the internal Israeli debate about nuclear
weapons. On December 2l, l960, American political and journalistic
pressure (articles in Time and The New York Times) induced
Ben-Gurion to admit in an address before the Knesset that the
facility at Dimona was not a "textile plant" or a "desert
agricultural station," but rather "a research reactor with a
capacity 24,000 thermal kilowatts…which will also be used to
train Israeli scientists and technologists for the future of an
atomic power station." He stated that the reactor "is designed
exclusively for peaceful purposes."
This public revelation led to the formation of a citizen's lobby
called the Committee for the Denuclearization of the Middle East,
supported by some of Israel's leading intellectuals such as
professors Martin Buber, Efraim Auerbach and Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
and backed by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, the influential president of the
World Zionist Organization. Socialist intellectual Eliezer Livneh
wrote an article in Ha'aretz in l963 entitled "A Last Moment
Warning," in which he argued that the nuclearization of the
Arab-Israeli conflict would be catastrophic to the region. Within
the Zionist body politic, the centrist Liberal Party and the
leftist Mapam party were both opposed to the introduction of
nuclear weapons.
A second form of opposition came from security-minded leaders
opposed to the Ben-Gurion-Dayan-Peres analysis that nuclear
deterrence was the key to Israel's long-term survival. Led by
former Palmach commander Yigal Allon and former Haganah chief of
staff Israel Galili (then leaders of the leftist Achdut Ha'avoda
Party and ministers in the government), they believed that Israel's
security should depend upon conventional weapons.
During the course of this internal debate, and in response to
American pressures, Peres and Ben-Gurion developed the formulation
that "Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons
into the Middle East." It was left to president Johnson and prime
minister Eshkol to officially formulate the parameters of the
Israeli-American compromise on the nuclear program: that "Israel
would not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons into the
Middle East, while the U.S. would provide Israel with sophisticated
conventional armaments so that Israel could defend itself without
recourse to nuclear weapons." As part of its compliance with the
l963 Partial Test Ban Treat (PTBT), Israel asserted that
non-introduction included no testing, while the Americans insisted
it also should include no possession.
Cohen writes that "according to credible reports, on the eve of the
(l967) war Israel 'improvised' two deliverable explosive devices."
He concludes that "if physical possession of nuclear weapons is the
criterion by which a state is judged to be a nuclear weapon state,
then by May l967, Israel was a nuclear weapon state. In a political
and strategic sense, however, Israel was not a nuclear weapon
state. The Eshkol government did not renege on its pledge not to be
the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region."
Against Nuclear Proliferation
The advent of the l968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was
the background of the final American attempt to prevent Israel from
going nuclear. While Israel was not a member of the Conference on
Disarmament which negotiated the treaty, it supported the UN
General Assembly non-binding endorsement of the treaty. President
Johnson's secretary of state Dean Rusk and assistant secretary of
defense Paul Warnke tried to pressure the Israeli government into
officially signing the treaty. While UN ambassador Abba Eban and
deputy prime minister Yigal Allon felt this would become a major
problem in Israel-American relations, Eshkol's government decided
not to sign the NPT "without new and firmer American security
assurances, in the form of an alliance," which were not
forthcoming.
The last American inspection visit to Dimona took place on
Saturday, July 12, l969. Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, was always
chosen for these visits, because few people would be around to
notice the activity.
Efforts against nuclear proliferation, culminating in the
establishment of the NPT regime, were promoted by two Democratic
presidents, Kennedy and Johnson. When Republican Richard M. Nixon
became president on January 20, l969, and Henry Kissinger became a
central player in the security and foreign policy of his
administration, the American attitude towards Israel's nuclear
program, and towards international treaties in general, changed
(just as they did when George W. Bush replaced Bill Clinton). "The
CIA assessment (from l967) that Israel was a nuclear weapon state
was no longer a matter of 'unconfirmed intelligence reports,' but
was shared more openly with Congress, and even leaked to the
media." On July l8, l970, The New York Times diplomatic
correspondent Hedrick Smith wrote that "for at least two years, the
U.S. Government has been conducting its Middle East policy on the
assumption that Israel either possesses an atomic bomb or has the
component parts available for quick assembly." At this point it was
understood that further American inspection visits to Dimona were
meaningless, and they were discontinued.
Cohen writes that The New York Times article "signified the
beginning of a new era in the public history of the Israeli nuclear
weapons program. It revealed what had been known by some for at
least two years - Israel was a nuclear weapons state and should be
treated as such." And this was l6 years before former Israeli
nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu's revelations in l986.
Nuclear Secrecy and Democracy
The author consciously chooses to end the book at this point. Thus
he does not deal with the possible effect of Israel's nuclear
program on circumscribing Sadat and Syrian president Assad's goals
when they launched the Yom Kippur War in October l973, on Sadat's
motivation to reach a peace agreement with Israel in l977, and on
Saddam Hussein's decision not to attach unconventional warheads to
the 40-odd Scud missiles he aimed at Israel during the second Gulf
War in l99l.
Neither does the book deal with the dangers of a nuclearized Middle
East conflict if either Iran or Iraq gains a nuclear weapons
potential, alongside Israel, a possibility that many observers
believed will be realized within the next few years. This question
of whether MAD, Mutually Asssured Destruction, as developed during
the Cold War can be applied to the Middle East as a rational
theory, was one of the key motivations for the establishment of the
Israeli Committee for the Denuclearization of the Middle East back
in l962, and it has been of concern to the small group of Israeli
anti-nuclear activists ever since.
In his epilogue, Cohen notes that there is an "inherent tension
between nuclear secrecy and democracy." Nuclear ambiguity, or what
he prefers to call "nuclear opacity," by its very nature stifles
democratic discussion, and also tends to infringe on individual
rights and academic freedom of research and expression.
Cohen decided to write this book in l994, after the Israeli
military censor informed him that "for reasons of state" he was
banned from publishing an academic monograph on the subject of
Israel's nuclear opacity. With the publication of this book in
America in l998, the Israeli Defense Ministry's Security Division
warned Cohen, who has been based at Washington academic research
institutes for a number of years, that he would be arrested for
questioning if he tried to visit Israel. Eventually, the book was
published in Hebrew, and in the spring of 200l Cohen came for a
visit and participated in public discussions on the book at the Van
Leer Institute in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University.
Cohen argues in his epilogue that the time may have come for Israel
to move beyond ambiguity and opacity, so as to preserve its
democratic culture, the freedom of academic and technological
innovation, and to clarify its nuclear objectives, i.e., its
agreement in principle with the establishment of a Nuclear Weapons
Free Zone in the Middle East concurrently with a comprehensive
resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, he qualifies this
position by stating that any hasty movement beyond opacity will be
counterproductive and even dangerous, if it is not accompanied by
significant progress in the peace process towards a permanent
settlement.
While the paper trail is not complete because of still-classified
archival material, this book is the product of eight years of
meticulous research of unclassified material, and of interviews
with most of the relevant living Israelis and Americans. As Cohen
writes in the introduction, "this work is not the last word on the
subject, but rather an opening of an historical dialogue." Anyone
interested in the fate of Israel and the Middle East should read
this book.