Ever since Israel’s founding, the same question has been asked by nosy journalists and students of international affairs: “Does Israel possess nuclear weapons?” And ever since the administration of Levi Eshkol (1963–69), right up through Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime ministers have responded with the same mantra: “Israel will not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.”
What that reply means, of course, all depends on what you mean by “introduce.” If it means “announce the possession of nuclear weapons,” or “openly test nuclear devices,” or “threaten to use nuclear weapons,” then Israel has clearly not yet “introduced” nuclear weapons into the Middle East. But if “introduce” means to have ready for actual deployment several nuclear warheads and a credible delivery system, then Israel actually introduced nuclear weapons into the region as far back as 1967. Early that year, to use the somewhat edgy language of Washington-based Israeli scholar Avner Cohen in this entirely fascinating book, Israel already had “a bomb in the basement,” a primitive but usable nuclear fissionable weapon.
What makes Cohen’s book so interesting is not that it openly reveals this fact; after all, several earlier books have sketched out, often in convincing detail, the basic facts of Israel’s nuclear-weapons program. Cohen’s agenda is much more basic. He wants to examine what he calls the “opacity” of Israel’s nuclear status in both the domestic and international arena. He wants to probe the motivations and intents of Israel’s political, military, and scientific leaders in making Israel’s nuclear status the holy unmentionable name of Middle East politics.
” ‘The Lord’s our shepherd,’ says the psalm. But just in case, we better get a bomb.” —Tom Lehrer
It was not until 1970, incredibly, that the CIA finally was certain that Israel had become the world’s sixth nuclear state (after the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China), and the word—not convincingly denied by the Israelis—spread quickly through British and American news publications. By then, however, its impact had already been discounted by three factors of international politics which, though quite distinct, had nevertheless for several years reinforced one another. These were: (1) genuine U.S. uncertainty about the status of the Israeli program, (2) an unwillingness to confront Israel openly once the United States was sure, and (3) the threat to Middle East peace if the Arabs were certain that Israel was nuclear equipped.
The failure of the U.S. intelligence community to interpret correctly growing evidence of Israel’s nuclear program from the late 1950s onward in retrospect has elements of Keystone Cops obtuseness. American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and diplomatic military attaches stationed in Tel Aviv had from 1958 onward clear photographs of a gigantic, top-secret nuclear plant under construction at Dimona in the Negev desert, not far from the ancient biblical site of Beersheba. Under persistent prodding, the Israelis permitted no fewer than seven official U.S. scientific inspections at the Dimona site between 1961 and 1969, when they came to an end. Yet the visiting Americans were never able to prove that uranium reprocessing, the prerequisite of producing nuclear fissionable material, was in fact being carried out under their very noses.
Intelligence failures in ascertaining the nuclear capabilities of foreign countries seems to have plagued the U.S. foreign policy establishment for half a century. The most recent examples are the U.S. failure to forecast India’s explosion of nuclear devices in 1998 and to grasp how close Iraq came to nuclear weapons status in 1990 be fore the Gulf War.
But quite apart from such failures of intelligence, there was clearly a deep ambivalence in the various U.S. administrations dealing with Israel on the nuclear issue, a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. President Eisenhower, for example, almost conspicuously refused to show interest in the first photographic evidence of construction at Dimona in 1958. President Kennedy, by contrast, intent on establishing a worldwide nuclear test-ban consensus, pressed the Israelis on the issue. He was worried that Israeli nuclear capability would provoke the Soviets to provide nuclear arms to the Arab world, hence vastly increasing global vulnerability to nuclear conflict. Kennedy’s prodding of Israel on the nuclear-weapons issue forced Ben-Gurion and other Israeli officials to deceive the United States grossly on their intentions and their actual capabilities. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson—perhaps because of sentimental feelings for Israel that derived from childhood Sunday-school lessons—really didn’t want the Israelis to be pushed to the wall on the subject. In this approach he was abetted by the long-serving (1961–73) U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv Walworth Barbour, an American official who demonstrably preferred not to be in any intelligence loop about the “metallurgical factory” under construction at Dimona.
By the time Richard Nixon reached the White House in 1969, the climate had changed. The Kennedy-era enthusiasm for enlisting Moscow in a global antinuclear crusade had cooled, thanks to new Cold War tensions resulting from the Vietnam conflict and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Israel’s crushing of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967 gave Jerusalem the confidence to opt out of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that Moscow and Washington had pushed on the global community since the mid-1960s. In the U.S. view, moreover, Israel had be come a powerful outpost of resistance to the expansion of Soviet interests in the Middle East. Both Nixon and Kissinger, certain by 1970 from CIA reports that Israel had indeed become the world’s sixth nuclear power, nevertheless failed to make any public acknowledgment of it. Secretary of State William Rogers was not even informed of the CIA findings.
The third factor reinforcing Israel’s nuclear “opacity” was the complex ambiguity of the country’s relations with the Arab world. It was Ben-Gurion himself who had been the initial visionary behind Israel’s nuclear program. Together with a prickly Israeli scientist, Ernst David Bergmann, and the then-young defense ministry official Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion saw from the outset that if Israel had a nuclear bomb it would be the ultimate insurance policy for the survival of the Zionist experiment. As Levi Eshkol explained to a very sympathetic LBJ during a visit to the United States, “We cannot afford to lose. This may be our last stand in history.” But Eshkol never told LBJ the truth about Israel’s long-range nuclear ambitions.
Though the Americans helped set Israel up with a modest nuclear scientific research reactor in 1955, it was the French who actually provided a comprehensive nuclear package at Dimona, starting in 1956. De Gaulle, determined to sever the special relationship with Israel in 1960, wanted to stop the nuclear cooperation forthwith, but the canny Peres persuaded the French to continue for several more months for fear, supposedly, that adverse publicity about the French corporations involved in the project might render them vulnerable to Arab economic embargoes.
By the time the Dimona reactor had gone critical in 1963, rumors about Israel’s nuclear program were causing panic in the Arab world. General Nasser that year chillingly told visiting U.S. official Robert Komer that Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons would be a cause for war. But the Israelis, after all, still hadn’t “told” anything, the Americans still hadn’t “seen” anything, and the earnestness with which Jerusalem denied nuclear military capacity was at least at that time based on fact. Both Moscow and Washington helped soothe Nasser’s fears for the time being.
Yet those fears not only never disappeared, they seem in retrospect to have been critical factors in the outbreak of the 1967 war. In May of that year, as tensions were rapidly rising in the region, two Egyptian MiG-21s overflew Dimona and escaped to Jordan without being intercepted by the Israelis. A few days later, we now know, Egypt’s minister of defense secretly proposed an Egyptian preemptive attack on the Dimona reactor. Amazingly, Nasser vetoed the idea. That proved a fatal error. Now deeply anxious about Dimona’s vulnerability to Arab air attack, the Israeli high command decided to go ahead with its own preemptive bombing of Egyptian and Syrian airfields in the early hours of June 4, thus precipitating the Six-Day War.
Cohen’s account makes it apparent that senior Israeli officials repeatedly lied to the Americans and everyone else in the early stages of their nuclear program for many reasons, but above all not to have to confront either domestically or internationally the implications of being recognized as a nuclear power. One irony of this posture was that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat felt so confident that Israel would never use nuclear weapons in a war with the Arabs even in extreme adversity that he launched his attack across the Suez Canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That calculation was obviously dangerously risky. After the war, there were persistent reports that some high Israeli military officials, when things were going badly against Israel militarily, had suggested a preliminary deployment of Israel’s Doomsday weapon. Golda Meir, mercifully, said no.
To most observers, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of Israel has been a blessing rather than a curse on the international scene. Maintaining it, unfortunately, has not been a cost-free policy for Israel’s international human-rights reputation. In 1986, the former Dimona technician Mordechai Vanunu, after telling his story to British newspapers, was lured to Rome and then abducted to Israel. He is now 12 years into an 18-year sentence, 10 of them in solitary confinement. Cohen himself was prevented by the military censor from publishing in Israel an entirely academic monograph on Israel’s nuclear status, the first overt censorship interference in Israel’s academic community since the founding of the state. These manifestations of Israel’s obsession with nuclear secrecy are not attractive.
On the other hand, it is hard to agree with Cohen’s conclusion that Israel’s nuclear “opacity” has been “a striking failure of Israeli democracy,” or, somewhat more bizarrely, that “nuclear weapons corrode and corrupt democratic rule.” Like the original tetragrammaton, Israel’s nuclear capacity is much safer to allude to, to hint at, than to spell out in plain ink. Nuclear Doomsday is such a terrible notion that it should be banned from serious discussion of solutions to international problems, no matter how dire they may be. Israel’s “opacity” may have had painful consequences for Israelis in a position to breach it, but it has so far kept Dr. Strangelove out of the Middle East equation. Sometimes the tetragrammaton is a blessing.
David Aikman is senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
