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Israel`s Nuclear Weapons
Editor`s note: David Polden (Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Middle East) delievred this speech at a meeting with the title "Iran, Israel, Nuclear Weapons and the Threat to Attack Iran" at the House of Commons on Monday 26th March.
It has been argued that the Israeli nuclear weapons’ programme grew out of the conviction that the Holocaust justified any measures Israel took to ensure its survival. Consequently, Israel has been actively investigating the nuclear option from its earliest days. In 1949, a special unit of the IDF`s Science Corps began a two-year geological survey of the Negev desert, Israel with an eye towards the discovery of uranium reserves, which indeed it succeeded in finding in limited quantities.
The programme took another step forward with the creation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1952. Its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann, had long advocated an Israeli bomb as the best way to ensure "that we shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter”. By 1953, Israel had not only perfected a process for extracting the uranium found in the Negev, but had also developed a method of producing heavy water, providing Israel with an indigenous capability to produce some of the most important nuclear materials.
For reactor design and construction, Israel sought the assistance of France. Nuclear cooperation between the two nations dates back as far as the early 1950s. Both governments saw an independent nuclear option as a means by which they could maintain a degree of autonomy in the bipolar – NATO v. the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact - environment of the cold war.
In 1957, France and Israel signed an agreement for France to build a 24 MWt reactor in Israel and a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the International Atomic Energy Authority (or IAEA) inspection regime, at Dimona in the Negev desert. The reactor went critical in 1964.
Secret British documents obtained by BBC Newsnight in 2005 show that Britain made hundreds of secret shipments of restricted materials to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. These included specialist chemicals for reprocessing and samples of fissile material - uranium 235 in 1959 and plutonium in 1966 - as well as highly enriched lithium-6 which is used to boost fission bombs and fuel hydrogen bombs. The investigation also showed that Britain shipped 20 tons of heavy water directly to Israel in 1959 and 1960 to start up the Dimona reactor. The transaction was made through a Norwegian front company called Noratom which took a 2% commission on the transaction. Britain was challenged about the heavy water deal at the IAEA after it was exposed on Newsnight. British Foreign Minister Kim Howells claimed this was a sale to Norway, but the Foreign Office finally admitted in March 2006 that Britain knew the destination was Israel all along.
The United States first became aware of Dimona`s existence after U-2 spyplane overflights in 1958 photographed the facility`s construction, but it was not identified as a nuclear site until two years later. David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1960 that the Dimona complex was a nuclear research centre built for "peaceful purposes."
In 1961 British intelligence had concluded that Israel was intending “to produce nuclear weapons”. Initially, the US (unlike seemingly the UK and France at the time) was concerned at the possibility of Israel acquiring nuclear weapons and thus striking a blow at non-proliferation. It insisted on inspecting Dimona, making arms sales to Israel conditional on inspections being allowed. Such an inspection was indeed held in 1961 and then annually from 1964 on, but since Israel insisted on prior notice they rapidly descended into farce, Israel fooling the inspectors by hiding the entrances to the underground floors where plutonium was separated and bomb parts manufactured and building a false control room. The 1969 team reported that it “could not guarantee that there was no weapons-related work at Dimona in view of the limitations imposed by the Israelis on weapons inspections.”
So we find President Nixon in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 merely pressing Israel to "make no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test programme” (So perhaps the US can be credited with initiating Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”.) When Meir agreed to such an undertaking, Nixon called off the annual inspections. It is clear that by then both the British and US governments were well aware of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons.
Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear programme at the time, it also did nothing to stop it. Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb programme`s crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate the President from facts that might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, allegedly saying at one point that "The President did not send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news." Even when Barbour did authorise forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put nuclear warheads on missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon.
In 1968, a year before the final Dimona inspection, a secret CIA report estimated that Israel had already manufactured at least 4 nuclear warheads and in 1974, Carl Duckett, head of the CIA`s Office of Science and Technology, estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. This remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s.
The knowledge of Israel possessing nuclear weapons entered the public arena only in October 1986, when the Sunday Times published Mordechai Vanunu’s evidence about weapons’ production at Dimona, where he had worked as a technician. For publication of state secrets, Mordechai was sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason and espionage – and he still remains under severe restriction of movement, speech and association in East Jerusalem. Vanunu`s information also indicated that Israel had built hydrogen bombs.
On the basis of Vanunu`s information, Frank Barnaby estimated that Israel had approximately 100–200 nuclear warheads, far higher than the CIA estimate. This figure is the one generally quoted today for Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Perhaps no more up-to-date information is available. However, Jane’s Intelligence Review in 1997 put the figure at 400. The same journal reports that Israel has NWs of all sizes from thermonuclear strategic ones, larger than the Hiroshima bomb, down to nuclear artillery shells and demolition charges.
Israel bought three large diesel submarines from Germany in 1999 and in 2000 the US, in a rare sign of concern, refused an Israeli request to supply 12 long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, which exist in a nuclear warhead version. However it is thought that Israel has nevertheless equipped the submarines with such missiles by producing its own. The Sunday Times reported in June 2000 that Israel had already succeeded in launching a cruise missile from a submarine that hit a target 950 miles away.
In terms of delivery systems, Israel has a range of missiles, the longest-range of which is the modified Shavit, which, is said to be convertible to a missile with a range of up to 7000 kilometres. Israel has advanced bombers, including the F151E Strike Eagles, bought from the US, where this bomber is used to carry NWs.
All this gives Israel a nuclear armoury at least on a par with that of France and Britain.
As far as testing is concerned, it is possible that the Israelis received results from French nuclear testing in the 1960s. In June 1976 a German army magazine claimed that a 1963 underground test took place in the Negev, in September 1979 a satellite detected what appeared to be a three kiloton nuclear explosion near South Africa, which it was surmised was a joint nuclear test carried out by Israel and South Africa, then a nuclear-armed ally of Israel.
In spite of its possession of nuclear weapons now being an open secret, Israel still continues to refuse to confirm or deny such possession. This is perhaps simply so as to avoid embarrassing its US ally, for in 1976, the US Congress passed the “Symington Amendmement” to the Arms Control Act, which prohibits the US from giving economic or military assistance to states (apart from the other so-called “Nuclear Weapon States”, the UK, France, Russia and China) who receive or sell nuclear reprocessing or enrichment materials, equipment or technologyy without accepting IAEA safeguards – and of course the US continues to lavishly support Israel economically and militarily. Note that this arrangement rquires that the US also pretends publicly that it doesn’t know that Israel has nuclear weapons and even ignore occasional gaffes by Israeli leaders in which such possession is acknowledged – eg. Olmert did so in an interview on German TV last December.
This raises the question why? Why is the US is such an enthusiastic supporter of Israel? Here’s not the place to go into this in any detail, except to point to the Lebanon war where it is now clear that the US was aware of Israel preparations for a war on Hezbullah well in advance and indeed held off calling for a ceasefire (as did the UK) in the hope that Israel would destroy Iran’s protégé Hezbullah and even that the war would escalate into a war with Iran’s ally Syria; in other words, quoting commentator Adel Darwish writing in Mideastnews, July 2006, for the US this was a “Proxy War” fought by Israel on behalf of the US.
Israel has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, so the International Atomic Energy Authority has no right to inspect Israel’s nuclear facilities.
As far as chemical and biological weapons are concerned. Israel has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. Israel has admitted using phosphorus bombs in last year’s attack on Lebanon and the El Al flight bound for Tel Aviv that crashed in Holland in 1992 was carrying a large volume of a banned chemical used in the synthesis of Sarin nerve gas from a US chemical plant. There is speculation that the Israel Institute of Biological Research is concerned with the development of offensive biological weapons as well as defensive measures aggainst biological attack.
Israel`s Nuclear Weapon Policy
From the beginning, Israel’s investment in nuclear weapons can be seen as the result of two factors: the belief that it was surrounded by hostile neighbours determined to destroy it (it might be argued that Israel has done much to earn this hostility) and the fact that these neighbours have a vastly larger population and land area than Israel. To take an example, Iran has a land area of over 1.6 million square kilometres and a population of some 68 million whereas Israel has an area of under 23,000 square kilometres with a population a little over 6 million.
With this disparity, Israel cannot hope to defend itself against a combined attack from its neighbours unless it has some weapon that renders this disparity irrelevant. Nuclear weapons were seen as this weapon – a weapon of last resort that would that could be used against invading forces. This was known as the “Samson Option” – whereby Israel would pull down the walls of the temple on any invaders even at the cost of serious harm to itself. And Israel continues to maintain battlefield nuclear weapons with which to exercise this option.
Avner Cohen revealed in his book Israel and the Bomb that on the eve of the Six-Day War, in late May 1967, Israeli engineers improvised rudimentary, but operational, nuclear weapons - the first time that Israel had assembled nuclear devices. And it is reported that during the early phase of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan readied the nuclear weapons infrastructure system, apparently even proposing to Prime Minister Golda Meir to arm the weapons in case Israel suddenly reached the point of "last resort." The Gulf War in 1990 was the third time that Israel placed its nuclear/strategic forces on alert.
One thing the effectiveness of the Samson Option requires is that Israel remains the sole nuclear weapon armed state in the Middle East. (It has been calculated that it would take 6 nuclear missiles with an average yield warhead three minutes to travel from Iraq to destroy Israel - given its size and population concentration.) Hence Israel`s successful attack on the Iraqi Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 to stop Iraq’s attempts to produce the bomb.
This attack can be seen as launching a different strategy - that of the 1st or pre-emptive strike: any potential attack on Israel, especially by nuclear weapons, is to be prevented by a conventional or nuclear attack on the potential enemy before it can mount an attack or even acquire nuclear weapons. This policy becomes explicit in the present crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons’ programme. Mr Olmert is reporting as saying in a speech to a high-level security conference on 24th January this year, "The Jewish people, with the scars of the Holocaust fresh on its body, cannot afford to allow itself to face threats of annihilation once again…It is the obligation of every country to act against this with all its might…We can stand up against nuclear threats and even prevent them," he said. Israel acting with “all its might” would presumably include using nuclear weapons and there has been talk of Israel planning to use nuclear “bunker busters” in an attack directed at Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. It is quite possible even that the US would welcome such an attack from Israel, again acting as a proxy for the US. Thus, on 2/11/6, the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, citing diplomatic sources, reported that when French President Jacques Chirac was discussing Iran’s nuclear programme with Bush on the sidelines of the UN summit and he asked Bush if Israel could attack Iran to prevent it getting the bomb, Bush said: "We cannot rule this out. And if it were to happen, I would understand it." What, it might be asked, is the point of having a vassal state if it can’t be relied on when necessary to act on one’s behalf.
However, Israel’s nuclear weapons are in truth a millstone. For, apart from cost, perhaps of not much concern to Israel, bankrolled as it is by the US, there are dangers associated with the ageing Dimona nuclear reactor, where enriched uranium fuel for Israel’s nuclear weapons is produced (now 42 years in operation) including the possibility of meltdown, radioactive contamination of workers and people living in the area and the local environment and the problem of the disposal of nuclear waste.
But the greatest danger they represent is to Israel’s existence. For the threat these weapons represent to surrounding Arab states is an incentive for them to develop WMDs so as to be able to dissuade Israel from attacking. Time is not on Israel’s side: it cannot rely indefinitely on its neighbours being prevented by action by itself or by the US from developing such weapons. And faced with enemies also possessing WMD, Israel, because of its small size and concentrated population, would be at risk of destruction if a conflict leads to exchange of WMDs. The advent in Israel’s armoury of nuclear missile-armed submarines on patrol can be seen as a way of deterring an enemy attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, because they would be unaffected in any such exchange, which might otherwise be able to destroy Israel’s ability to retaliate. This introduces a third Israeli nuclear strategy, that of the 2nd strike. (It is to be noted that Israel retains the capacity to carry out all the 3 nuclear strategies I have mentioned, though I would imagine that it’s Israel’s hope that its present ability to carry out pre-emptive strikes and to retaliate with a “second strike” would obviate its ever needing to resort to the Samson Option.)
And Israel’s NWs can have no part to play in solving its major ongoing problem, its conflict with the Palestinians.
It is time for Israel to cease trying to base its security on the ability to destroy its neighbours, but find ways to negotiate with them to achieve mutual security. This requires good faith on all sides and Israel cannot demonstrate this while maintaining its policy of developing an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal veiled in nuclear ambiguity.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Middle East