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By Root 1306 0

had security concerns from the start of its existence in 1948. Its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, was haunted by the Holocaust, and he feared the genocide against Jews would be continued by Arabs in the Middle East. If Israel had a nuclear weapon, or if other nations thought it did, enemies would refrain from attacking the Jewish state out of concern for their preservation. Ben-Gurion was also aware that Jews had played a key role in nuclear physics and chemistry before and during the war, and he hoped to collect a world-class scientific community in Israeli universities and institutes. Avner Cohen, who has written the definitive history of Israel’s nuclear project, says that Ben-Gurion began thinking seriously about a nuclear reactor (at least) during the 1948 War of Independence, as the Israelis called it. (Israelis fought Arab armies in part with a wildly inaccurate mortar nicknamed the Davidka, the shell from which created a small, mushroom-shaped cloud when it landed in the desert; the Arabs insisted the Israelis were using nuclear weapons against them.) The Israeli government sent six young physicists abroad in 1949, expecting them to learn some sophisticated nuclear science, and combed the Negev Desert in a futile search for uranium. Reasoning that expertise might eventually be traded for resources, Israeli scientists explored innovations in the production of heavy water and the refinement of uranium.

Ben-Gurion’s interest in the pursuit of nuclear power, and ultimately a nuclear weapon, was joined in the mid-1950s to the willingness of other nations to assist him in at least the first quest. The Americans’ Atoms for Peace program, announced by President Eisenhower in December 1953, soon brought an offer to the Israelis of a small research reactor. Better still, in mid-1956 the French, seeking Israeli help with their plans to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt, dangled as payment a reactor complete with uranium fuel. This was not exactly a purchase of Israel’s cooperation but an ‘implicit incentive’, according to Cohen, sweetening the deal for an Israeli government inclined to join the Suez expedition anyway. Forced by US pressure to back off from its aggression (with Israel and Britain), France resolved, as noted, in late 1956 to speed its nuclear-weapons program, and also grew more sympathetic to Israeli security concerns. (Britain, too, evidently got in on this act, funneling heavy water and small amounts of plutonium and enriched uranium to Israel from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s.) France and Israel negotiated an agreement providing French help with building a nuclear compound in Dimona, in the Negev. Signed a year after the Suez fiasco, the deal provided Israel with a reactor capable of yielding up to 15 kilograms of plutonium a year, and evidently (the agreement is still classified) added a reprocessing facility wherein plutonium could be extracted. What the French gained from the arrangement, aside from Israeli gratitude, was not obvious. And, when de Gaulle became premier in the spring of 1958, he tried to put a stop to French-Israeli collaboration, holding hostage further shipments of uranium until Israel agreed to limit itself to peaceful uses of nuclear power and to permit inspection of its plant by the International Atomic Energy Commission. But by then Dimona was fully under construction, and other benefactors had been found: the British, through the Norwegians, sold Israel heavy water, and Jews in the United States, almost certainly knowing what they were doing, sent Israel money directly for the project. The French also permitted an Israeli scientist to watch an early nuclear-weapon test in the Sahara.

The American government only slowly acknowledged to itselfthat Israel intended to develop nuclear weapons at Dimona. In part this was because Ben-Gurion misled the United States about the purposes ofIsraeli research, denying publicly and privately that Israel sought to make a bomb. US diplomats were inclined to accept at face value Ben-Gurion’s denials: it was easier to hope that Ben-Gurion