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By Root 1213 0

was telling the truth, and it may have been that the Americans were not altogether unhappy to have doubts about Israeli military capabilities creep into the minds of the Arabs and the Russians. Nevertheless, when incoming President John F. Kennedy asked Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Christian Herter about nuclear ‘proliferation’ in January 1961, Herter replied: ‘Israel and India.’ Thus informed, Kennedy insisted that Israel allow US inspectors into Dimona, and he noted his nation’s ‘deep commitment to the security of Israel’ as an alternative to Israeli development of a nuclear-weapons capability. Ben-Gurion’s response was to allow American ‘visitors’ (not inspectors) to come briefly to Dimona over several years and otherwise to continue delay and prevarication with regard to the weapons issue. The ‘visits’ started in early 1964. The Americans’ hosts at Dimona were friendly and seemed cooperative, but never once allowed the visitors to see the plutonium-reprocessing operation, which would have revealed clearly Israel’s intentions. The CIA nonetheless concluded, by 1963, that such activity was probably going on. (The CIA was later accused of having supplied Israel with enriched uranium during this period.) Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy following the latter’s assassination in November 1963, was less inclined than his predecessor to pressure the Israelis on the nuclear weapons’ issue. He compromised: in exchange for an Israeli pledge not to ‘introduce’ the weapons into the region, the United States would supply Israel with conventional arms sufficient in number and sophistication for the Jewish state not to need atomic bombs. By ‘introduce’ the Americans may have meant ‘create’. The Israelis meant ‘use’. It suited both sides to avoid clarifying the matter.

This calculated ambiguity about its nuclear program—Cohen calls it ‘opacity’—allowed the Israelis to proceed with weapons development under the assumption that Arab states would worry about what might happen to them unless they avoided direct confrontation. Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, threatened to attack Israel should it become apparent that the Israelis were building atomic weapons, but he also denigrated nuclear weapons as unlikely to be useful or decisive in war and suggested that Israel might just be trying to intimidate his people by pretending to develop a bomb. For the most part, Nasser and other Arab leaders thought it best to keep quiet about the issue, perhaps hoping that the Israelis would be less likely to build nuclear weapons iftheir adversaries seemed unconcerned about them. If so, the strategy failed to work. The Israelis feared an Egyptian air strike on Dimona. In May 1967, as armies mobilized and tensions rose in the Middle East, Egyptian MIGs twice flew reconnaissance missions over the nuclear facility. After the first overflight, on the 17th, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol called up thousands of reserves and told aides: ‘It is war, I am telling you, it is war.’ Following the second overflight, Ezer Weizman, the military’s chief of operations, concluded that an Egyptian attack on the nuclear base was imminent, and urged Eshkol (writes Cohen) ‘to preempt immediately or at the latest the next morning’. Both sides stayed their hands, but only temporarily; on 5 June the Israeli air force struck Egyptian planes on the ground, initiating the Six Day War. Israel won decisively. But, whatever the outcome, the Israelis’ perception of the threat that preceded—in their view, induced—the war convinced them that a nuclear weapon belonged in their arsenal. Indeed: at the time war broke out, it was already there, though it had not been tested and, short of a catastrophic event that put the existence of the Jewish state in doubt, it could not be used. Maintaining an air of mystery about its capabilities and intentions allowed Israel to keep its enemies in a salutary state ofuncertainty about what it might do.

Israel’s ‘opacity’ concerning the bomb persisted. On 1 July 1968 sixty-five nations signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel was