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not among them. Article Two prohibited signatory nations from working toward the acquisition or manufacture of‘nuclear devices’, and the Israelis were unready to make this pledge. The Johnson administration pressed Eshkol to sign; the Prime Minister demurred. Meanwhile, the Americans sought clarification of Israel’s enigmatic promise not to ‘introduce’ nuclear weapons to the Middle East. The Israelis, through their ambassador in Washington Yitzhak Rabin, played coy, but, when pushed by the American negotiator, Paul Warnke, Rabin declared that (as Warnke put it) ‘an unadvertised, untested nuclear device is not a nuclear weapon’. Because Israel had not admitted having a nuclear weapon and had not tested one, it had no nuclear weapon. The public disclosure of the bomb in Israel’s basement, made by Hedrick Smith in the New York Times in July 1970, seemed neither to shock anyone nor to change the Israeli position. Virtually everyone continued to abjure talking about the Israeli nuclear weapon. Perhaps they felt there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps they hoped it would go away.6

4. South Africa: To the nuclear brink and back

Like Israel, the Republic of South Africa began thinking seriously about nuclear weapons in the late 1940s, and for some of the same reasons. Both nations had hostile neighbors who regarded them as pariahs: Israel had displaced the Palestinians, while South Africa was governed by a tiny white minority that had disempowered and oppressed the black majority, particularly after the victory of the racist, Afrikaner-led Nationalist Party in 1948. Both nations found sympathy in the United States, which provided both with nuclear technical help under the Atoms for Peace Initiative. Both boasted advanced scientific communities; brains were the leading asset of both nations’ nuclear projects. South Africa, like Israel, refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 (though the South Africans, unlike the Israelis, eventually did so). And South Africa, like Israel, would find it useful to practice ambiguity with regard to its nuclear-weapons capabilities. It was diplomatically less abrasive to keep other nations guessing than to tell the whole truth about developments, and it ultimately enhanced security, or so both nations argued. Enhanced credibility and prestige were, these governments hoped, natural consequences of a nuclear program about which other nations knew just enough to be concerned.

One major difference between Israel and South Africa was the abundance of uranium available in the latter country. Uranium was a byproduct of gold mining, long South Africa’s most fabled enterprise, and the nation had abundant reserves of both elements. British and especially American attempts to monopolize the world’s uranium led both to muffle any objections they might have had to white South Africans’ racist policies and to cooperate with Pretoria’s efforts to extract its uranium and prepare it for export: in the early years of atomic energy, the United States and Great Britain bought a good deal of uranium from South Africa, with the Americans alone purchasing some 40,000 tons during the 1950s and 1960s. The South Africans put the sales of their uranium to relevant purpose. They established an Atomic Energy Board (AEB) in 1949, which accepted help from its British and American counterparts, willing to provide know-how and technical assistance in return for continued South African uranium sales. A. J. A. Roux, longtime president of the South African AEB, would laud the help ‘so willingly provided by the United States of America during the early years of our nuclear programme when several of the Western world’s nuclear nations cooperated in initiating our scientists and engineers into nuclear science’. The British trained South Africa’s scientists and permitted the recruitment by South Africa of scores of their own. The Americans provided the South Africans with their first reactor, Safari-1, which went critical in 1965. In the meantime, the AEB had instituted, in 1961, a site for nuclear research and