[ RadSafe ] Article: The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb

Mon May 8 10:49:33 CDT 2006

With all the discussions about Iran and nuclear weapon
development, I thought that this would be of interest.
It is at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801326.html
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The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb

By Avner Cohen and William Burr
Sunday, April 30, 2006; B01

On Sept. 9, 1969, a big brown envelope was delivered
to the Oval Office on behalf of CIA Director Richard
M. Helms. On it he had written, "For and to be opened
only by: The President, The White House." The precise
contents of the envelope are still unknown, but it was
the latest intelligence on one of Washington's most
secretive foreign policy matters: Israel's nuclear
program. The material was so sensitive that the
nation's spymaster was unwilling to share it with
anybody but President Richard M. Nixon himself.

The now-empty envelope is inside a two-folder set
labeled "NSSM 40," held by the Nixon Presidential
Materials Project at the National Archives. (NSSM is
the acronym for National Security Study Memorandum, a
series of policy studies produced by the national
security bureaucracy for the Nixon White House.) The
NSSM 40 files are almost bare because most of their
documents remain classified.

With the aid of With the aid ofrecently declassified
documents , we now know that NSSM 40 was the Nixon
administration's effort to grapple with the policy
implications of a nuclear-armed Israel. These
documents offer unprecedented insight into the tense
deliberations in the White House in 1969 -- a crucial
time in which international ratification of the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was uncertain
and U.S. policymakers feared that a Middle Eastern
conflagration could lead to superpower conflict.
Nearly four decades later, as the world struggles with
nuclear ambitions in Iran, India and elsewhere, the
ramifications of this hidden history are still felt.

Israel's nuclear program began more than 10 years
before Helms's envelope landed on Nixon's desk. In
1958, Israel secretly initiated work at what was to
become the Dimona nuclear research site. Only about 15
years after the Holocaust, nuclear nonproliferation
norms did not yet exist, and Israel's founders
believed they had a compelling case for acquiring
nuclear weapons. In 1961, the CIA estimated that
Israel could produce nuclear weapons within the
decade.

The discovery presented a difficult challenge for U.S.
policymakers. From their perspective, Israel was a
small, friendly state -- albeit one outside the
boundaries of U.S. security guarantees -- surrounded
by larger enemies vowing to destroy it. Yet government
officials also saw the Israeli nuclear program as a
potential threat to U.S. interests. President John F.
Kennedy feared that without decisive international
action to curb nuclear proliferation, a world of 20 to
30 nuclear-armed nations would be inevitable within a
decade or two.

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations fashioned a
complex scheme of annual visits to Dimona to ensure
that Israel would not develop nuclear weapons. But the
Israelis were adept at concealing their activities. By
late 1966, Israel had reached the nuclear threshold,
although it decided not to conduct an atomic test.

By the time Prime Minister Levi Eshkol visited
President Lyndon B. Johnson in January 1968, the
official State Department view was that despite
Israel's growing nuclear weapons potential, it had
"not embarked on a program to produce a nuclear
weapon." That assessment, however, eroded in the
months ahead. By the fall, Assistant Defense Secretary
Paul C. Warnke concluded that Israel had already
acquired the bomb when Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak
Rabin explained to him how he interpreted Israel's
pledge not to be the first country to introduce
nuclear weapons into the region. According to Rabin,
for nuclear weapons to be introduced, they needed to
be tested and publicly declared. Implicitly, then,
Israel could possess the bomb without "introducing"
it.

The question of what to do about the Israeli bomb
would fall to Nixon. Unlike his Democratic
predecessors, he and his national security adviser,
Henry A. Kissinger, were initially skeptical about the
effectiveness of the NPT. And though they may have
been inclined to accommodate Israel's nuclear
ambitions, they would have to manage senior State
Department and Pentagon officials whose perspectives
differed. Documents prepared between February and
April 1969 reveal a great sense of urgency and alarm
among senior officials about Israel's nuclear
progress.

As Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird wrote in March
1969, these "developments were not in the United
States' interests and should, if at all possible, be
stopped." Above all, the Nixon administration was
concerned that Israel would publicly display its
nuclear capabilities.

Apparently prompted by those high-level concerns,
Kissinger issued NSSM 40 -- titled Israeli Nuclear
Weapons Program -- on April 11, 1969. In it he asked
the national security bureaucracy for a review of
policy options toward Israel's nuclear program. In the
weeks that followed, the issue was taken up by a
senior review group (SRG), chaired by Kissinger, that
included Helms, Undersecretary of State Elliot
Richardson, Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard and
Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle Wheeler.

The one available report of an SRG meeting on NSSM 40
suggests that the bureaucracy was interested in
pressuring Israel to halt its nuclear program. How
much pressure to exert remained open. Kissinger wanted
to "avoid direct confrontation," while Richardson was
willing to apply pressure if an investigation to
determine Israel's intentions showed that some key
assurances would not be forthcoming. In such
circumstances, the United States could tell the
Israelis that scheduled deliveries of F-4 Phantom jets
to Israel would have to be reconsidered.

By mid-July 1969, Nixon had let it be known that he
was leery of using the Phantoms as leverage, so when
Richardson and Packard summoned Rabin on July 29 to
discuss the nuclear issue, the idea of a probe that
involved pressure had been torpedoed. Although
Richardson and Packard emphasized the seriousness with
which they viewed the nuclear problem, they had no
threat to back up their rhetoric.

Richardson posed three issues for Rabin to respond to:
the status of Israel's NPT deliberations; assurances
that "non-introduction" meant "non-possession" of
nuclear weapons; and assurances that Israel would not
produce or deploy the Jericho ballistic missile.
Rabin, however, was unresponsive except to say that
the NPT was still "under study."

Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir would have
to address the nuclear issue when they met in late
September.

Perhaps the most fateful event of this tale was
Nixon's one-on-one meeting with Meir in the Oval
Office on Sept. 26, 1969.

In the days before Meir's visit, the State Department
produced background papers suggesting that the horse
was already out of the barn: "Israel might very well
now have a nuclear bomb" and certainly "already had
the technical ability and material resources to
produce weapon-grade material for a number of
weapons." If that was true, it meant that events had
overtaken the NSSM 40 exercise.

In later years, Meir never discussed the substance of
her private conversation with Nixon, saying only, "I
could not quote him then, and I will not quote him
now." Yet, according to declassified Israeli
documents, since the early 1960s, Meir had been
convinced that "Israel should tell the United States
the truth [about the nuclear issue] and explain why."

Even without the record of this meeting, informed
speculation is possible. It is likely that Nixon
started with a plea for openness. Meir, in turn,
probably acknowledged -- tacitly or explicitly -- that
Israel had reached a weapons capability, but probably
pledged extreme caution. (Years later, Nixon told
CNN's Larry King that he knew for certain that Israel
had the bomb, but he wouldn't reveal his source.) Meir
may have assured Nixon that Israel thought of nuclear
weapons as a last-resort option, a way to provide her
Holocaust-haunted nation with a psychological sense of
existential deterrence.

Subsequent memorandums from Kissinger to Nixon provide
a limited sense of what the national security adviser
understood happened at the meeting. Kissinger noted
that the president had emphasized to Meir that "our
primary concern was that the Israeli [government] make
no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or
undertake a nuclear test program." Thus, Israel would
be committed to conducting its nuclear affairs
cautiously and secretly; their status would remain
uncertain and unannounced.

On Feb. 23, 1970, Rabin told Kissinger privately that
he wanted the president to know that, in light of the
Meir-Nixon conversation, "Israel has no intention to
sign the NPT." Rabin, Kissinger wrote, "wanted also to
make sure there was no misapprehension at the White
House about Israel's current intentions."

Kissinger informed Nixon that he told Rabin that he
would notify the president. And with that, the
decade-long U.S. effort to curb Israel's nuclear
program ended. That enterprise was replaced by
understandings negotiated at the highest level,
between the respective heads of state, that have
governed Israel's nuclear conduct ever since.

That so little is known today about the tale of NSSM
40 is not surprising. Dealing with Israel's nuclear
ambitions was thornier for the Nixon administration
than for its predecessors because it was forced to
deal with the problem at the critical time when Israel
appeared to be crossing the nuclear threshold.

Yet, even as Nixon and Kissinger enabled Israel to
flout the NPT, NSSM 40 allowed them to create a
defensible record. As was his typical modus operandi,
Kissinger used NSSM 40 to maintain control over key
officials who wanted to take action on the problem.

Politically, the Nixon-Meir agreement allowed both
leaders to continue with their old public policies
without being forced to openly acknowledge the new
reality. As long as Israel kept the bomb invisible --
no test, declaration, or any other act displaying
nuclear capability -- the United States could live
with it.

Over time, the tentative Nixon-Meir understanding
became the foundation for a remarkable U.S.-Israeli
deal, accompanied by a tacit but strict code of
behavior to which both nations closely adhered. Even
during its darkest hours in the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
Israel was cautious not to make any public display of
its nuclear capability.

Yet set against contemporary values of transparency
and accountability, the Nixon-Meir deal of 1969 now
stands as a striking and burdensome anomaly. Israel's
nuclear posture is inconsistent with the tenets of a
modern liberal democracy. The deal is also burdensome
for the United States, provoking claims about double
standards in U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy.

It is especially striking to compare the Nixon
administration's stance toward Israel in 1969 with the
way Washington is trying to accommodate India in 2006.
As problematic as the proposed nuclear pact with New
Delhi is, it at least represents an effort to deal
openly with the issue.

Unlike the case of Iran today -- where a nation is
publicly violating its NPT obligations and where the
United States and the international community are
acting in the open -- the White House in 1969
addressed the Israeli weapons program in a highly
secretive fashion. That kind of deal-making would be
impossible now.

Without open acknowledgment of Israel's nuclear
status, such ideas as a nuclear-free Middle East, or
even the inclusion of Israel in an updated NPT regime,
cannot be discussed properly. It is time for a new
deal to replace the Nixon-Meir understandings of 1969,
with Israel telling the truth and finally normalizing
its nuclear affairs.

cohenavner at msn.com

mailto:%20nsarchiv at gwu.edu

Avner Cohen is a senior research fellow at the Center
for International and Security Studies at the
University of Maryland and author of "Israel and the
Bomb" (Columbia University Press). William Burr is a
senior analyst at the National Security Archive at
George Washington University. A longer version of this
article appears in the May/June issue of theBulletin
of the Atomic Scientists.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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