Newly declassified documents reveal how US agreed to Israel’s nuclear program
Israel Tests Jericho Series Jericho III intermediate-range ballistic missile
The Obama administration
this week declassified papers, after 45 years of top-secret status,
documenting contacts between Jerusalem and Washington over American
agreement to the existence of an Israeli nuclear option. The
Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is in
charge of approving declassification, had for decades consistently
refused to declassify these secrets of the Israeli nuclear program.
The documents outline how the American administration worked ahead of
the meeting between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda
Meir at the White House in September 1969, as officials came to terms
with a three-part Israeli refusal – to sign the Non-Proliferation
Treaty; to agree to American inspection of the Dimona nuclear facility;
and to condition delivery of fighter jets on Israel’s agreement to give
up nuclear weaponry in exchange for strategic ground-to-ground Jericho
missiles “capable of reaching the Arab capitals” although “not all the
Arab capitals.”
The officials – cabinet secretaries and senior advisers who wrote the
documents – withdrew step after step from an ambitious plan to block
Israeli nuclearization, until they finally acceded, in internal
correspondence – the content of the conversation between Nixon and Meir
is still classified – to
recognition of Israel as a threshold nuclear state.
In fact, according to the American documents, the Nixon
administration defined a double threshold for Israel’s move from a
“technical option” to a “possessor” of nuclear weapons.
The first threshold was the possession of “the components of nuclear
weapons that will explode,” and making them a part of the Israel Defense
Forces operational inventory.
The second threshold was public confirmation of suspicions
internationally, and in Arab countries in particular, of the existence
of nuclear weapons in Israel, by means of testing and “making public the
fact of the possession of nuclear weapons.”
Officials under Nixon proposed to him, on the eve of his conversation
with Meir, to show restraint with regard to the Israeli nuclear
program, and to abandon efforts to get Israel to cease acquiring
500-kilometer-range missiles with one-ton warheads developed in the
Marcel Dassault factory in France, if it could reach an agreement with
Israel on these points.
Origins of nuclear ambiguity
Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity – which for the sake of
deterrence does not categorically deny some nuclear ability but insists
on using the term “option” – appears, according to the newly released
documents, as an outcome of the Nixon-Meir understandings, no less than
as an original Israeli maneuver.
The decision to release the documents was made in March, but was
mentioned alongside the declassification of other materials less than a
week ago in ISCAP, which is headed by a representative of the president
and whose members are officials in the Department of State, Department
of Defense and Department of Justice, as well as the intelligence
administration and the National Archive, where the documents are stored.
The declassified material deals only with events in 1968 and 1969,
the end of the terms of President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Levi
Eshkol, and the beginning of the Nixon-Meir era. However, it contains
many contemporary lessons. Among these are the decisive nature of
personal relations between a president like Obama and a prime minister
like Benjamin Netanyahu; the relationship between the diplomatic process
of “land for peace,” American guarantees of Israeli security in peace
time, supplies of weapons to Israel and Israel’s nuclear status; and the
ability of a country like Iran to move ahead gradually toward nuclear
weapons and remain on the threshold of military nuclear weapons.
In the material declassified this week, one document was written by
senior officials in the Nixon administration in a working group led by
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, exploring the nature of the
Israeli nuclear weapons program known as “NSSM 40.” The existence of the
document and its heading were known, but the content had so far been
kept secret.
The document was circulated to a select group, including Secretary of
State William P. Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and CIA
director Richard Helms, and with the knowledge of the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Earle Wheeler. In it, Nixon directed
Kissinger to put together a panel of experts, headed by Assistant
Secretary of State Joseph Sisco.
The experts were asked to submit their intelligence evaluations as to
the extent of Israel’s progress toward nuclear weapons and to present
policy alternatives toward Israel under these circumstances, considering
that the administration was bound to the pledge of the Johnson
administration to provide Israel with 50 Phantom jets, the diplomatic
process underway through Rogers, and the aspiration to achieve, within
the year, global nonproliferation – all while, simultaneously, Israel
was facing off against Egypt on the Suez Canal during the War of
Attrition.
The most fascinating parts of the 107 pages discuss internal
disagreements in the American administration over how to approach Israel
– pressure or persuasion, as Sisco’s assistant, Rodger Davies, put it
in the draft of the Department of State document. Davies also formulated
a scenario of dialogue and confrontation with Israel’s ambassador to
Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, the IDF chief of staff during the Six-Day
War, who continued to sign his name using his military rank of
Lieutenant General.
The documents are an intriguing illustration of organizational
politics. Unexpectedly, the Department of State’s approach was softer.
It opposed threats and sanctions because of the fear of obstructing
Rogers’ diplomatic moves if Israel hardened its line. “If we choose to
use the maximum option on the nuclear issue, we may not have the
necessary leverage left for helping along the peace negotiations,”
Davies wrote.
The two branches of the Pentagon – the civilian branch headed by
Laird, his deputy David Packard (a partner in the computer manufacturer
Hewlett-Packard, who objected to a previous sale of a super-computer
manufactured by Control Data to Israel, lest it be used for the nuclear
program) and their policy advisers; and the military branch headed by
Gen. Wheeler – were more belligerent. Laird fully accepted the
recommendation of the deputy secretary of defense in the outgoing
Johnson administration, Paul Warnke, to use supplying the Phantoms to
leverage far-reaching concessions from Israel on the nuclear issue.
Packard’s opposite number in the Department of State – Rogers’
deputy, Elliot Richardson – was Packard’s ideological ally in
reservations regarding Israel. However, Sisco’s appointment, rather than
an official from the strategic section of the Department of State,
which agreed with the Pentagon, steered the recommendations of the
officials toward a softer stance on Israel.
There was also an internal debate in the American administration over
the extent of Israel’s progress toward a nuclear weapon. The Department
of State, relying on the CIA, strongly doubted the evidence and
described it as circumstantial in light of the inability to collect
intelligence, including during the annual visits to the Dimona facility.
As to conclusive evidence that Israel had manufactured a nuclear
weapon, Davies wrote, “This final step is one we believe the Labor
Alignment in Israel would like to avoid. The fierce determination to
safeguard the Jewish people, however, makes it probable that Israel
would desire to maintain the ultimate weapon at hand should its security
again be seriously threatened.”
The Department of Defense, based on its intelligence agency, was more
decisive in its evaluation that Israel had already attained nuclear
weapons, or would do so in a matter of months.
Rabin, with his military aura and experience in previous talks on
arms supplies (Skyhawks and later Phantoms) with the Johnson
administration, was the key man on the Israeli side in these
discussions, according to the Americans. This, even though the decisions
were made in Jerusalem by Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Foreign
Minister Abba Eban and their colleagues, who were not always happy with
Rabin’s tendency to express his “private” stances first and only then
obtain approval from Jerusalem.
The Johnson and Nixon administrations concluded that, in talks with
Rabin, it had been stated in a manner both “explicit and implicit” that
“Israel wants nuclear weapons, for two reasons: First, to deter the
Arabs from striking Israel; and second, if deterrence fails and Israel
were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.”
The contradiction in this stance, according to the Americans, was
that Israel “would need a nuclear force that is publicly known and, by
and large, invulnerable, i.e., having a second-strike capability. Israel
is now building such a force – the hardened silos of the Jericho
missiles.”
However, “it is not really possible to deter Arab leaders – and
certainly not the fedayeen – when they themselves represent basically
irrational forces. The theory of nuclear deterrence that applies between
the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a theory that requires a reasoned response
to provocation, which in turn is made possible by essentially stable
societies and governments – is far less applicable in the Near East.”
Four years before the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 and the general
scorn for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the Nixon administration wrote
that Israel “would never be able to rule out the possibility that some
irrational Arab leader would be willing to sustain great losses if he
believed he could inflict decisive damage on Israel.”
Sisco and his advisers worried that a threat to cut off arms supplies
“could build military and psychological pressures within Israel to move
rapidly to the very sophisticated weaponry we are trying to avoid.”
According to the documents,
the
Nixon administration believed that Israel’s acquisition of nuclear
weapons would spur the Arab countries to acquire their own such weapons
within 10 years, through private contracts with scientists and engineers
in Europe. Moreover, “deeply rooted in the Arab psyche is the concept
that a settlement will be possible only when there is some parity in
strength with Israel. A ‘kamikaze’ strike at the Dimona facilities cannot be ruled out,” the document states.
The Nixon advisers concluded that, all things considered, “we cannot
force the Israelis to destroy design data and components, much less the
technical knowledge in people’s minds, nor the existing talent for rapid
improvisation.” Thus, Davies wrote in July, two months before the
Nixon-Meir meeting, the lesser evil would be to agree for Israel to
“retain its ‘technical option’” to produce nuclear weapons.
“If the Israelis show a disposition to meet us on the nuclear issue
but are adamant on the Jericho missiles, we can drop back to a position
of insisting on non-deployment of missiles and an undertaking by the
Israelis to keep any further production secret,” Davies added.
The strategic consideration, mixed with political considerations, was
persuasive. The draft of Meir’s unconditional surrender – formulated in
the Pentagon without her knowledge in her first month in office – was
shelved, and the ambiguity option was born and lived in secret documents
until the Obama administration made them public, for reasons (or
unintentionally) of their own.