Deep beneath desert sands,
an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb,
using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by
a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and
the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about
the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor
British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and
Iran‘s atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.
The
exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though.
It’s just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat
of subterfuge,
Israel
managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now
estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan –
and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.
Despite
the fact that the Israel’s nuclear programme has been an open secret
since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it
in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.
When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month,
declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as “outdated and childish” a rightwing group
formally called for a police investigation for treason.
Meanwhile,
western governments have played along with the policy of “opacity” by
avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington
reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his
presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East with
nuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to “speculate”.
UK
governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords
in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsi
answered tangentially.
“Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular
discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related
issues,” the minister said. “The government of Israel is in no doubt as
to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT].”
But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of
how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.
The
tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today’s drawn-out struggle
over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel,
unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it.
But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as
countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in
nuclear materials and technology.
The
list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to
make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include
today’s staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France,
Germany, Britain and even Norway.
Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu
Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP Meanwhile,
Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and
state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most
sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and
remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for
the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful
figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such
hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave,
who finally admitted his role last month.
“Do
you know what it’s like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his
country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting,” he
said in an Israeli documentary.
Milchan’s life story is colourful,
and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he
bankrolls. In the documentary,
Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan’s role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers.
“At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but
not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know,” De Niro says. “And he
said: yeah I did that. Israel’s my country.”
Milchan was not shy
about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At
one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to
actor Richard Dreyfuss’s home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur
Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.
According to
Milchan’s biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph
Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel’s current president, Shimon
Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy’s, named after
the hostess and owner’s wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for
her role in the Profumo sex scandal).
Milchan,
who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a
central role in Israel’s clandestine acquisition programme.
He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that
a German executive had been bribed into temporarily “mislaying” in his
kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium
enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani
employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country’s
enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business,
selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.
For
that reason, Israel’s centrifuges are near-identical to Iran’s, a
convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed
Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.
Arguably, Lakam’s exploits were even more daring than Khan’s. In 1968,
it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean.
In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of
front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as
yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled
“plumbat”, a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a
phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction
between German and Italian companies with help from German officials,
reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with
centrifuge technology.
When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in
Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel
had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed
into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was
transferred to another vessel.
US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown
Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.
Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons know how and materials,
giving South Africa’s apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.
Israel’s Nuclear Reactor Dimona
Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging Israel’s
nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy
water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to
Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy
water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for
the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that
the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the
other way.
In documents seen by the BBC in 2005
British officials argued it would be “over-zealous” to impose
safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit,
in 1961.
Israel’s nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The
country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it
came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel’s nuclear weapons
programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the
1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists,
intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise
and abroad.
“There was a tendency to try to export and there was a
general feeling of support for Israel,” Andre Finkelstein, a former
deputy commissioner at France’s Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy
director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner
Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.
France’s first
reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear
weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France
made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of
ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an
aide: “It’s exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his
gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a
nuclear programme.”
Mendès France gave the order to start building
bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds
material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.
“[T]his
went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports,
including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy,”
Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in
a collection of Cohen’s papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. “We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation.”
In
Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear
reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating
plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel’s nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.
By
the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona,
transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with
French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour
was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: “French
workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and
friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office
box in Latin America.”
The British were kept out of the loop,
being told at different times that the huge construction site was a
desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant.
The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2
spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.
The
Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely
peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing,
they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being
loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the
existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was
churning out plutonium for bombs.
Israel refused to countenance
visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early
1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US
physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from
the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with
Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists
sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect
samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on
plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly
plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that
before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around
the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean
reprocessing plant.
As
more and more evidence of Israel’s weapons programme emerged, the US
role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice.
In
1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel
had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had
conducted sorties to practise dropping them.
The
timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many
nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up
and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states
had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that
many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.
The
Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was
formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at
which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the
NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be
the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do
anything to make their existence public.
In fact, US involvement
went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only
recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett
informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
that the agency suspected
some
of the fissile fuel in Israel’s bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen
under America’s nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.
Not
only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the
company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had
been visited by a veritable who’s-who of Israeli intelligence,
including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence
ministry “chemist”, but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to
head Lakam.
“It was a shock. Everybody was open-mouthed,” recalls
Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed
by Duckett. “It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear
material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved
and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on.”
The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.
A
few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911,
detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast
of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on
nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and
after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the
country’s nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear
test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.
It
was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations
attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an
unconvincing panel of inquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that
it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.
“I
was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the
US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US
didn’t want anyone to know about,” says Weiss.
Israeli sources
told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the
third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in
cooperation with South Africa.
“It was a fuck-up,” one source
told him. “There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but
there was a gap in the weather – a window – and Vela got blinded by the
flash.”
The US policy of silence continues to this day, even
though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black
market, albeit at much reduced volumes.
In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October,
the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security
(ISIS) noted: “Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel …
decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons
programme.
Today,
there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit
procurements – US sting operations and legal cases show this.”
Avner
Cohen, the author of two books on Israel’s bomb, said that policy of
opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by
inertia. “At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear
of opening a Pandora’s box. It has in many ways become a burden for the
US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch
it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the
Israeli-US understanding.”
In the Arab world and beyond, there is
growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in
particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is
progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The
western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012
but it was called off, largely at America’s behest, to reduce the
pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.
“Somehow
the kabuki goes on,” Weiss says. “If it is admitted Israel has nuclear
weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it’s
very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being
honest about that.”
