The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb
By Avner Cohen and William Burr
Sunday, April 30, 2006; Page 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 labelled "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
of
recently
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 non-proliferation 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 Defence 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 Defence 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
Defence 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.
The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb
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.
The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb
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 behaviour 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 non-proliferation 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@msn.com
mailto:%20nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Avner Cohen is a senior research fellow at the
Centre 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 the
Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists.
